京都大学 多言語ポータルサイト 東南アジアを中心とした京都大学のさまざまな活動を紹介しています。
京都大学 多言語ポータルサイト 東南アジアを中心とした京都大学のさまざまな活動を紹介しています。
更新日:2014/02/06
A paper presented at the JSPS Workshop: “International Collaboration for the Formation and Development of Science and Technology Community in Southeast Asia”, Rembrandt Hotel, Bangkok, 12-14 February 2007
Enhancing Kyoto University’s Language- and Culture-Conscious Collaborations with Southeast Asian Institutions of Science and Technology
International Collaboration for the Formation and Development of Science and Technology Community in Southeast Asia >>PDF
Toshio YOKOYAMA
in collaboration with Yasuyuki KONO
Kyoto University is known for its historical commitment to ‘academic freedom’ for originality and creativity. The spirit behind this commitment has encouraged a thriving tradition of Kyoto scholars’ field-sciences in Asia and Africa, where a long line of scholars have looked for what is unwritten in books, reconsidered their preconceptions, created new ideas and even new vocabularies. In my view, Kyoto University’s ‘culture’ is a part of the intellectual climate of Japan’s old capital, Kyoto – a city that has experienced many ups and downs during the past twelve hundred years, cultivating strong immunity to the passing trend.
In 2001, Kyoto University, in its endeavour to integrate over-diversified academic disciplines in campus, promulgated a mission statement, which declared a new ideal: ‘to pursue harmonious coexistence within human and ecological community on this planet’. The drafting committee emphasised that this community should include non-humans ranging ‘from animals and plants to rocks and streams’. This statement may sound too brave. However, if we take into account that humanity finds itself today at a critical stage of its history, when conventional notions of Nature and Humanity are under serious review, it is perhaps natural that Kyoto University, with its rich tradition of field sciences, should aspire to such an ideal.
Kyoto University’s academic commitment to Southeast Asia reaches back almost fifty years. What began in the late 1950s as an idea to open a liaison office in Bangkok for Southeast Asian studies, came into being in 1964, with the opening of the Bangkok Office, followed six years later, by the opening of a second office, this time in Jakarta. Before discussing the prospects of Kyoto University’s collaborations with academic communities in Southeast Asian countries, a brief review of the history of our activities in this area seems appropriate.
The history can be divided into three stages. The first is the stage of individual field works that lasted until the end of the 1970s and were mostly concerned with human relationships with nature in diverse localities (Slide 1). The second stage can be summarized as that of institutional collaborations between Kyoto University and various research and educational institutions in Southeast Asia (Slide 2). These took place during the 1980s – a decade which saw notable developments in agricultural and social sciences, one symbolic event of which was the conclusion of an MoU with Kasetsart University. The third stage comes to the present day: a stage of in-depth collaborative research and education in Southeast Asia (Slide 3). This began in the 1990s, stimulated by the launch of the Centre-of-Excellence Programmes in 2002 in new areas such as ecological studies, atmospheric physics, energy sciences, and informatics. Collaborative educational activities also began in a number of departments in Southeast Asian universities under MoU relationships.
Unsurprisingly, given this historical background, exchanges between Kyoto university students and students of Southeast Asian universities have increased steadily since the middle of 1950s. In Slides 4, recent holders of Japanese Government scholarships for their studies in Kyoto are depicted in the bar-graph – in this, the subdivisions in colours indicate students’ nationalities; and the graph in Slide 5 indicates their enrollment in the four kinds of courses at Kyoto University ranging from the undergraduate course to the doctoral course. One notable tendency is a steady increase of doctoral course students since the early 1990s. As for the number of Japanese Kyoto University students studying in Southeast Asian countries, a selected number of students have been sent on Japanese government scholarships since the early 1980s (Slide 6). In 1980, the Division of Tropical Agriculture was established within the Faculty of Agriculture at Kyoto University. This initiated a regular flow of Japanese students to Southeast Asian countries. Since the beginning of the 1990s, several new graduate schools were established at Kyoto University in succession. Four of these, that is, The Graduate Schools of: Human and Ecological Studies; Energy Science; Asian and African Area Studies; Informatics; and Global Environmental Studies — have been particularly active in sending their students to Southeast Asian universities for research collaborations, as well as accepting graduate students from overseas who wish to study in Kyoto.
