EASC Newsletter: Print-Ready Version

EASC Newsletter: April 2003

Japan Study Tour a Success

Two professors and twenty-one Indiana University students, ten from East Asian Languages and Cultures and eleven from the school of Business spent Spring Break in Japan as part of the combined East Asian Languages and Cultures and Kelley School of Business class "Japan Study Tour, Spring 2003." Professors Marc Dollinger and Yasuko Watt developed this course using support from the Freeman Foundation grant. You can read more about the origins of this course in the October 2002 EASC newsletter.

Students spent the weeks up to spring break preparing for the trip, learning about Japanese business and culture, and studying survival Japanese phrases. Eight of the twenty-one students had never studied Japanese before. "The lessons ranged from thought-provoking to super-practical…We spent as much time learning about societal ideas and concepts as we did studying basic language survival," explained EALC major Sean Stone. Jennie Woolf, a business major, found the videos to be most helpful. "Some of the best things we learned during class were from the movies and videos we saw because it taught us a lot about the culture, which helped to better prepare those of us who had not studied Japan prior to the class."

The professors worked hard to create a class that challenged these students, who often exhibited very different points of view. Woolf continues, "The professors shared lectures and assigned work which was for all of us, rather than assigning certain work to students in certain areas. The only trouble we ran into was with the group projects. Business and EALC students have completely different training on how group work should be done, so it presented some complications which we had to discuss as a class." EALC student Stone concurs, "This may sound strange, but the greatest strength and weakness in the EALC/Business collaboration are the same. There is a real difference in approach and attitude in everything from planning to problem solving…but this very different perspective was refreshing and seemed to add a lot of life to the trip."

The students left Indiana on March 13 and returned on March 22. While in Japan, they had the freedom to investigate issues which were of deepest interest to them while still participating in planned group tours. This combination of structured and unstructured time allowed students to experience Japan on their own terms. The group visited the Tokyo central government building, the Imperial Palace, Shibuya, Harajuku, Ueno Zoo, the National Museum, Kamakura, the National Diet, Asahi Beer, Nissan, and the Daily Yomiuri newspaper. In Shibuya, students encountered the largest organized anti-war demonstration face-to-face, and war with Iraq broke out while they were visiting the Yomiuri newspaper offices. They saw the newspaper company spring into action, and each of them left with a hot-off-the-presses extra edition about the war. Toward the end of their stay in Japan, students attended a reception hosted by the Indiana University Alumni Association of Japan.

Interested students also visited the National Diet Library and looked at some of Japan's rarest books. Other students saw Japan's most cutting-edge, completely paperless hospital. Nurses carry PDAs instead of charts, and patient files could be accessed on any of the 1200 computers which could be found in examination rooms and nurse stations throughout the hospital. After returning to campus, students used the information they gathered to begin work on individual projects which will be the culmination of the course.

Stone concludes, "The trip was a real joy, and I am lucky to have had the experience. It didn't change me; it re-forged me, presenting me with a lot of questions and scenarios that I hadn't had the opportunity to encounter." Business student Woolf agrees, "Because of opportunities such as this, I feel like I have grown tremendously as a person. I wish all students could have this chance as well. A course like this should be required before a student can graduate!" Written by Susan Furukawa.

More Good Things to Come

A new combined department study tour course is being developed between East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC) and the School for Environmental and Public Affairs (SPEA) by Michael Robinson of EALC and Roy Shin of SPEA. The course, which is still in the early phases of development, will meet during the first 2004 summer session and provide an intensive introduction to Korean public policy and government. It is being built around SPEA alumni who are now placed in government, NGO and private policy-influencing institutions. While the schedule for the course is still under discussion, some possible sites that students will visit include the Seoul City Planning Bureau, the National Environmental Agency, the Economic Planning Board, and the Seoul National University Institute of Public Policy. Much of the discussion, training and de-briefing for this class will be done on site in Korea.

