英米　２年
Thank you for your presentation. I like to read mass-market paperbacks, but I do not often read literature. When I read a narrative, I just follow the story, so watching movies or TV dramas are better for me than literature because I could understand them well. But today, I thought I would like to try some literature to gain a cross-cultural understanding and get the custom of thinking in another’s situation. In addition to that, I thought understanding others is important when we work. I work in a convenience store and many people such as foreign people, elderly and deaf people come. When I serve a deaf person, I communicated with him by writing. We could communicate almost everything, but sometimes it was difficult. I think the communication went smoothly if I had more imagination. Therefore, I want to be able to sympathize with others more by reading a lot of literature.

英米　２年
Professor David Ostman, thank you very much for your very interesting presentation today. It was very interesting to learn that when we read people's feelings, we imagine them based on their body language and what they have experienced because we are usually not aware of how we read their feelings. Thinking about other people's feelings is a very important part of life. I think that imagining what the other person is thinking is very useful to understanding them better and to facilitate communication. I also usually try to think about the emotions behind what the other person is saying. because by thinking about it, I can make appropriate comments. Thinking about other people's feelings is a very important part of life. In addition, the application of thinking about emotions to reading a story as explained in this presentation was very interesting, and I thought that reading a story while thinking about the emotions of the characters would help me enjoy the movie or drama even more. I would like to practice this next time I watch a movie or drama.

英米　２年
I had never considered empathy so seriously until today’s class, so it was significantly fascinating for me. The idea that empathy works a lot of roles in getting new perspectives is so innovative. According to Mr. Ostman, empathy is a powerful tool to understanding other people. Besides, due to globalization, there are significant chances to have contact with people who have strange way of thinking. Therefore, we are endowed with lots of opportunities to emphasize. In his presentation, it was stated that reading stories improves our skill for emphasizing. If this idea spread well enough in Japan, there would not be some ideas which are prejudicial. However, in other words, the idea can be utilized for removing the prejudice against various kinds of people. I hope that the society where people empathize and understand mutually comes someday.

英米　２年
From the point of view where empathy is particular to mammals, especially those which live in a group, it is important to enhance the ability of empathy to understand each other and make sure everybody lives comfortably. However, if you do not have enough knowledge to understand something or someone who is new to you, such as people from other regions, you cannot empathize with them or get along with them. As the experiment which we did in the class showed, you tend to empathize with people who are familiar with you. Therefore, it is essential to be willing to know other people with an open mind. I learned that reading literature is an effective way to enhance our ability to identify with someone else because it enables you to exercise your imagination. I would like to read as many books as possible.

英米　３年
Thank you very much for your talk today. Books have always charmed me and as a student at the British and American studies department, literature has made up a fair amount of my studies in this university. However, it was not until today that I came to realise how much these stories had aided me on empathy growing and cultural understanding through the years. Starting from the world of Harry Potter, hundreds of stories have taken me through mystical lands to mere high schools in other nations. Particularly, the stories based on actual existent places such as London and California made me grow found of the places the story were based on even though I have never seen then with my own eyes. This empathy I grew through stories have unconsciously helped me in learning and getting used to British culture, once I got to study abroad in the northern part of the UK. Especially now that I think of it, these stories based on several places across the UK that I grew to love so much reduced a fair amount of the culture shock I was expecting from not being abroad before, enriching my whole experience as an exchange student. This has been a great realization, which has now encouraged me to get into a more diverse range of books, so to get a better understanding of people’s cultures and habits at places in the world I have never dreamed of before, which will surely come in handy once we are all able to travel again

中国　２年
When I was in the first grade of high school, I participated in the speech contest held in my school. At that time, I recited a speech by Severn Suzuki who was a Canadian environmental activist. To win the contest, I practiced a lot and finally came to be able to recite her speech as if it was my own. I think I almost perfectly succeeded in the affective empathy with her. That experience was so wonderful for me that I could recite the same script even now though about 4 years or more had passed since then. In her speech, there is a phrase: “it makes a tremendous difference where you are born.” This means we are in a place where we are by chance. In the other words, you could be me, I could be you, he could be her and she could be him. Influenced by her perspective, I think that everything happening around the world is everyone’s own business, and thus the idea of “empathy” is important for all of us.

