This is half of my class practice how to do an international meeting. During the course the students are taught how to chair a meeting and this was a final practical exercise where they were supposed to apply everything they had learned. Although most of the students sit in meetings every day at work, they have no idea how to organize or run a meeting effectively or efficiently.

 This is the other half of the students. Actually in each picture there are only four students. The other two people are what the program calls "facilitators", a more common term might be TAs, teaching assistants. The facilitators are graduate students from the MBA and international relations departments, who are doing this as a part time job and as a chance to meet Japanese business people.

 The view out almost every window is breathtaking.

 This is the path leading from the building containing my office to the classrooms. You can judge how much snow there is by comparing the height of the person shoveling snow to the snowbanks on either side.

 It started to clear up for the first time since I arrived. This snow drift is on the balcony outside the classroom.

 As the weather improved the scenery became even more impressive.

 Blue sky! I had almost forgotten what it looked like. The students opened the classroom window, so I leaned out and took this picture.

With the better weather, a lot of the snow disappeared from the paths and roads. I was surprised to find that the water spray, the round object is one of the nozzles, a layer of moss to form on the surface of the path. This had been hidden under the snow.