Announcing the SPEA/EALC Dual Master's Program

This fall the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC) and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) will begin to offer a joint three-year program that qualifies students for a dual Master's degree. Students must separately apply to and be accepted into both the MPA program in SPEA and the MA degree program in East Asian Studies. This degree parallels the joint degree EALC already offers with the Kelley School of Business (MA/MBA). The purpose of the degree is to prepare interested students to learn about East Asia while at the same time learning skills for government and nonprofit work. The dual Master's degree allows accepted students to streamline their coursework in each program so that they may complete a dual degree in three years.

EASC EVENTS

East Asian Security Series Begins

This spring the East Asian Studies Center began sponsoring an informal lecture series on the topic of East Asian security issues. The talks are held at the Borders bookstore at Eastland Plaza in Bloomington. Jacques L. Fuqua, Associate Director of the East Asian Studies Center and retired Lieutenant Colonel gave the first talk, "The Axis of Uncertainty: US-South Korea-North Korea Security Relations," on March 22. He addressed questions such as: Why is North Korea's diplomacy characterized by such a "brinksmanship" posture? Why have the Bush administration's policies toward North Korea failed? Why do some experts believe that the US-South Korea bilateral relationship will become more strained during the current nuclear crisis on the peninsula instead of bringing the US and South Korea closer together? Can South Korea's Sunshine Policy toward North Korea succeed? This presentation touched on these and other pertinent current issues confronting the Bush administration and its bilateral relationship with South Korea, while proving a contextual background that lays the foundation for the current crisis. Mr. Fuqua recommended the book The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Revised and Updated Edition) by Don Oberdorfer for further study.

On April 26 Scott Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Political Science and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, gave the second lecture in the series, "China: America's Enemy, America's Ally." The United States has alternated between treating China as a close ally at some moments and as America's most dangerous challenger -- strategic, economic, and ideological -- at others. Such wavering reflects the deep divisions among Americans' views about the Middle Kingdom. This presentation provided a window into the fractious, polarized, and sometimes funny debate over China policy that Americans have been engaged in during the past quarter century. The discussion was based on Kennedy's new book, China Cross Talk: The American Debate over China Policy since Normalization, A Reader (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

First Midwest Chinese Studies Summit Held at IUPUI

On April 18, 2003, the East Asian Studies Center along with affiliated faculty hosted the Midwest Chinese Studies Summit. The summit was held in the Law School facilities on the campus of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Beginning in the afternoon, two sessions engaged China scholars from the Midwest in discussions on the current state of China studies and the ways to make the focus stronger. Dr. David Wong of Columbia University and Dr. Prasenjit Duara of the University of Chicago led the first session that focused upon the current plurality of work produced by China scholars. The following session was led by Dr. Kristen Stapleton of the University of Kentucky and focused on strategies for China scholars to strengthen the field's identity. This summit was open to all faculty members with an interest in the field of Chinese studies in the Midwest, their graduate students, and knowledgeable parties outside the academy.

High School Honors Seminar Draws a Large Crowd

More than 75 high school juniors and seniors and their teachers from ten high schools around Indiana attended the 2003 High School Honors Seminar, which was held on the I.U. Bloomington campus. The theme for the seminar was "Manga and Anime: Traditional Culture in Modern Media." Many young people today are attracted to the study of Japan through their experience with anime. However they often misinterpret aspects of these media due to a lack of understanding of the cultural and historical background of anime/manga. This day of lectures and activities was designed to help high school students begin to understand the aspects of traditional Japanese culture as they are reflected in these popular media. Due to the popularity of the topic, a second seminar will be held on September 16, 2003 to accommodate the more than 100 students who were not able to get into the April seminar.

New York Times Arts and Leisure Weekend Chinese Film Festival

The China film weekend was a great success. Each of the three movies shown, Postmen in the Mountains, The Saga of Mulan and The Journey to the Western Xia Empire was well-attended and gave students and members of the greater community a chance to see some rare Chinese films. The festival began with Postmen in the Mountains, the most widely acclaimed of the three films. The story's simple but universal theme of a father's struggle to understand his son combined with the exquisite scenery drew enthusiastic response from the audience.

