Akiko Matsubara - Retiring in AY2020

Including my time as a part-time lecturer, I have been with Keio University for 32 years. During that time, I have been sincerely grateful for the opportunity to engage in research and education in a free atmosphere. With both my grandfather and uncle being graduates of the Faculty of Economics, I have felt a sense of closeness to Keio since I was a child. Since Keio did not have a department in the earth sciences, I thought I would have no connection to it, but it has been a great joy to have spent such a long time here.

My specialty is physical geography, and I have continued to conduct research on the global environment and natural disasters, including their relationship with humans. The reason I majored in physical geography within the earth sciences department is that during a guidance session for choosing a career path, my (future) supervising professor said, "Geography is an interdisciplinary field with a broad scope and a high degree of freedom."

My specific research theme is to clarify how coastal plains have been formed over the past approximately 10,000 years. In particular, I have worked on reconstructing the formation process of coastal ridge topographies (elongated elevations parallel to the coastline, such as sandbars, sand spits, and sand dunes, which often form in multiple rows from the inland side), based on topography, geology, and fossils. I also consider when humans began to be active in these areas, based on the distribution of archaeological sites on the coastal ridges. As a result, it has become clear that there is a time lag of several hundred to several thousand years between the time the coastal ridge topography was completed and the time people began to live a settled life there. From this, it is presumed that people began to live there after a new coastal ridge formed on the seaward side of the existing one, creating a stable environment less susceptible to the direct effects of high waves and tsunamis. These research findings were published in 2015 as Holocene Geomorphic Development of Coastal Ridges in Japan, with the support of a publication grant from the Keio Gijuku Fukuzawa Memorial Fund for the Advancement of Education and Research.

While my personal fieldwork is mainly within Japan, I have also had opportunities to go abroad for collaborative research. I participated in an agricultural geography survey in France with faculty from the geography major at the Faculty of Economics; a joint survey on flood and landslide disasters in Nepal with faculty from the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies and other universities; and an archaeological excavation at a site on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel with faculty from the archaeology major at the Faculty of Letters. Including the interaction with researchers from other fields, these were extremely valuable experiences that I could not have gained through my individual research. These experiences have also made me realize anew the "broad scope" of geography.

Through the physical geography course in the general education curriculum at Hiyoshi, I believe I had the opportunity to convey the characteristics of this field to many students, including those from the Faculty of Economics. As a student, the courses I found most interesting were the diverse liberal arts subjects, so I am grateful to have been able to teach my course as a liberal arts subject rather than a specialized one.

Until around 2005, which was the first half of my teaching career, my lectures followed the traditional format of distributing materials and writing on the blackboard. After that, I shifted to a more "efficient" style of teaching using slides. Also, during this period, I completed an original textbook, which I believe made the course more accessible for students. On the other hand, both class attendance and the number of questions from students decreased. This may be due to changes in student temperament or my own perceptions, but I feel that the "enthusiasm" of the large lecture halls in the first half of my career diminished in the latter half. In the future, I expect that a hybrid of in-person and online lectures will become the mainstream, and it seems that new innovations will be needed to bridge the distance between faculty and students.

Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the faculty members of the Faculty of Economics for their cooperation in various duties, and I wish the Faculty of Economics continued success and development.

(Interview conducted in December 2020)