中国　２年
Today's guest speaker talked about how to take cultural perspectives through literature. Through his class, I noticed my mind is less active these days. During his speech, I tried to imagine how the blind person in the image was feeling. I closed my eyes and tried to empathize, but I thought about whether it was my assumption. Then, the teacher said to imagine if this person is your father. Suddenly, I felt nervous because I remembered a story that my father always helped his mother who had weak eyesight. The words that remained in my mind from the teacher are that "You don't need to experience them all by yourself." Thinking about if I can understand my father's feelings at that time or empathize with my grandmother's feelings, his story makes me want to read books and train the skills to feel empathy. I know to empathize is so powerful that sometimes to imagine too much makes one’s mind exhausted. However, if the person who has many experiences is easy to empathize with, I would like to try many things, gain experiences, and become a person who can emphasize easily with many people. Reading books is so much fun beyond words, so through book-reading exploration, I want to exercise my mind and to be good at controlling the skill of empathy.

看護　１年
In David Ostman’s presentation, I have learned that empathy can help us understand different cultural perspectives. But I think empathy can apply to not only cultural understanding, but also some other fields. And I belong to the department of nursing, I tried to think how I might use empathy in the nursing field in my future. In my thinking, empathy can help nurses build a trusting connection with those who need care by focusing on the patient’s point of view. This strengthens communication between nurses and patients because nurses can gain an understanding of what patients are experiencing and how they are coping. Thus, I think empathy is essential to promote a dialogue with patients about their suffering, worries and even favorite things. I want to build a trusting relationship with my future patients.

留学生
Thank you for your interesting presentation, Professor Ostman. Though we may not be conscious of it, the word “empathy” is in some ways very ambiguous and unclear. Of course, I have never thought about it deeply. So, I appreciate it that you gave us a chance to think about it deeply. The most impressive point for me was reasons why we had better empathize. In the presentation, especially, I thought it important to empathize and to stand with those who are different, minority groups in Japan. We have different values and it cannot be changed. However, we can get close to such people to empathize their lives. By doing so we will not call them ‘others.’

留学生
Whenever we think about a country that is totally different to us, we may start questioning why they do the things they do? Why are their customs that way? We may not understand the reason, but there’s a way to step into their world and see why are they like that. In today’s presentation David Ostman talked us about empathy, and how we can use literature to get a better understanding of other people’s culture and feelings. When we watch a movie, or when we read a book, many times we start to feel or think about the protagonist, how he or she may feel in a certain situation, sometimes we can even feel the emotion ourselves; this is called empathy. We may know how the other person feels because of their body language, or maybe because we or someone we know may have had a similar situation. It’s a normal reaction in many of us, but some have stronger empathy towards others. David told us that we all may understand the body language from another person, but that actually being able to feel or to think about ourselves in that exact situation (being in their shoes) is not a thing that we all have. It is a skill that we can practice and develop through different ways, and one of them is reading. When we are reading, as mentioned before, we start to feel how the protagonist feels. This is because we use our imagination to see through his or her eyes, and because of this, we put ourselves in their shoes unconsciously. As we share their perspectives, we start to develop and empathetic concern about them, this is having a positive response about wanting to help someone. When we read different stories, we meet new people and new worlds. This helps us experience things that we would normally wouldn’t. For this reason, reading a story from another country may help us understand how the people from that country live their lives, and why they do the things they do. I’m a person that is empathetic towards the people close to me, or the people I love, and I’m not used to practicing empathy with people I don’t know, but I have lately tried to do this and to understand more about them. As an international student, it is really difficult for me to live here and understand all the differences I have, and I would love for them to understand how I feel. I’m glad that the friends that I’ve made here are empathetic and friendly towards me. I’m also glad that we had this presentation because I feel that many of us need this kind of empathetic feeling in our lives to learn how to be more human and truer to themselves.