So about a week ago I put up a pithy away message that said "Reading, and mourning the loss of my Japanese major." I got a lot of surprised IMs, especially from other Japanese majors who were surprised to see me go. Long story short, I got the major back. Here's what happened:A couple weeks ago, I went to visit the Asian Studies advisor to clear up a couple questions, one on minor pass/fail stuff and another on how to fit all the upper-division JPN classes into my last year of school. Being the new advisor she was, she basically told me that it couldn't be done and I had no options except studying in Japan if I wanted to leave in 2007 with my Japanese degree. This made me unhappy, because as cool as study abroad is, I didn't want to spend *just* 5-10 weeks in Japan on my studies, much less be forced to spend about $9K to be allowed to get the degree. I asked for who I could talk to about better options, and I was sent to Aida-sensei. She's a prof in the Japanese department who's more or less the de facto head of the department. I sent her an email to set up an appointment and her reply was "Come on Monday at 1pm, but I'm not sure how much more help I can be." I got up Monday, dreading an appointment full of no's to lead me into my 3 hour class from 4-7. Wasn't about to be a good day.Instead, I wound up at Aida's office and she told me exactly what I wanted to hear: if you're in upper-div Japanese, and you've been a good student, and you have a very pressing matter (i.e., graduation), you can take some upper-div classes concurrently. So, thanks to her help and advice, I'll just be taking two classes that feed into one another at the same time, in my last semester, and even then they might not actually overlap in material. So! Moral of the story is, I talked to the right people and found out exactly what I expected: it is possible to finish a Japanese major in 3 years. I'll just be doing a ton of it next year, but that won't necessarily be a bad thing.