The Saga of Mulan, performed by the Beijing Opera, is based on the ancient Chinese legendary tale that became known to US audiences through an animated version produced by the Disney Studios. Paola Voci, a Chinese film specialist and recent graduate of the EALC Ph.D. program, was pleasantly surprised by the audience response. "I showed The Saga of Mulan on a sunny and warm Saturday afternoon, and it still attracted a crowd. Despite the unfamiliar Beijing Opera format, even the non-Chinese audience enjoyed the film." According to Voci, the film elicited varied reactions from the diverse audience. "I noticed, for instance, that some tragic moments were perceived as comical by those who were not familiar with the acting and singing conventions of the Beijing Opera. As a result, some were laughing while a couple of older Chinese ladies were moved to tears."

The Journey to the Western Xia Empire is a Chinese "western," or a xibu pian, which is a film shot in the northwestern regions, often in a desert-like or mountains setting. Voci was even more impressed by the number of people who came to the Buskirk Chumley Theater to see this film on Sunday night. "The content and historical setting of the film was unfamiliar to much of the audience, but they responded very positively and many of them came up to ask questions at the end."

Spring Lecture Series Comes to a Close

EASC's Spring colloquium series came to a close on April 25 with I.U.B. Associate Professor of Religion, Jan Nattier's talk, "'Three Disasters and Four Opportunities': On Interpreting Early Chinese Buddhist Translations." Nattier's talk, along with the post-modern lecture about Haruki Murakami given by Harvard professor of Japanese Literature, Jay Rubin, focused on issues of translation and drew a diverse crowd. All of the Spring colloquium lectures were well-attended and well-received, covering a wide range of topics.

There were also two special lectures this semester by Dru Gladney and Wang Ping. Both of these lectures were great successes. Dru Gladney, an anthropologist who has done extensive work in both the PRC and Central Asia, gave a stimulating talk -- to a packed room of about 60 students and faculty members -- on shifting senses of cultural and political identity among the people's of China's Northwestern frontier region.

Wang Ping, who was in Bloomington to give a reading of her poetry in a series sponsored by the Kinsey Institute and the Creative Writing Program, gave an informal talk to students and faculty interested in East Asia on her book dealing with footbinding. That work, Aching for Beauty (read a review in this newsletter), is a fascinating study which is both very personal and scholarly. In her conversation about it, she spoke in insightful and sometimes quite moving ways about the things that motivated her to write the book and how in doing so she drew upon both her own experiences growing up in China and her graduate studies in the United States.

While the fall lecture series schedule is still under construction, here are some dates for your fall calendar.

October 31st - Paul Cohen, Wellesley College
November 14th - Gail Hershatter, University of Santa Cruz
TBA - Greg Waller, University of Kentucky

Look at our website to obtain updated information: http://www.indiana.edu/~easc/eaq/.

EASC to Co-sponsor Lecture by Former Ambassador Lilley

On November 13, 2003, Ambassador Lilley, presently a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, will give a lecture for the Buskirk-Chumley Theater Public Affairs Lecture Series. Ambassador Lilley has had a distinguished career in government and academe, having held a variety of important posts in or related to East Asia. Ambassador Lilley began his academic career as a professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University and subsequently held such notable positions as director of the American Institute in Taiwan, Fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, and director of University of Maryland's Institute for Global Chinese Affairs. His career in public service spanned three decades and includes such postings as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs and US ambassador to the Peoples' Republic of China and the Republic of Korea.

Ambassador Lilley is well known for his prolific writing on security and trade issues related to East Asia. In addition to the several books he has co edited on the China-Taiwan issue, trade with China, and the Chinese military, he has written numerous articles for the Foreign Policy Journal, US News and World Report, Washington Post, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and a host of others. Ambassador Lilley also makes frequent television appearances on network and cables news broadcasts such as ABC's Nightline, PBS's NewsHour, as well as CNN, CNN International, NBC and CBS.

More New Faculty

In addition to the new hire in the School of Education, Heidi Ross, and the College of Arts and Sciences, Ethan Michelson, EASC would like to introduce two more new faculty members.

Scott O'Bryan, Ph.D. Columbia University, currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, will join the East Asian Languages and Cultures and History Departments in the fall of 2003. He was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Asian Studies from the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University (2000-2001) and a Leonard Hastings Schoff Publication Award from the Office of University Seminars, Columbia University (2001).

