Ayako Hirono, Guest Professor (Part-time): "What is 'Knowledge Compilation'?"

October 6, 2022

Courses Taught: Techniques of Knowledge Compilation-1 (Spring Semester)

Techniques of Knowledge Compilation-2 (Fall Semester)

For the past 20 years or so, I have worked mainly for business magazines. As an economics reporter and editor, I have watched trends in economics and business administration around the world, searching for interesting economic theories and research not widely known to the public, and have continued to disseminate them for over 10 years by commissioning articles from experts and conducting interviews. This was driven by a desire to "bridge the knowledge gap between theory and practice, both domestically and internationally," but in the end, I think I was able to continue because I found it interesting.

I wanted to convey the excitement of encountering "high-quality, cutting-edge knowledge" to students with their infinite potential, and through a fortunate turn of events, I was given the opportunity to teach a course at SFC.

In the first semester of 2022, about 120 students registered through a lottery system. The course was conducted in a hybrid format of Zoom and in-person classes, featuring many guests from Japan and abroad, and we managed to get through it with the support of the Kotosaka Seminar. In the second semester, I plan to create opportunities to open the guest lectures to a wider audience and would like to keep the class size to that of a seminar. The goal is the "compilation" of living knowledge.

My previous job was as a reporter for a major newspaper, where I worked for about eight years, but I originally wanted to work for a publishing house. When I was in my first year of junior high school, I even astonished my friend's mother by telling her, "In the future, I want to get a job at XX company (the name of a major publisher) and become an editor."

The reason is simple. In elementary school, I aspired to be a manga artist and was absorbed in drawing stories in a blank sketchbook. In the sixth grade, I used my New Year's money and allowance to buy professional tools and submitted a work I was proud of to a shojo manga competition, but it was not selected. So, I decided to pursue a job creating manga and quickly switched my career goal to working for a publishing house.

The first time I seriously thought about my career path was during a conversation with a friend. In my first year of prefectural high school, a friend from the track and field team and I were on the school roof, talking about our future dreams. She looked straight ahead with a determined gaze and said, "I want to help the world by developing new drugs." As for me, I was just living on curiosity. Before I knew it, I had blurted out, "I want to be a journalist."

Soon after entering university, I had a once-in-a-lifetime encounter. After I was admitted, I was invited to a roundtable discussion for successful applicants by the correspondence course I had taken for my university entrance exams. Among the four or so participants was a woman who had been accepted into the Keio University School of Medicine. When asked why she had studied so hard for the exams, she repeated forcefully, "To wear a white coat," "To wear a white coat."

I became interested in places where people are driven by strong emotions. I observed customers at my part-time job at an off-track betting parlor as they experienced the highs and lows of the races, and I also worked part-time as an operator for a computer fortune-telling service, observing the people who came.

My father was a city desk reporter for a major newspaper, so I was also influenced by growing up hearing his stories about crime scenes, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and the private lives of famous people. His catchphrase was, "Newspapers have female reporters like you." At the time, it was difficult for women with liberal arts degrees to find jobs, but it seemed possible to get into a newspaper company.

However, what you think and what you actually do are completely different. After I got a job and entered the workforce, my expectations and reality were sometimes vastly different. But as I met many people I wouldn't normally have been able to meet and acquired knowledge through trial and error, I found myself moving forward little by little.

"Do what you believe in." Many students responded enthusiastically to these words from one of the guest lecturers in the first semester, my former colleague, journalist Shinichiro Kaneda. In the first class, I introduced the definition from contemporary epistemology, which is still debated: "Knowledge is a justified true belief." "Doing what you believe in" is precisely the "knowledge" in this definition.

You can't know if knowledge is justified and true for you until you try to apply it to reality. If it's not, you can just try doing what you believe in next. I hope to learn how to engage with knowledge in this way, together with our guests and all of you.

Ayako Hirono, Guest Professor (Part-time), Faculty of Policy Management Profile

(Photo by Junya Inagaki)