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Training Future Leaders in International Culture and Communication StudiesPioneering A New World from the Intersection of Multicultural SocietiesMore than three years have already passed since the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies at Waseda University was launched with a Master’s program in April 2013. That launch, as the University’s 22nd graduate school, was greeted by a combination of high expectations and concerns about the future. However, the school has grown steadily by attracting large numbers of talented students from Japan as well as a number of countries worldwide, and the rst group of students graduated in March 2015. The school also launched a Doctoral program in April 2015, as part of a continuing effort to provide more specialized research and educational programs.It is only natural that there have been many unanticipated events along the way. They include curriculum details and issues involving daily student life, of course, but above all we did not imagine when founding the program how many ambitious young people from around the world would be interested in our graduate school. No doubt we have beneted not only from interest in Japan’s traditional culture, but also a general perception that Japan is “cool,” for example in terms of anime and contemporary art. It is also true that the graduate school’s curriculum, which has embraced English as its primary language and enables students to conduct multidisciplinary research in a variety of elds, including language, culture, and society, has captured the interest of students.In fact, a range of discussions went into planning the curriculum before the school opened. In common-sense terms, there was the expectation that graduate-level education, as a follow-up to students’ undergraduate experiences, would embody a more highly specialized curriculum. Whereas undergraduate education values the accumulation of the basics and general knowledge while laying the groundwork for future specialization, it is typical for graduate programs to subdivide academic disciplines and pursue a more sophisticated level of understanding. It is in this way that more specialized education and research are carried out.However, the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies includes courses that allow broader-ranging research. For example, a variety of approaches to research into multicultural communication are possible, including research that emphasizes contacts between different languages; research that focuses on collisions of, friction between, or fusion of cultures; and research that analyzes the characteristics of societies and communities that are formed by people with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The objective of the school is to investigate communication through these different approaches, pursuing research that is exhaustive yet simultaneously longitudinal, comprehensive yet simultaneously multifaceted. As a result, we are able to provide educational and research programs that give priority to unusual topics in traditional academic disciplines. It may be that my personal background has inuenced the design of this new type of graduate curriculum. In my own research, I have explored themes such as the problems of cultures undergoing globalization and the friction that people crossing borders experience as they encounter new cultures, with a focus on American culture and literature in the second half of the 20th century and beyond. As part of that process, I’ve spent a signicant amount of time conducting research into postmodernism, in the sense of the culture and art that gave shape to the latter half of the 20th century. In doing so, my attention has been drawn to the phenomena by which different cultures come into contact with one another for political, economic, or other reasons, and give rise to new cultures—in other words, the creation of trans-cultural phenomena. Currently, I am conducting interdisciplinary research based on my interest in the formation of culture and community by Vietnamese-Americans on the West Coast of the U.S. This research has revealed a complex political and economic environment that came into existence during the second half of the 20th century and continues to the present day, as well as the movements of people that it has caused. In conducting research into new cultures such as this one, it is necessary to adopt a genuinely broad perspective that goes beyond a simple focus on cultural phenomena to instead encompass the underlying political and economic background as well as other topics such as language issues. I suspect that the same considerations apply to other research topics as well. Today, in addition to investigating a single phenomenon from a highly specialized perspective, researchers need to remain aware of the results that can be obtained from examining their subjects from other perspectives.I recall the words spoken to me by a professor when I rst began studying at a graduate school in the U.S.: “People undergo something when they cross borders.” That surely applies to more than national borders. Whether it’s the delineation of an academic discipline or some other structure, going beyond existing structures gives us new insight. Maintaining strong interest in such insights will be important in the scholarship and research of the future. After all, the goal of the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies is to become a contemporary community that helps and encourages researchers to develop the courage to cross borders and then lead them to success.WASEDA UNIVERSITY | GSICCS3

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