O'Bryan's specialty is postwar Japan, particularly postwar economic policy and thought, and he is interested in the intellectual infrastructure of "high growth" in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. He examines Japanese capitalism in the twentieth century as intellectual history, analyzing the ways of thinking about the economy that made it possible to measure and assess economic growth and that underlay the consensus that emerged about economic growth: the emphasis on GNP and national income (made famous in Ikeda Hayato's promise to double national income over the course of the 1960s). O'Bryan is also interested in the role consumption played in Japanese economic growth, and about the ways that consumption was "sold" to the Japanese public as a virtue. In the future he plans to work on projects concerning the environmental and peace movements in Japan.

Dr. O'Bryan is currently revising his dissertation, "Growth Solutions: Economic Knowledge and Problems of Capitalism in Post-War Japan, 1945-1960" into a book manuscript. An article titled "The Science of National Income Accounting and Economic Knowledge in Twentieth-Century Japan," appeared in the Japan Studies Review, spring 2002. His chapter on the rise of new statistical forms of economic analysis in the mid-twentieth-century is forthcoming in a volume edited in Japan by Nakamura Masanori (2003). He has also published translations and book reviews in Positions: Asian Cultures Critique, Journal of Economic History, U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, and Japan Studies Review.

Dr. O'Bryan will teach EALC E352 "War and Peace in Modern Japan" and History J400 "'Revolution and Nationalism in Modern Asia" at I.U. Bloomington this fall and "Topics in East Asian History" and "Modern Japan" in the spring.

Marvin Sterling is coming to I.U. for a one-year appointment in the Anthropology Department. Sterling recently received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from UCLA. His dissertation was titled, "In the Shadow of the Universal Other: Performative Identifications with Jamaican Culture in Japan." He has written an ethnography of African-American sailors at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan. Since June, he has been living in New York City, starting a new research project on Japanese engagements with black musical subcultures in New York City, and working for the Educational Testing Service, where he identifies, prepares and submits academic reading material to be used on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).

His areas of specialty are expressive culture and national identity, anthropology of the body, Japanese popular culture, and ethnomusicology, and he will teach ethnographic courses about the culture of Japan, a topical seminar on expressive culture and the body, Japanese popular culture, and global hip-hop music. Dr. Sterling's diverse background ensures that he will be widely welcomed here at I.U. Bloomington. Rick Wilk, Chair of the Anthropology Department explains, "This may be the first time East Asian Languages and Cultures, African American and Diaspora Cultures, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean studies have all wanted to see the same person hired! Our graduate students have been wildly enthusiastic about his work on popular culture and nationalism. We are really excited at the prospect of developing East Asian anthropology as a specialty within our department."

Journal of Chinese Religions Published

Vol. 30 (2002) of the Journal of Chinese Religions is now available. This issue has seven articles, including a study of a foundational text in Daoist alchemy, a translation and study of a popular tale about the bodhisattva Guanyin's virtuous parrot, a study of Buddhist beliefs about the afterlife as revealed in pre-Tang tomb documents, an article on the earliest Chan Buddhist autobiographical narrative, and an article by John McRae in which he casts the Chan master Shenhui as an evangelist.

JCR has been published by the Center since 1998. The co-editors are Stephen Bokenkamp and Robert Campany, with Clarke Hudson replacing Joanne Quimby as assistant this year. Russell Kirkland (a 1986 PhD graduate of EALC) also stepped down as JCR book review editor recently, after more than a decade of service.

When I first read the book Aching for Beauty, I was struck by the author's story of her own desire to have her foot bound when she was nine. That was 1966, the beginning year of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This grasped my full attention because as someone who also grew up during that time in history, I thought it must be a very unique individual who would dare to embrace such desire. Young generations are implanted with ideas of what's new and what's old, the ultimate dichotomy of good and evil. We were new citizens who must abandon all of the old feudal ideas, and footbinding, the distorting of girls' feet, was the evil of all evils, even though we didn't know why. The author, Wang Ping, who has her Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University and teaches creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota, was free spirited in her formative years during that repressive era.

It was all the more pleasing to meet with her in person in early March when she came to Bloomington to read her poems and present her thoughts. After talking to her, I was impressed with her frankness and the direct impact of her American experiences. She indeed is a cultural explorer of her past, a Chinese part that defines our roots.

