Downhill both ways

The Morningside Bubble is real, and anyone who’s ever complained about a dorm-to-Westside stroll for groceries is complicit in its creation. Columbia students are spoiled by our campus’ compact layout—we are never far from our daily needs. Though we have the entire city sprawled out south of us, we could arguably pass most of our college lives between the Upper West Side confines of Broadway and Amsterdam and not find much amiss. Even though commuter college campuses, as I experienced in Japan this summer, are not an uncommon phenomenon overseas, the inconveniences of commuting are foreign to most American undergraduate populations like our own. Comparing the two helps me realize that there’s a security and comfort that comes from living on campus, which the college commuter cannot attain.

Over the summer, I participated in a six-week language program in Kyoto that operated out of the local Doshisha University. Its picaresque Imadegawa campus, while the site of numerous important cultural properties dating back to the Meiji era, is home to very few student dorms. Most of the students I met were commuters—many from the city of Kyoto proper—but some came from as far afield as Osaka or Nara, a good two hours away, even on Japan’s efficient public transport system.

Though student dormitories do exist, they are either unpopular or an acquired taste. Featured in a 2010 CNNGo article, Kyoto University’s Yoshida-ryo is an (in)famous student-run dormitory that could be better described as a ramshackle shantytown. For 2500¥ (~$35) a month, low-income students or those looking for a particular type of dorm experience can stay—more accurately, squat—where there are “college students building robots in the cafeteria of a century-old decrepit Japanese dormitory ... a scene that should be in a William Gibson novel,” in the words of the article. It’s not exactly the cross-Pacific equivalent of East Campus, to say the least, though the parties at the Yoshida-ryo can run their own kind of wild. Of course, more modern dormitory lodging is also available, but Japanese facilities are limited when compared with Columbia’s capacity to house all four years’ worth of its undergraduate population. By and large, the students of Kyoto’s universities make a daily trek between their homes and their campuses.

The product of this commuter culture is, speaking literally, a healthy university population. Both Doshisha and the nearby Kyoto University are home to a staggering number of bicycles, which line the wide college walks during class hours in glinting lines before they can be found clattering out onto the city streets in the evening. For 7500¥ ($75) I had a bicycle of my own, and I traversed daily the 4.5-mile uphill stretch that separated my apartment in the downtown area of Sanjo from my classes up north at Imadegawa. My classmates lived scattered across Kyoto’s grid, with most of them a 20-minute ride away from me. Very quickly, I learned my way around the city: where to go after the library closed in the unthinkably early pre-midnight hours, where to best position myself along the Kamogawa River to watch buskers during weekend evenings, how to maneuver a bicycle through narrow shopping avenues. Discovering Kyoto was a daily after-school adventure as I was pushed out of Doshisha’s gates and into the city’s streets.

In comparison, at Columbia it seems almost too easy to fall into the trap of barely leaving campus—and to remain content that way. Butler’s ever-welcoming 24-hour embrace aside, no one dorm is really ever too far away from another. While Harmony may seem a light-year away in the dead of winter, there really aren’t too many excuses for not visiting a friend who lives only four or five streets down the road. But there’s a flip side to the laziness that Columbia’s campus inures in its students. There is a loneliness to a commuter’s existence that I never knew until I was one myself. Even if you fill up your days with friends and plans, your nights will always see you coming home to an empty house. In Kyoto, isolation was a disease that bred hours on YouTube and too-quiet meals for one.

If nothing else, the Morningside Bubble will never leave you lonely. Discussions in the middle of the night can go on forever, and Lit Hum study sessions are not limited by when the last train leaves. So while we shouldn’t ignore the city that makes this school great, neither should we forget to be grateful for the root of our Columbian indolence: a campus that many of us can call home.

Po Linn Chia is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian languages and cultures. She is involved in CIRCA and the Global Recruitment Committee. Ever the Twain runs alternating Tuesdays.