Going to the Field | Tomoki Kamo, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management
In the blink of an eye, the seasons have come full circle, and the season for the Camp for Designing the Future has arrived once again.
This summer, SFC is once again holding the Camp for Designing the Future 2025 in various locations. This year, from August 3 to August 5, four workshops are being held at SFC, and one workshop each is taking place in Kyoto and Yonago. At SFC, the main venue for the Camp for Designing the Future 2025, the following are being held: "WS01: Entrepreneurship and Management Workshop for High School Students — Designing the Future through Startups" (August 5), "WS02: Multilingual Education Workshop — Composing Haiku in Multiple Languages" (August 5), "WS03: Strategic Decision-Making Workshop — Mapping Strategies on the Stage of the Cold War World" (August 5), and "WS04: Fabrication Workshop — Finding, Interpreting, Making, and Creating Landscapes" (August 4, August 5).
In Kyoto City, the "Kyoto WS: Place-making and Town-making Workshop in Kyoto — How to Open Up Public Facilities and Public Spaces" is being held on August 4 and August 5 with the cooperation of Kyoto City. Prior to this, in Yonago City, Tottori Prefecture, the "Tottori WS: Camp for Designing the Future in Yonago (Tottori) Augmented Town Workshop — Opening the Future of People, Living, and Regional Healthcare through XR and Robotics" is being held from August 3 to August 5, co-hosted by Tottori Prefecture and WebDINO Japan, with the cooperation of Yonago City.
As I write this manuscript, I am on a train returning to Tokyo after participating in the kickoff for the Kyoto WS on Monday, August 4, and greeting the camp participants, in order to attend the kickoff event for the Camp for Designing the Future at SFC the following morning.
For the past few years, I have watched my colleagues interact closely with high school students at the Camp for Designing the Future. Every year, this makes me unable to suppress the desire to go to my own field of education and research.
As a China researcher, I am driven by the desire to go to China with my students and invite them into the fascination of China studies. When I was a student, I studied Chinese at SFC because I wanted to understand China, I studied the discipline of political science because I wanted to understand the people living there, and I studied international politics because I wanted to think about how to engage with Chinese society. Going to the camp reminds me of those feelings from my student days. That is why this year, too, I have decided to launch a special research project and go to China with my students.
Since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, my laboratory has revived the practice of deepening our understanding of China during the semester by carefully reading academic research on contemporary Chinese politics and diplomacy and engaging in discussions with practitioners in those fields. Meanwhile, during long breaks, we visit China while paying attention to various circumstances and repeatedly engage in exchanges with Chinese university students. We also sometimes have opportunities for lectures by inviting overseas researchers. As we have worked through trial and error to revive academic exchanges over the past few years, observing the students has shown me that they are deepening their understanding of China step by step with each exchange.
Students who visited China this past March sought to deepen mutual understanding by finding "connections" and "commonalities" with China—a country located in East Asia with many cultural and historical similarities—through interactions with Chinese students. This may be the standard approach to mutual understanding. However, ahead of their visit to China this September, students are beginning to realize the danger of focusing only on commonalities between Japan and China and easily believing that they are "similar." In other words, students are starting to talk about how there are actually differences in values and interests created by different social systems between Japan and China, and because of that, there may be differences in perceptions of the future. Perhaps the students are trying to find clues for understanding not just in commonalities, but within the differences. Furthermore, they feel that there are limits to trying to understand China—a country with a population of 1.4 billion and a land area of 9.6 million square kilometers—through the single word "China." I haven't heard the details from the students yet, but I would like to hear what they are thinking.
Understanding the other. What does it actually mean for the societies of Japan and China to understand each other? I feel that visiting the society you seek to understand, facing the people who live there directly, and exchanging words with a sense of both tension and respect is the entrance to mutual understanding. I am reminded of the hot summer exactly 30 years ago when I first began my long-term study abroad in China.