Ryosuke kobayashi is the only Japanese undergraduate in his year at Harvard University. When he applied, he knew no one who could advise him on how to get in. So this week, in a rickety wooden inn in Tokyo, sitting cross-legged on tatami mats with Apple Macs on their laps, he and fellow Harvard students conducted seminars for Japanese high-school students on subjects ranging from anime to Thomas Hobbes. He was not encouraging students to go to America, he insists, just offering them an alternative to uchimuki, or the culture of looking inward, which pervades Japan.
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