Wang Ping's book, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, is an exquisite pursuit of pain, body, myth, sex, beauty and femininity. Through abundant literary citations and analysis from Chinese erotic classics such as the Golden Lotus, The Romance of the Western Chamber, and the Three-Inch Golden Lotus, we hear murmurs of our distant female ancestors, their sorrows, tears and pride. Her richly documented writing takes us back to the 12th century when this painful practice originated, and the 13th century when the Mongol rulers particularly encouraged the spread of footbinding. She translated many primary sources that depict young girls' screams of pain and male companions' admiration of the "lotus," the tiny feet. Readers will gain insights about the pain-infested culture and its sublimation in poetry and verse. Along the way, you will enjoy Wang Ping's literary accomplishment as her words flow poetically.

During the Cultural Revolution, girls in my neighborhood, who were Red Guards at 14 or 15 years of age, proudly compared their feet with each other to see who has the largest, so that they could claim there were no feudal crumbs in their thoughts. Even so, they bound their breasts with layers and layers of cloth so that they could have a gender-neutral appearance. Reading Wang Ping's footbinding book brought back my long-forgotten childhood memories. Reviewed by Liana Zhou, Head of the Library, Kinsey Institute

Jay Rubin, Harvard professor of Japanese literature and author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, begins his book about the writing career of Haruki Murakami with a confession. "I might as well admit it from the start: I am a Haruki Murakami fan." Perhaps he is worried that his admiration for the man and his writing will somehow color the analysis that follows. While it is unusual to have such a comprehensive analysis of a contemporary writer by someone who also happens to be the writer's friend, Rubin is able to maintain a balanced approach to his analysis. The book is by and large chronological, taking us through Murakami's work from the first short stories to after the quake. Interspersed are brief glimpses of Murakami the man. Along the way, Rubin includes translated passages and in some cases entire stories that are new to English readers of Murakami. This mixture of academic examination, personal anecdote, snapshots of Murakami's life, and passages and stories translated in their entirety make Rubin's look at Murakami and his works truly unique.

Critics have always been divided as to whether we should take Murakami seriously. Rubin explains, "[Critic Masao] Miyoshi regards Murakami as a cynical entrepreneur who never wrote a word out of such old fashioned motives as inspiration or inner impulse. To frighten off skittish academics who might be tempted to take Murakami seriously, he warns, 'only a very few would be silly enough to get interested in deep reading.'" Rubin is not afraid to be one of those proud, silly few, and the result is a valuable study of the life and works of Haruki Murakami.

Rubin ends this work with two important appendices -- a detailed bibliography of works by and about Haruki Murakami and an interesting discussion of issues of translation. Any close look at the works of Haruki Murakami is bound to elicit discussions on issues of translation. Murakami has been accused of writing awkward Japanese so that it will translate easily into English, and indeed when he is not producing fiction, he is translating one of many American authors, such as Raymond Carver, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote, that he has helped make famous in Japan. This English-sounding Japanese is the foundation for Murakami's writing style. "Murakami's style strikes the Japanese reader as fresh and new because it often reads like it is translated from English…Its American flavor is subtle and feels both foreign and natural at the same time" (Rubin, 288). When Rubin talked about this work during his colloquium lecture on April 4, 2003, he admitted that one of the biggest challenges to translating Murakami is communicating this style. This thought is echoed in his book: "Paradoxically, the closeness of Murakami's style to English can itself pose problems for a translator trying to translate it 'back' into English; the single most important quality that makes his style fresh and enjoyable in Japanese is what is lost in translation" (Rubin, 289). With Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Rubin allows English-speaking readers to have a fascinating glimpse into the world of modern translation and the most comprehensive view of the works of Murakami to date. Reviewed by Susan Furukawa

Yale Global Online
A Web Resource from the Yale University Center for the Study of Globalization

In both the academy and society at large, there has been intense debate regarding the increased interconnectedness of individuals, institutions, and nations throughout the world. Nayan Chanda of Yale University, the Spring Freeman Journalism Speaker at I.U. Bloomington, wanted to contribute to the understanding of globalization, so he created Yale Global Online (URL: www.yaleglobal.yale.edu). This flagship publication of the Center for the Study of Globalization brings together ideas from the academy and events reported in the news together to make sense of an increasingly interconnected and complex world.