For a general picture of the present situation of Kyoto University’s relationships with Southeast Asian academic societies, please look at Slide 7. This depicts the distribution of 7 university-level MoUs and 39 graduate-school- or research-institute- level MoUs. Looking at the experiences and achievements of Kyoto University in the history of its collaborations with academic institutions in Southeast Asia, I may point out three major characteristics: First, are the accumulated experiences from our collaborations with Southeast Asian scholars, which have nurtured lasting friendship across relevant areas; this friendship relates to the second characteristic I have observed: the growth of community-oriented studies, whether in natural sciences and technology or social sciences; that is studies which take place are pursued not merely for the sake of academic attainment, but for the wellbeing of the society in each locality. These studies in turn might be said to be the driving force behind the third characteristic I have observed, that is, a growth of interdisciplinary research and education between seasoned field scientists in Southeast Asia and science-and-technology specialists fresh from Kyoto. These collaborations have by necessity made everyone more than ever language-, culture-, and history-conscious.
To reinforce this picture, I should like to show a number of slides depicting some notable collaborations.
1) Slide 8 shows the variety of current activities of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies: one historic example is the 40-year-long research in Dondaeng, a rice-growing village in Northeastern Thailand; and one comparatively new but wide-ranged example is the study of functions of traditional welfare systems among the aging populations of mountainous areas in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar. Slides 9 and 10 show multilingual publications by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, to which scholars of Southeast Asian academic societies contribute regularly.
2) The major research activities of the Graduate School of Agriculture have been supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the JSPS, and the Japan International Cooperation Agency, also known as JICA. Slide 11 shows a chronological chart of their fieldwork beginning from the late 1950s; Slide 12 shows their trajectory of collaboration with Southeast Asian universities until the middle of 1990s; Slide 13 shows that the Graduate School was reformed in the middle of the ‘90s and since then nearly all divisions have been conducting collaborative research works with various universities and research institutes in Southeast Asia.
3) Slides 14 and 15 show our Field Station for Tropical Forest and Biodiversity in Lambir Hills National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia. This is an example of enduring collaboration between the Malaysian Government, the locality, and the Kyoto University Center for Ecological Research. The station was established in 1991. At that time, the urgent issue in tropical forest studies was to develop systems to study the biodiversity of the forest canopy 70 metres above the ground, and to understand the complex interrelations of plants and thousands of small animals in that world that had been until then unknown to humans. Tree towers and walkways were built with the help of the local people for such direct but time-consuming observations.
4) The Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere has carried out collaborations in wood sciences with the Indonesian Institute of Science (that is the LIPI) under the JSPS General Exchange Program and the JSPS-LIPI Core University Program for more than twenty years. Slide 16 shows two of their recent intensive summer school activities. Slide 17 shows a list of students from Indonesia and Malaysia who attained Ph.Ds from Kyoto University for their studies at this research institute.
5) Slides 18 to 23 show Kyoto University Active Geosphere Investigations: These investigations boldly integrate atmospheric, oceanic and geological sciences, and are carried out in tropical areas by a group collaboration between the Bandung Institute of Technology, the National institute of Aeronautics and Space (known as the LAPAN), and Kyoto University. A large number of students from many countries are involved in this multi-disciplinary collaboration. The next one shows:
6) A project led by the staff of the Graduate School of Informatics since 1999: ‘Ecological Studies of Endangered Aquatic Species in Thailand’ (Slides 24 and 25). Now, the project includes several sub-projects such as the Mekong Giant Catfish Tracking Project, the Southeast Asia Sea Turtle Associative Research, and the Dugong Biological Survey. These projects are performed in close cooperation with Thai researchers at regional bases located in Phayao, Mannai Island and Phuket.
