Name: LIN YEN TING Nationality: TAIWAN
Faculty/Year: School Political Science and Economics, 2014
This week campus celebrity is Chase Lin, an alumni of Waseda who has a multitude of accomplishments in various fields. Read on to find out more about his extraordinary experience!
Tell us a little bit about yourself! What are the things that you are interested in?
All through my four years of university, I stayed in an all-men dorm. I can be a real loner and I can be really outgoing as well. In my free time, I like to explore Tokyo in the search for good food. I also own a community on Facebook – Gaijin Photography and it recently won an Honorable Mention at the Moscow International Foto Awards in the category of Editorial – Conflict. It’s about the Sunflower Movement that took place in Taiwan this year. I wanna try all sorts of exotic foods before I go back to Taiwan as well as to find an opportunity to go to the Bonin Islands of Japan. I live by the motto of “Why not?” so as to give myself freedom to do the things I want.
I’m interested in beautiful things, creating art (music, paintings, photos or new ideas), breaking my own boundaries, all sorts of social issues. I hate injustice and I stand for social justice. I’m also interested in political science and economics, experimental economics, social psychology as well as the way in which introverts express themselves!
Wow, that’s a lot of stuff! We know you love photography so we definitely want to hear about that later but there’s something you didn’t mention…We know that you’re love running marathons, when did you realize you have a passion for the sport? Could you share with us some of the marathons that you have joined before?
When I was in university, I decided to change up my exercise routine so I began to run since it’s more convenient than playing basketball in Japan. At the same time that was when I started learning how to be independent, how to be on my own so I was trying to do an exercise that I could do on my own. So while I ran and ran, I just thought to myself, “Why not join a marathon?” Moreover, Tokyo Marathon is really popular!
I’ve participated in the Tokyo Marathon twice, the Kyoto Marathon, the Fujisan Marathon, the Taipei Marathon , Pyongyang (yes as in North Korea) Marathon and more! The Pyongyang Marathon was the first one that allowed amateur foreign runners to participate in and the size of the race wasn’t big. Just a 10km track that surrounded Pyongyang (you’ll run more rounds if you were participating in longer distance categories). The people sitting in the stadium were how the way people from the outside would expect North Koreans to look like. Their cheers were all really uniform, it was pretty amazing. But when I left the stadium and ran out on the tracks to the streets, the people had the warmest smiles I’ve ever seen in my life! You know, participating in marathons is really a great way to get to know a city.
[To be continued…]