Yale Global Online is a unique resource for individual to utilize. Bringing together information impacting a worldwide audience and not an immediate one, this online publication speaks equally well to the corporate manager, the public intellectual and the interested citizen. From first look, the publication is a mass of topical information that shares no coherence. Yet, in this respect the reader is exposed to the nature of a globalizing world. Yale Global Online presents information regarding our world where boundaries blur, distinctions disappear, and definitions are hard to come by.

This is a highly recommended resource for individuals interested in worldwide processes. The only caveat is that Yale Global Online is a synthesis of information that provides for a preliminary investigation of globalization only. Yet, as an online resource, Yale Global Online is an excellent source of information and is highly recommended, especially for use in the classroom and inside international outreach programs. Reviewed by Jeffrey Payne.

Christopher Beckwith (CEUS), published the article "On Korean and Tungusic Elements in the Koguryo Language" in Transactions of the International Conference of Eastern Studies, No. XLVII, 2002, pp. 82-98.

Sumie Jones (CMLT & EALC) chaired an AAS panel about what was discovered during the course of the research which went into cataloguing the Japanese rare books at the Library of Congress. The entire panel will be published in two journals.

Scott Kennedy (EALC), presented the paper "Protectionism by the Book: How Global Regimes and Competing Interests Shape Chinese Trade Policy," to the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, New York City, March 27, 2003.

John McRae will be a Distinguished Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hawai'i this fall semester. During that time period he plans to do a video-conference section for the reading of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen texts, allowing faculty and students from both IU and UH to participate simultaneously. In addition, he has received a Japan Foundation grant for twelve months, beginning in spring 2004, for research on "The Lotus Sutra Commentary of Prince Shôtoku in transcultural perspective."

Jan Nattier (REL & EALC) has received two one-year grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both for work on her lexicon of the extant works of Zhi Qian, a third-century translator of Buddhist texts into Chinese.

Anne Prescott (EASC) gave the paper "Orff, Debussy and Twinkle Gamelan" at the College Music Society Great Lakes Chapter Annual Meeting in South Bend, IN on April 5, 2003. She was also a featured presenter at the Michigan Music Educators Conference in Ann Arbor, MI on Jan. 17, 2003. The topic was "Japanese Music for the Elementary Music Classroom."

Natsuko Tsujimura (EALC & Linguistics) presented a paper entitled "Mimetic Verbs as Contextuals" at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America held in Atlanta, Georgia, January 2-5, 2003. She also presented a paper (with Masanori Deguchi) entitled "Semantic Integration of Mimetics in Japanese" at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society held at the University of Chicago April 10-12, 2003.

Jeff Wasserstrom (History & EALC), who has just been promoted to the rank of Full Professor, recently had a short essay, "Letter from Nanjing," appear in the TLS (January 3, 2003). In January, he also organized and spoke at a roundtable (on the global impact of E.P. Thompson's studies of the English working class) that was part of the program of the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and gave a History Department brown bag talk at I.U. on "Global Shanghai, 1925: A Turning Point Year as Event, Myth, and Experience." His other recent activities have included chairing a panel (on art and dissent in contemporary China) at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies and giving a talk on Shanghai history at Duke University.

Yasuko Ito Watt (EALC) served as the head judge at the 17th Japanese Language Speech Contest of the Japanese Consulate in Chicago on March 29, 2003. Forty students selected from 109 applicants participated in the contest. She participated as a panelist on, "Articulation: Concerns and Issues" at the 15th Central Association of Teachers of Japanese (CATJ) conference at Earlham College on April 12, 2003. She was also elected to serve as a member of the national Board of Directors of the Association of Teachers of Japanese for the next three years.

Greg Johnson moved to Tokyo to start a new job as a tenured assistant professor of comparative culture at Otsuma Women`s University.

Margaret Key presented a paper "Detecting Murder and Myths: Abe Kobo on Dam Construction" as part of a panel on Japanese detective fiction at AAS.