Kondoh: Up until 2008, I was involved with medical-engineering collaboration at the graduate school of Kyoto University. That involved developing applications for engineering materials in clinical practice. At that time, I realized the importance of understanding other fields in order to be able to communicate clearly "what I have done", and "what I need". Everybody had outstanding track records in their own field, but there was nobody who could bridge the gap between them. They couldn't communicate. So I felt that it was important to foster talented individuals, who would of course have specialist expertise in their own fields already, in order to develop the communication abilities to build connections between a wide range of fields.

I heard about the "Program for Leading Graduate Schools" back when it was still in the planning stages. There were a lot of areas in the life sciences and information sciences where different fields overlapped. However, there was no concrete format for how to bring both sides productively. I felt that ACLS was a project that would be capable of providing the solution. It was about developing people who had a thorough grounding in their own specialist field, as well as an understanding of other fields as well, and seeing what kind of things they could come up with, and how that would benefit society. I decided that I wanted to contribute to that.

On top of that, the fact that I would be in charge of the global communication section - which is an area that I think is very important - was also a large part of why I got involved. I came up with a plan based on "classes I would have liked to have taken when I was a student" that I had developed through interacting with foreign students and other visitors from overseas. So in that way, I felt that I was putting my own career and life experiences to good use.

Kondoh: When you talk about "Gamma Type Specialists," I have the image that "Intercultural Communication" is the horizontal stroke in the Gamma Symbol (Γ). I think of it as the task of building connections between the specialist field and the other fields. In terms of my own research, I think that it is definitely necessary to develop the ability to appeal to other people. Unfortunately, I think the ability of Japanese people to appeal to others is relatively low compared to people from other countries. I think that is because we can be too straightforwardly honest for our own good, and so we just say "I don't know" when we really don't know something. However, we have to develop the ability, comparable to people overseas, to attract other people and get them interested in the things we ourselves are working on. We have to engage in a little self-publicity. We need to have the capacity to express ourselves that is similar to the people we are talking to, in order to get them to agree with what we are saying. And that ability becomes important when it comes time to leave the safety of academia and go out into the wider world. So we are creating an opportunity to instill that ability in these students now.

Speaking from my own experience, there is a firm limit to how much expertise at intercultural communication you can gain just from studying by yourself. The level of ability you get from reading textbooks and listening to lectures is different to what you get from going out into the real world and engaging in communication and taking part in debates. You can't achieve communication by just remaining passive or only moving at your own pace. It is important to learn through practical experiences not only how to express yourself, but also how to put together an argument and engage in discussion. The Intercultural Communication program at ACLS allows students to learn these things.

Kondoh: "Debating" is a subject where students gain the ability to state their own opinion, argue their case, and get their point of view across to another person. In the classes we divide the students up into groups "for" and "against" some theme. Then they think about how to get the other side to agree with their opinions, and improve their ability to express themselves by taking part in a debate as a group. This is a subject where proper preparation is essential for getting the most out of it, in terms of improving students' communication abilities, and one where the students' results reflect the effort that they put into it.

Equally important as communication though conversation is the ability to convey information in writing. In order to pass information on to future generations, it is important to put down information in writing. In "Writing," students study methods of intercultural communication that use writing. In concrete terms, they learn how to write e-mails and academic essays. In terms of the latter, we start from how to structure an essay, and proceed onward in stages, developing the students' ability to write an essay that transmits their own ideas.

The final course on "Presentations" is to develop the ability to transmit the students’ thoughts neatly to a large number of people. They study things such as how to use gestures during the presentation, and what to be careful of when speaking. We train them to be able to speak with confidence in front of a large number of people.

All of the above courses have been highly rated, with people saying that any one of them would be sufficient on its own to satisfy the ACLS program's goal of providing "Training for Gamma Type Specialists". In the future I would like to develop the program further in the direction of rewarding the amount of effort that students put into their study.

Kondoh: This year (2013) the contest was held on August 7 at Suzukakedai Campus. In a questionnaire for students taking the intercultural communication course, there were a lot of responses that from students who felt that "my own communication ability has improved". By providing them with a place to give a presentation, we hoped to link that confidence up to the next step in the process, and so we provided the students with an opportunity to show how well they could present a report on their research results.

It was the first time that we had ever held this event, so we were a bit worried about whether we would even get enough participants, let alone an audience especially because participants do not get any reward in terms of credits. However, when we sent out the details, we got entries from 10 students. On the day they each had 10 minutes to speak, and it was an extremely tight schedule, with no break between speakers. There was an audience of more than 70 people. Thinking back to how the announcement of the competition was delayed, and also how the date on which it was held was right after summer vacation started, I think it is safe to assume that many of the participants and audience alike thought they "would get something out of taking part".

The presentations on the day were, in a good sense, far better than anything we expected. All 10 participants provided presentations of such consistently high quality that it was virtually impossible to separate them. The students who took part in the presentation course demonstrated how thoroughly they had absorbed the lessons of the course and how well they could appeal to other people. The slides that the presenters used were also well made and showed carefully thought out composition.

We considered the event a great success, including the party afterwards which was a valuable for people to get to know one another. We aim to hold the event again next year and in subsequent years, and we hope that the number of people coming to take part every year will increase.

(Note)The contents of the interview are accurate as of the time of interview in October 2013.