Yoshinori Kasai: Leveraging Accumulated Experience with Online Tools

2021/10/14

Every day, I enjoy many benefits from online tools. Students post questions online during class, and I answer them immediately. For interviews, I ask graduates from my previous school to visit the subjects' homes and conduct the interviews remotely. I work on transcription while viewing materials stored in the cloud simultaneously with seminar students who are at home. Research meetings are held in a hybrid format, allowing those abroad to participate. When I post photos of my daughter to the cloud, her grandmother leaves comments.

In course evaluations, I receive messages from students saying things like, "I was happy with the various creative efforts that were only possible because it was online." However, the truth is that everything I have introduced here, as well as the creative efforts in class, are things I have been working on since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Regarding online tools, the frequency of being asked "why use them" has decreased significantly, and we can now start the conversation with "how to use them."

Throughout my nine years as a student at SFC, I studied under Professor Junichi Yamamoto (now Professor Emeritus). He vividly described how the "Zapatista" guerrillas in Mexico utilized the internet to spread anti-globalism voices. Since then, he has also worked to support local coffee plantations from the perspectives of solidarity economy and fair trade. I heard that radio and the internet are vital means for coffee farmers in mountainous areas to learn about market prices and gain bargaining power and sales channels. I am now realizing, albeit belatedly, that he taught me long ago not only the importance of prioritizing the field but also the meaning of connecting regions and people through technology.

After being told by my professor, "You have to visit a region for ten years," I decided to go to graduate school. It has now been 19 years since I started working with my first field site in the Philippines, and 10 years with Shiga Prefecture, my current primary field. I want to tell my own seminar students, "Ten years...", but it breaks my heart that they are in a situation where they cannot even conduct their "first fieldwork."

There were colleagues who struggled because they could not deliver high-quality classes "as usual" due to their heavy reliance on accumulated face-to-face experience. There were also students who felt lonely because they could not make friends without building relationships in person. In this era, being in a position where it happens to be easy for me to utilize online tools, I want to spend a little more time supporting those colleagues and students, however modest my contribution may be.