Aleksandar Pupovacさん（リエカ大学第5学年次）

I am Aleksandar Pupovac, a fifth-year dental student at the Faculty of Medicine Rijeka, Croatia. This year two of my colleagues and I got a chance to attend a student exchange program at Hyogo College of Medicine in Japan. Barbara and I stayed at the Dentistry and Oral surgery department for four weeks, from August 20th to September 14th 2018. The practice lasted every day from 8.30am to 4.30 pm.

Every morning I participated on a morning conference with the doctors at the department and later we had operations in general anaesthesia on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. The other days we spent the time at the Outpatient clinic or visiting the patients after surgery. Also, we had some lectures with prof. Kishimoto and the Japanese students after they returned from their summer break.

I had the oportunity to see and participate in many surgeries such as cystectomy, tumor excision, wisdom tooth extraction, neck dissection with fibula bone transplantation and many others. We also assisted in these operations and even I got the chance to operate and remove two titanium mashes from the mandible after fracture under the supervision on Dr. Kawabe. Also, I assisted the doctors at the Outpatient clinic. Moreover, I had the opportunity to see some diseases that we only learned about theoretically at our Clinic, such as osteonecrosis of the jaw, which is excellent for our future practice as doctors.

I would like to take the opportunity and thank all the doctors and staff at Dental department for their willingness to show us and explain as much as they could in these 4 weeks. Except the time spent at the Hospital we had an amazing time with the doctors after shifts. They took us to many dinners, so we had the chance to try every kind of japanese food and I had to say that we liked it so much, especially tempura and tonkatsu. We also went on some trips to Nara and Osaka with the doctors and had a cooking experience with Dr. Kawabe and Dr. Matsuda the last day of our stay in Japan.

Apart from the time in hospital, we had enough time to travel and see many places. We arrived in Japan one week before the program start so we stayed in Tokyo and went to Mt. Fuji. We also visited Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Kobe, Himeji Castle, Hiroshima and Itsukushima temple and I really enjoyed them.

During the stay we met the Japanese students that stayed last month at our University, so we welcomed them upon their arrival in Croatia. I believe that this program that has been going on between our Faculties for 10 years is a great opportunity in terms of education, learning about a totally different culture and of making friends and meeting new people. It was an experience that I will never forget and would like to thank everyone involved in organizing this program, both in Croatia and in Japan. I hope that one day I will go back to Japan, maybe even for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and meet with the friends from the Department, if they do not come to Croatia before that.