All Data

Despite the various harmful effects caused by tourism, such as over tourism, there are few concrete measures to promote tourism and community development in an integrated manner. The background to this is that in tourism policies, indicators that are biased toward the evaluation of tourism exchange performance are set, and there is a lack of indicators that question the degree of involvement with the local community. On the other hand, in Europe and other countries, they contribute to the development of sustainable local communities by installing unified indicators (“ETIS” and “DIT-ACHIEV”) for advancing projects while considering tourism and regional formation from multiple perspectives. It should be a great example for Japanese local communities. The purpose of this study: Therefore, in this paper, we will analyze the factors that prevent the establishment and spread of indicators in the current situation, and analyze the method of setting indicators with high versatility based on the current situation. To accomplish these ends, the authors of this paper have tried to do questionnaire survey conducted by mail to 212 DMOs nationwide from November to December 2021. The conclusion of this paper: It was found; 1) Japanese DMOs lack the common purpose of "aiming for sustainable tourism", 2) Data collection for KPI is a burden for each DMO, 3) Relationship between DMOs and local residents is still weak, and in the first place, improvement in this point is desired.

The rapid expansion of telework during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Japan brought a delightful opportunity for telework migration to Japanese rural areas that had not seen significant progress before the Pandemic. However, as the infection of COVID-19 began to subside, telework migration has shown some new aspects, such as an extension of commuting limits and simply relocating and moving to the edge suburbs. Considering that, this study takes the position that the area around JR Shin-Yamaguchi Station in Yamaguchi City is a marginal edge suburb for commuting to Hiroshima and Fukuoka cities, and examines the latent needs of telework migration targeting the hybrid workers who work in both cities. Also, considering migration as a kind of aggregation of real estate transactions and migrants as its target customers, the authors of this paper have tried to conduct a questionnaire survey of experienced teleworkers in Hiroshima and Fukuoka prefectures in July 2022. We attempted to understand their primary push and pull factors of the telework migration, and the size of the potential demand for the telework migration to the area around JR Shin-Yamaguchi Station. As a result, those who either themselves or their spouses are from or have lived in Yamaguchi Prefecture, plus those who have family and household reasons, such as nursing care for their parents, are the most likely to carry out telework migration. In addition, the size of the potential demand would be for approximately 3,400 people in the case where the telework implementation rate returns to the level at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of the curriculum design for the General Education Curriculum that started in 2022, and to present the concept of the instructional design for the “Project to Design the Future of Yamaguchi,” which is a comprehensive assessment subject. Up until now this university had designed its curriculum using the so-called “theme-based” method. However, in a new era of unpredictability, the nature of the qualities and abilities demanded of university education by society and university establishers is changing. Therefore, the decision was made to design the new General Education Curriculum using a competency-based method of backward design with the required qualities and abilities set as educational targets. While combining the diverse knowledge they acquired in the first semester, students for mixed teams from all departments in the second semester and based on the design thinking process, generated ideas oriented toward solving problems in the local community. A rubric-type evaluation forms was used to visualize the students’ academic achievements.

Based on the results of theoretical and empirical studies, interviews were conducted with one affiliate and one subsidiary of Japanese ICT firms in Shandong Province. Although the productivity of affiliate and that of subsidiary were dependent on the headquarter, the affiliate made efforts to increase productivity by shifting from labor-intensive to more knowledge-intensive work, while the subsidiary was able to increase productivity even in labor-intensive activity as long as the parent company's management was doing well. Yet, in China, where human capital is growing considerably, the subsidiary was facing increasingly difficulty in recruiting workers for labor-intensive work. This indicates the need to investigate affiliated companies and subsidiaries separately, which has rarely been clarified in previous studies, many of which have been written from the parent company's perspective.

From 2007 to 2021, Yamaguchi Prefectural University offered a seminar course called "Seminar in Community Collaboration" as a part of its general education curriculum. In this seminar, students worked together with local residents to solve regional issues. Among these projects, we will introduce the example of working together for 13 years on the local festival "Mori-sama Festival" with residents and high school students under a cooperation agreement with the high school. In addition, we worked together with the students who took the "Seminar in Community Collaboration" to make a proposal to support the survival of the festival after the abolition of the course due to a curriculum revision.

