A presentation announcing the outcomes of the joint industry-university project between CASIO COMPUTER Co., Ltd and Musashino Art University was held on February 2nd at the Musashino Art University Design Lounge (Akasaka, Minato Ward).

The presentation covered an organization, consisting primarily of overseas students at the university, that is working at the front lines of multiculturalism in what is known as the “Nippon Multicultural Co-existence Promotion Project,” now in its second year. Videos were used to capture the progress of interviews with overseas students from their own particular viewpoints as they interacted closely with three types of organization: employment agencies that connect overseas students to Japanese companies, parent-child-type support organizations that target foreigners and Japanese-language schools that teach both Japanese and IT skills. As well as Japanese students, the project also included contributions from Casio designers and employees with many years’ experience in overseas offices, who acted as mentors for the various teams and contributed throughout to the planning, reporting and editing.
This year, the project was also incorporated into the 2018 second semester courses at the Musashino Art University under the guidance of Associate Professor Miyo Jumpei, who is conducting research at the university for the Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, together with Professor Shinichi Yonetoku, who specializes in video in the university’s Department of Arts Policy and Management.

The screening of the videos at the event was followed by presentations where students explained what they hoped to achieve through the videos, as well as the screening of a documentary that recorded the process of producing the videos. A total of 25 organizations took part, including the Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, publishing houses, Japanese language schools and university-related bodies.

Participants were highly appreciative of the three videos and the “making of” video, offering comments such as “These works provide an excellent opportunity to think about multicultural co-existence” and “I felt that these works communicated the message far better than last year’s works.”

Masayuki Uehara, Casio Senior General Manager and head of the BU for dictionaries and English conversation devices, commented, “Teaching foreigners how to speak Japanese is a hugely important topic.” Speaking of his hopes for the future he continued, “Casio would like to see this contribute to Japanese language learning in the Asia region.”

Casio will continue to support Japanese-language study both by disseminating these videos and by continuing this joint industry-university project with Musashino Art University.