“Bridging Divides” at Hitotsubashi:

“Have you ever been frustrated by students who don’t seem to care at all?” asked Shotaro Ishida, a plenary speaker at this year’s joint conference hosted by CUE, BizCom, and Peace as a Global Language (PGL) at Hitotsubashi University (September 13-14). “I know how these students feel,” he continued, “because I was one of them.” Speaking with plain, at times halting English, Ishida argued that university educators must create encounters that make world issues real. His own turning point came after meeting Zane Ritchie, whose development work in Nairobi brought Ishida face to face with a slum school. Amidst apparent poverty, he saw students engaged in learning with passion that he had never seen in Japan. After this experience, he could no longer accept the job offer from an advertising company to spend the rest of his life as a salaryman. Instead, he opened his own cram school and later entered local politics to fight for education that sparks engagement.

Bridging disciplines was another divide this conference tried to bridge by bringing presenters outside of language teaching. Business consultant and filmmaker Cyrus Nozomu Sethna discussed the power of film to catalyze dialogue between ethnic Japanese and long-term foreign residents. His short film, “Another Day to Stay Alive,” premiered this summer at Skip City, illustrates the effect of subtle discriminations felt by many non-Japanese residents in everyday life. Peace scholar Paul Duffill analyzed SodaStream as an economic model to promote peace in the West Bank. We even had a speaker from the Ministry of Defense, Eiko Iwata, who presented in Japanese about the potential of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to become the model of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) in Asia. Participants noticed this diversity, and I heard some hallway talks energized by these interdisciplinary contacts.

Interdisciplinary research itself was the topic of plenary speaker Zuocheng Zhang. He argued that language scholars must be at least somewhat familiar with disciplinary content, but he insisted that language scholars must be proud of our own expertise. When conducting interdisciplinary research on marketing, for example, we should not pretend to be marketing researchers but remain language researchers who can bring insights into the language of marketing, which may not be obvious to marketing researchers.

Such small linguistic devices are the building blocks of leadership, according to Yasuo Nakatani, another plenary speaker. He conducted a corpus analysis of TED Talks and identified certain patterns in using Aristotle’s triangle (logos, pathos, ethos), pronouns (especially, “we,” “you,” “I”), and tricolon (a series of three), among others. Another related skill, namely negotiation, was the topic of Rachel Patterson’s workshop, and she had us roleplay negotiations and reflect on what it means to negotiate.

If Ishida articulated student apathy as one major divide, the rest of the program offered tools to build bridges. As Ishida reminded us, these seemingly apathetic students (“They say they are tired? They are lying!” Ishida said) are waiting to be awakened. Language teachers can provide real-world contexts that elicit purpose, nudge the student into the world through leadership and persuasion, and empower them with the rhetorical scaffolds. Together, we can make a difference.

Published as: Tachino, T. (September 30, 2025). Voices from the 2025 CUE conference: Dr. Tosh Tachino. CUE SIG Newsletter.

Previous post on this conference: https://toshtachino.com/index.php/2025/08/19/2025-cue-pgl-and-bizcom-conference/