Standing at the turning point:
Invitation to an “Intellectual Community of the Humanities and Social Sciences” in Kochi, the south of Japan.
We are now witnessing a turning point in world history.
With the progress of globalization, our world has faced numerous challenges including poverty and socioeconomic inequality, wars/violence and related diasporas, and climate change/natural disasters/emerging infectious diseases leading to threats to survival. Under these circumstances, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aiming at a more viable and better world by 2030 were adopted at the UN Summit in 2015, and various initiatives have been addressed by both public and private sectors. Furthermore, the nine “Planetary boundaries,” denoting the range of activities within which humans could remain safe on the planet, have become a hot topic, and so-called the “Anthropocene,” in which humans exert a major geological impact on the entire world, has been heard in recent years. In other words, ordinary norms in the modern industrial society are increasingly obsolete, and new approaches are required to tackle today’s multiple crises.
On the other hand, higher expectations for technological breakthroughs such as digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI), and other scientific innovations is a growing trend, and, in the context of educational policy, much more emphasis is placed on training human resources in science and engineering to manage such technologies. Technology, however, does not automatically lead to prosperity; its direction and consequences depend on human attitudes and the social conditions of its practical use. That is, technology, in itself, is not a panacea for human and social problems. In addition, we wonder if final judgements should be rendered for others when we have difficulty in judging whether to adopt it. If we do not investigate into the human-nature relationship and the relationship between human beings, and simply delegate decision-making to a handful of power elites, or seek market/technology solutions to address global problems, we will eventually reach a dead end.
What is a human being? What is the current situation of human interaction with nature? How should be the socioeconomic and environmental relationship in our society and the international relationship between global North and South?･･･････In short, it is critical to explore how people think and act, how societies and economies are structured, and how the human ideal and social visions should be to address these issues. And, in order to meet these challenges, knowledge power of the Humanities and Social Sciences to redefine traditional values would be much more required.
Regarding this knowledge power, we could not acquire such capabilities simply by consuming the manualized established knowledge. We could acquire them through knowledge-producing activities including identify challenges, analyze/synthesize them from our own perspectives, and propose our original solutions. It is the universities as an intellectual communitiy that have a crucial role of fostering such knowledge producers.
Kochi University is located in Kochi Prefecture, Shikoku Island's southern side facing the Pacific Ocean. While Kochi is confronting a severe declining/aging population in Japan and is referred to as a “challenge-advanced prefecture,” it is rich in nature and surrounded by green mountains and the blue sea. It is an area brightly lit by a sunlit unique to southern Japan. Historically, as the phrase “freedom comes from the mountains of Tosa” implies, Freedom and People’s Rights Movement flourished in Kochi in the 1870s-80s. After the postwar period, Kochi spearheaded national debates on regional development including the Free Textbook Movement in compulsory education, resistance to pollution caused by extraneous companies, local sovereignty against proposed nuclear power plant sites, and regional reconstruction practices beyond the depopulation trend leading to “marginal/disappearing communities.”
The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kochi University has also walked hand in hand with the community and with the regional development mentioned above. Our faculty originated as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, established in 1949 when the postwar new university system was born. It was reorganized into the Faculty of Humanities* in 1977 and restructured into three departments in 1998. Thus, it has evolved into a comprehensive humanities faculty. The school has attracted a diverse student body from all over Japan because it offers wide-ranging study domains in the humanities and social sciences including literature, philosophy, psychology, history, foreign languages, communication, comparative sociocultural studies, economics, business administration, and law.
Furthermore, our Faculty was redesigned in 2016 as the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for responding to new contemporary circumstances. The system comprised of three existing departments was transformed into one department offering three courses of study.
The current Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences provides great potential for students to transcend the barriers between academic disciplines by combining three departments into one. Students can study a wider range of topics they are interested in. Besides expanding the scope of interdisciplinary studies, the school has established several “study programs” to intensify specialized courses of study that allow students to select multiple programs. The final goal of our educational system is to encourage students to form their core areas of individualized learning along with small-group intensive guidance through seminars, and to complete their own learning by writing a graduation thesis.
Standing at the turning point mentioned above, we all sincerely welcome those who wish to join our unique intellectual community in Kochi. Located in the peripheral South, and far from the mainstream center of Japan, we have long nurtured a free and creative climate.
* The faculty was also called in English as "the Faculty of Humanities and Economics" in 1977-2016.
Kazuyuki Iwasa
Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Date of Publication: 28/04/2022
