East Asia Four Universities Forum in Tokyo 2007 / BESETOHA

Key note speech/ Nishinakamura Hiroshi
(Deputy dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo)

At the East Asia Four Universities Forum, held annually since 1999, researchers from four universities in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan that are leading higher education in East Asia discussed about the role of universities, and especially liberal arts education in the East Asia region. In the first round of the forum, a reappraisal of Asian values, and a discussion on the East Asian cultural community and its significance for today took place. The second round was building on the results of the first by debating the role university education and liberal arts education has to play in order to create a common culture and to enable sustainable development while taking fully into account the region's cultural diversity and recognizing that further discussion is needed in various areas in order to construct an intellectual community and ensure the harmonious development of the East Asian region as a whole, even though today regional cooperation between East Asian countries is growing stronger and stronger. In addition, natural scientists participated in the 7th forum in Seoul in 2005, and in the 8th forum in Hanoi in 2006, and the issue of sustainable development of East Asia was also put on the agenda. The results were reflected in " East Asia Four Universities Forum Hanoi Declaration" which was adopted at the November 2006 forum, and which confirmed that the four universities should strengthen and develop the forum further and turn it into a formal network and that at the same time act together to promote exchange with other regions in the world.

The 9th forum which was held as part of the events commemorating the 130th anniversary of the founding of the University of Tokyo, based on the results of the first two rounds and the eight years of the forum's activities, was the next step as the first conference of the third round. Therefore, this time the discussion focused on the problem of the concrete ways the four universities’ research and education activities could be linked to the accomplishments made to the present day through research and educational exchanges and the accumulated discussions between the four universities, by implementing a wider range of student exchanges and introducing common textbooks and common syllabi. In the morning of the first day, the deans of the four universities gave keynote speeches on student exchanges and reported on each university’s policy and the actual situation of student exchanges. After that the signing ceremony of the "Agreement on the East Asia Four Universities Forum" took place, which aims to lay the groundwork for the institutionalization of exchanges between the four universities in the spirit of the "Hanoi Declaration". In the afternoon, two sessions were held. The first session, "Cultural diversity and classical education", discussed about the creation of a common liberal arts education in East Asia based on the historical and cultural differences in the East Asian region. The second session "Environmental education at university level ", deliberated the concrete methods of how to develop liberal arts education at the four universities in a way that integrates the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences for the sustainable development of the East Asian region. On the second day, a working session on "distance education" took place and concrete measures to conduct joint online classes at the four universities using a common syllabus were discussed.

At the Hanoi conference an experimental student panel had been held, but from this time the panel began in earnest, with four students each from Beijing University, Seoul National University and Vietnam National University, Hanoi school, and 10 students from the University of Tokyo participating and with four professors who had attended the second session holding lectures for the students titled "Tradition and environmental issues in East Asia" after which the students engaged in a lively debate on the topic "Environmental protection in East Asia: How can we use East Asia's tradition to solve environmental problems". With the addition of the student panel where the students participated actively and were trying to understand the other countries' historical and cultural differences for a better understanding of each other, as well as thinking together about and discuss the region's shared problems, the Forum has come a step closer to the goal of educating world citizens in the region who share a common foundation. This four university forum is basically held in four languages, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, and this time, apart from the session on environmental education and the student panel which were conducted in English, the forum was held in four languages with simultaneous translation. Underlying this is the wish that college students should learn language at least one of the languages of their neighboring countries, besides English, but also the recognition that the respective languages are very important when it comes to debating about the cultures of the region. Therefore the presence of interpreters and translators who know more than just the vocabulary of a language, but also have a deep understanding about history and culture is essential. The fact that the forums of the four universities have been held without any problems, serves as proof that human resources that can act as interpreters and translators have been cultivated at all of the universities.

Finally, the success of this conference owes very much to these interpreters and translators, as well as to the officials of the four universities and the members of the East Asian Liberal Arts Initiative who played a central role in the running of the forum at the University of Tokyo. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of them.