Graduate School of International Culture and Communication StudiesWaseda University

YOSHIMOTO, Mitsuhiro Dean/Professor The Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies, Waseda University

The Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies or GSICCS recently celebrated its 10^th anniversary in 2023. On this occasion, I would like to briefly take stock of the current situation of GSICCS with an eye toward the next 10 years and beyond by focusing on the idea of internationalization.

GSICCS was established as the only graduate school of culture and communication at Waseda University. The courses offered by GSICCS are all taught in English, and our students, who come from Japan and many other countries in the world, write their master’s theses and doctorate dissertations in English. Japanese is not used unless students deal with Japanese documents or cultural texts in their own research. Do these facts make GSICCS international? The scholarly output in English is not necessarily more valuable than that in Japanese. The diversity of nationalities does not make our school automatically more international. Neither does the GSICCS try to replicate the United Nations on a smaller scale nor is it consumed with a Borgesian obsession to produce a perfect map of the world. Furthermore, international exchange and collaboration are hardly monopolized by GSICCS. To the extent that other graduate schools at Waseda also actively promote the agenda of internationalization, they do not specifically contribute to the unique identity of GSICCS. Then, why is our school called the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies?

I personally believe that the reason is that one of our missions is to engage with the international as a critical issue. No matter how many countries are “represented” by our student body or how many languages are spoken by our students and faculty members, GSICCS falls short of accomplishing its intellectual goal if it stops questioning the meaning of the terms “international” and “internationalization.” I do not wish to see GSICCS succumbing to a bureaucratic game of internationalization (or something worse, if we follow the late David Graeber’s line of thinking). This does not mean that we should scrutinize these ideas solely as a critical issue with a detached attitude. Critical scrutiny becomes possible only by putting ourselves in the midst of internationalization while simultaneously trying to constantly problematize it. In the world that we live in today, thinking about internationalization cannot but be a reflexive endeavor, which refuses to indulge in a fantasy of the international either in an abstract space of globalization or a self-enclosed space of the nation-state.

The internationalization of the University is necessary and inevitable. However, not all changes occurring at universities in Japan and elsewhere in the name of internationalization are producing positive effects. In fact, when pursued unreflectively, internationalization may lead to the transformation of the University into what Rem Koolhaas referred to as “Junkspace.” By reflexively embracing and questioning internationalization, GSICCS can work against the spread of academic Junkspace. At least this is how I envision the future of GSICCS in the next 10 years.