7) Slides 26 and 27 show the recent activities of Kyoto University’s Institute of Advanced Energy (IAE) in Southeast Asia, which cooperates extensively with Chulalongkorn University and the Joint Graduate School of Energy and Environment (JGSEE), Thailand. The student exchange in the field of energy sciences between these universities and Kyoto has been rapidly growing. (One example is Mr. Taro Sonobe, a matured Ph.D. student from Kyoto completing his theses at the JGSEE.) This IAE has been proposing an Asian initiative titled ‘Towards 2030 – New Energy Initiative’. It is an initiative to address the issue of global warming as well as energy security in Asia. The IAE has started preparations for a network for this purpose within the ASEAN and with other neighbouring countries.
8) The Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies has been opening a ‘Platform for Education and Research Cooperation on Environment and Disaster Management for Human Security in Asia’ (Slides 28 to 30). This is a case of in-depth collaboration between community and university, creating locally optimum technology systems in three geographically different sites in Central Vietnam. The CBO in the slide means community-based organizations. Every Kyoto participant, whether he or she is a technologist or a social scientist, takes a Vietnamese language course in Kyoto.
9) In collaboration with the Joint United Nations’ Programme on HIV/ AIDS, our Graduate School of Medicine launched ‘The UNAIDS Collaborating Centre on HIV Socio-epidemiological Research last autumn; it was the first of its kind in the world (Slides 31 and 32).
Before concluding my talk, I should like to mention three major on-going activities that are significant in terms of Kyoto University’s future international collaborations for the development of a science and technology community in Southeast Asia.
First among them is a set of two multi-disciplinary thinking groups across Kyoto University’s various campuses: one for Bangkok-based research and education activities and the other for Jakarta-based ones (Slide 33). The major function of these thinking groups is to create dialogues across disciplines to further proper and lasting academic co-operations for studies related to Southeast Asian countries. One of the leading figures is Professor Yasuyuki Kono who is attending this workshop.
The second on-going activity requiring special note is the succession of Kyoto University International Symposia since 2001. The 7th of these, titled ‘Coexistence with Nature in A ‘Glocalizing’ World – Field Science Perspectives’, was organised by the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies and the Center for Southsast Asian Studies (Slide 34). It was held in Bangkok in November 2005. The 8th symposium, titled ‘Towards Harmonious Coexistence within Human and Ecological Community on This Planet’, was held again in Bangkok three months ago, organized with the cooperation of 7 Centre-of-Excellence Programmes and the Research Unit for Sustainability Sciences (Slide 35). Both these symposia have been a vital first step towards the implementation of Kyoto University’s Mission Statement – the lofty statement mentioned in my introduction to this talk. These events have been carefully prepared with the support of the Organisation for the Promotion of International Relations, Kyoto University, an organization of which I am in charge. One of this organisation’s missions is to encourage the participants at such symposia to be increasingly language conscious in the interests of better communication with non-specialists and society at large. The 9th and 10th of the Symposia are being prepared to be held in Kyoto and Bandung, respectively, during this summer.
The third on-going activity is a series of University Administrators Workshops to discuss how international offices of each Asian university can support each other to promote international collaborations between Asian universities. The second workshop was held in Kyoto just two weeks ago, one year after the first workshop that was also held in Kyoto (Slide 36). Kyoto University had sent requests for participation to member universities of the Asian group within the Association of Pacific-Rim Universities, as well as a number of universities in Asia which have MoU agreements with Kyoto University. Among the participants, there were representatives of international administration offices of Southeast Asian universities, such as Chulalongkorn University, Kasetsart University, Thammasat University, University of Malaya, and the National University of Singapore.
These three new types of activities to further Kyoto University’s collaborations with Asian scholars can be summarized as follows: They are as a whole a long-term effort to better accommodate modern science and technology within the diverse and rich cultures of Asian countries. In other words, Kyoto Univeristy has been conscious that it is in the middle of its endeavour to civilise modern science and technology in the search for a new civilisation for Asia’s human and ecological community. Through such conscious pursuit of joint work, innovations in science and technology are bound to be brought forth — and such innovations should be called joint creations between Southeast Asian scholars and Japanese scholars.