美: Why start a blog?

We would like to thank you for spotting this page among millions and billions that exist on the World Wide Web. For a small group like us, it is extremely important to actually have someone visit our page, and hopefully, read it.

So, here we go, this is our story.

We are 美(bi), a small group of students in the world’s biggest city. We are passionate and artistic… we want more than just an elite education.

美 is an initiative by students for students. We get artists together to inspire the other University of Tokyo students who share our Komaba campus. Our bimonthly meetings are like small evening get-togethers. We crowd around a storyteller as they share their story with us. It’s like a campfire story without a campfire, intimate and family-like. We’ve had professors, bloggers, writers, illustrators, actors, performers, potters and runners. Each session is planned with a broad theme meant to inspire ourselves and our speakers. We try to bring together different people from different parts of society and different walks of life, and allow thought to free-flow.

Our main goal is to provide students with a little “a-ha!” they wouldn’t get sitting in their classrooms or reading their textbooks. At the same time, we hope that our sessions will enable us to rediscover this metropolis we are dwelling in.

It has been more than three years since 美 was born. Why then, are we creating this blog now?

Well, to tell the truth, the idea of having a webpage has been around for a long time. After having held couple of successful sessions, we were aspiring to grow further; to involve more people, both students and speakers; to step out of UTokyo boundaries; and to expand our activities. Having a website with constant updates seemed like the best start.

This time, however, we realized that this issue is much more urgent than we thought. Most of our members are graduating next year, including our founder Manasa, leaving only two active 美 members. Even though the meetings are casual and mostly easygoing, it is impossible to manage them with only two of us. We desperately need more people.

We are proud of what we do and we believe that our work is tremendously important for the students of the University of Tokyo. Therefore, we desire to pass on our tradition. All of our activities will be made visible on this page, so if you find yourself interested even a tiny bit, please let us know! You are always welcome.

You can follow us on social media (on Twitter @bcreativeut and on Facebook.com/bcreative.ut ) or shoot us an email at creative.ut@gmail.com.

We’re going to explain more about ourselves and what we have done on the past in our next post. Stay tuned!