-

Suo-Oshima Town, Yamaguchi Prefectural University, and Suo-Oshima High School signed an agreement of comprehensive cooperation on April 28, 2021. Professor Mizutani was asked to be the representative researcher to begin the “Suo-Oshima High School Aloha Project 2021.” With this project as the starting point, a joint collaboration was carried out on the promotion of Hawaiian culture through design in Suo-Oshima Town. This paper will investigate the Hawaiian culture promotion plan with particular focus on aloha shirts. In addition, as a practical study of design, it will verify the results of the workshops on making Hawaiian shirts, the fashion show, and the design exchanges which took place online. Finally, future challenges were identified for the purpose of contributing to the branding of Suo-Oshima Town through Hawaiian culture promotion.

The piece is a home-use step stool designed in consideration of the need for child safety. Step stools have been used in Japanese families since a long time ago for various purposes in daily living. Today, multipurpose stools such as foldable ones are commonly used. However, in terms of safety they have more dangerous parts than the conventional type. The concerns become particularly apparent whenever children use such stools. Therefore, to address such safety concerns we have designed a stool under the theme of a “child-friendly stool that ensures peace of mind for adults and guardians.”

The use of the Internet and digital devices may encourage social interactions among the elderly. However, the utilization rate of smartphones and other digital devices is not very high among the elderly. A questionnaire was administered to 119 elderly people aged 65 years or older to determine the association between smartphone usage frequency and the frequency of social interactions among them. Our results discovered that 83.2% of the elderly respondents used smartphones. Those who reported using their smartphones more frequently had fewer instances of social isolation and greater numbers of social interactions with others. Our findings also revealed a significant association between the frequency of using social networking services (SNS) on smartphones and the number of social interactions among the elderly. Our findings indicated that the use of smartphones as a means of communication may lead to more social interactions among elderly people.

Japanese teacher training course for teaching Japanese as a foreign language in Yamaguchi Prefectural University was instituted as one of the qualification licenses with the foundation of the Faculty of Intercultural Studies in April, 1994. Since our establishment we have sent more than 500 graduates out to society. I engaged in the teacher training program as a chief for 28 years, and now, upon retiring in March of 2021, look back on more than a quarter century of this work. During these 28 years, we changed the curriculum three times to meet the needs of the times. 570 students participated in domestic training of the Teaching Japanese as a foreign language course, which was the most important core subject. We conducted this course 26 times without fail. In terms of the overseas training, 195 students were sent as trainees mainly to secondary schools. 125 overseas Japanese assistants were sent to 23 organizations of eight countries, and this constituted the main characteristic of the Japanese teacher training course in Yamaguchi Prefectural University. The reason why we focused on the experience in foreign countries was that we expected our students to make much of the relationship with the people and experience the enjoyment felt through teaching Japanese. As a result, we hoped the people who come to understand Japan and Japanese culture would increase, and that they will further help in building a peaceful world. Finally, we showed there are many graduates, who are now Japanese specialists in The Japan Foundation, Japanese lecturers in university or Japanese teachers in Japanese language schools, with all playing an active role at home and abroad. We also showed a variety of examples of career paths with Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language as one of their life choices.

Teaching practice is an essential subject in the course of TJFL (Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language). However, the content of Teaching practice is not specified yet. This paper suggests the introduction of culture-topic modules which integrate direct methods with culture in the teaching practice in New Zealand to improve the quality and effectiveness of classroom time. A culture-based vocaburary arises from the culture-topic modules, and appropriate selection of culture words to make use of the modules is discussed. This study tries to show one of the possibilities for practice teaching in courses of TJFL at the universities.

The purpose of this study is to visualize the process of moving from anxiety to liberation of English proficiency held by Japanese assistants (hereinafter referred to as JA) dispatched to secondary schools in English speaking countries, and to show the growth and essential role of JA. As a result of analyzing the monthly reports of 16 JAs by paragraph and topic in four stages of their terms abroad, immediately after dispatch, 3 months, 6 months, and just before the end, it turned out that it went from the "English wall", through the stages of "thinking about the ideal way of learning a foreign language", "breaking down the English barrier", and to "releasing the anxiety of English proficiency". By the time the anxiety was released, the importance of the role of "catch-up" for students that JA supports was inferred. JA is a person who can "speak things that teachers cannot speak", and through "catch-up", students can not only catch up with the delay of learning but also teach English to the JA, while the JA can strengthen one’s position as JA and gain motivation for learning English. It can be guessed that a warm, personal relationship between the JA and students, that grows on an equal footing with each other, is established. In intercultural learning, JA and students have a mutually beneficial relationship and can break away from stereotypes of each other, and in a multilingual environment, English is regarded as one of the tools because of the enjoyment and acceptability of language exchange. It was suggested that those are factors that promote the development and growth of JA's English proficiency.