A photo collage by Ashley White contrasts moss from a famous Zen garden with Harajuku girls, who dress up and hang out on an old bridge in Tokyo.

For the past four years, the Freeman Foundation has sponsored the Kansas Asia Scholars program at Kansas University. We were chosen to participate in this scholarship’s 2006 trip to Japan. This trip, led by Pat Graham of the Center for East Asian Studies, focused on Japanese culture, primarily through its focus on art and architecture.

Over three weeks, we traveled the country and, so it seemed, through time. We began in the historic capital city of Kyoto, a city full of temples, gardens and palaces. Then we visited the rebuilt city of Hiroshima, and Lawrence’s sister city, Hiratsuka, where we learned about the similarities and differences in our cultures while staying with a host family. Finally, we reached Tokyo, a city of commerce, light and movement.

This exhibition is part of a service learning project connected with the program. We are trying to share something of our experience in Japan with the Lawrence community, here through a series of sketches, photos and photographic collages. The sketches and photos are observations about how Japanese people inhabit their spaces. They look at a variety of places, from religious and contemplative, to modern and busy.

The collages are more of an abstraction of observation, juxtaposing images that might seem out of context. But the Japanese have a way of adopting foreign cultural elements and making them their own, so it is not so strange to see opposites coexisting.

A sketch of a family eating at Ryoanji Temple.

Our work will be on display in the auditorium of the Lawrence Public Library through Thursday. At 7 p.m. today, we will have a public reception, including a brief presentation and an opportunity to ask questions about the work or Japan.

– Emily Moisan is a fourth-year architecture student from St. Charles, Mo.; Ashley White is a fifth-year architecture student from Overland Park.