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Ms Shi was born in 1987, in Shanghai, China. She graduated from Chiba Prefectural Higashi-Katsushika High School. Now, she is a 2nd-year student in the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences I, and her major is Humanities. She has been a student staff leader at the ICC since its kickoff, and has planned and produced the musical project “FAME,” an event of the ICC. Her hobbies are watching movies and reading.

Ms Shi Yiyi,
who contributed to international exchange as the total producer of the student musical “FAME”

Did you know that a musical by students was held recently at Okuma Auditorium? It was “FAME.” All of the cast and staff were made up of international and local students in Waseda University, and the main supporter was the International Community Center (ICC). On this stage, many international cultures coexisted to make the musical a success. A young staff leader of the ICC, Ms. Shi was the one who started this great event.

Ms. Shi was born in Shanghai as a Chinese national, but she has been living in Japan since she was six years old. She came to Japan because her father was studying in Japan. She goes back to China to visit her relatives when she has a long vacation. She says that she feels as if she has two mother countries. “Because both countries are equally precious to me, I am free of fixed ideas like citizenship or borders. So I feel that I can see both countries objectively.”

Such an objective sense could be useful for an international career, she thought, so Ms. Shi applied to the ICC, which had just been established, to become a member of the student staff when she was a first-year student in Waseda. “The events of the ICC were great. But almost all the events were isolated and one-time-only types of events. The participants were enjoying the cultural interchange at the ICC but that was it. I wanted to make an event which we could tackle for an extended period of time. This is why I started to produce a stage project.” The stage program she chose was “FAME,” a Broadway musical. Ms. Shi selected this because she wanted to produce a stage play in which every cast member could feel that she or he was the leading character. One of the highlights of the musical was that there were two stage showings, one in Japanese and the other in English with double cast members. “We don't care what country we belong to on stage. Citizenship has no room here. We wanted to make a musical which was different from being within borders, a musical which reached beyond country borders.”

Ms. Shi says that she wants to be “a global person” in the future. She thinks that all in all, international exchange derives from individual face-to-face relationships. “I do not think that international issues are the result of national or cultural differences. That, I think, is just an excuse. You cannot find any solid painted border lines on oceans or mountains; the line exists just in people's minds. The key is how to extend the line.” Ms. Shi has played a role as “the receiver” of International Students at Waseda until recently. But she now wants to be the one to be “the received,” i.e., studying abroad. She has just taken the first step to cross over the border at Waseda.

The members of the ICC's musical project “FAME”

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