Masahiro Niitsuma: The Difficulty of Cross-disciplinary Research

2022/02/09

While I was enrolled in the Graduate School of Keio University, my decision to study abroad in Doctoral Programs in the UK was primarily driven by the words of Professor Yoshitake Kobayashi, a leading expert in fundamental Bach research whom I had the chance to meet through a mysterious connection with the Satsuma biwa: "If I were to study handwriting now, I would use computers." There, I collaborated with experts in historical musicology, image processing, and robotics to work on research extracting knowledge from original musical scores and verifying expert opinions.

Cross-disciplinary research through the collaboration of different specialized fields is essential for truly solving the problems of today's massive and complex society, and I was fortunate to have this rare opportunity at a young age. One of the things I felt was particularly important is that to understand the insights of sophisticated experts, the more innovative they are, the more important the mutual relationship of trust becomes.

We always have a habit of viewing things from a starting point created by the habit of "self." At the time, I had a bitter experience where I could not take a bird's-eye view of that starting point, and an expert with outstanding insights closed their heart to me. The trigger for this was my statement, "Is there any scientific evidence?" In the past, when I encountered things that were not easily understood from my own perspective, I would say that without thinking deeply. However, this cut off communication with the other person, giving me an opportunity to rethink deeply. Was I making a sincere effort to see things from the other person's perspective? Was I forcing things into my own framework? How should I have spoken?

The tacit knowledge of experts, which is important in cross-disciplinary research, includes many things that cannot be converted into data with current measurement technologies. Looking back at history, there is the fact that the society we live in today is built on the foundation of original discoveries and inventions made by a handful of people that would have been difficult to support at the time. I feel that many of these things can only be recognized through a complex interplay between sensation and concept, and many cannot be reached solely through the accumulation of thought. Recently, more people have become aware of these issues, and it seems that the number of researchers taking on challenging topics that were previously difficult to gain recognition for is increasing.