Fieldwork

July 8, 2016

By taking almost two hours train and bus, DFW2016 team visited Asuke-cho. And the team also conducted their pre-survey in Oiden Sanson Center. The visit to old street area of Asuke enhanced participants’ understanding of the community. And the lecture and interview in the Center helped our students deepen their understanding of the topics they have concerns. The insights of our informants at the Center will definitely help us to further improve our reserach design for the fieldwork in October.

Today, we are very pleased to invite Prof. Chiho Ogaya to give us a lecture about overseas migration from the Philippines and Feminization of the international migration in the Philippines. Prof. Ogaya introduced overview of overseas migration from the Philippines, government policy and objecitves. She also shared the disparity of females in the Philippines society and care chain at global level and within the Philippines. In the end of the lecture, Prof. Ogaya raised some topics which can be further explored in the future.

Overeseas migration is one of the most important issues in the Philippines. I hope our participants got some hints for their own studies in OFW2016.

As part of curriculum reform of OFW and DFW program, we introduced a couple of joint sessions about skills for fieldwork survey since last year. We tried to enrich contents and activities of preparatory sessions of OFW2015 and DFW2015.

In the session of June 29, Prof. Akiko Ueda organized a special session about how to conduct interview for participants of both OFW and DFW program. The session included lecture, group work, demonstration and feedback. With 3 hours lecture, participants learnd basic concept, skills and know-how about how to conduct interivew. This session helped our participants to understand the difficulties of conducting interviews.

Our thankness goes to TAs of both program and Prof. Isamu Okada, Prof. Aser Javier, Prof. Wataru Kusaka and Prof. Yuki Shimazu.

June 22

DFW working groups had their mid-term presentation about progress of their research plan for their fieldwork in Toyota City in October. Based on comments and feedback from seminar in last week, our partcipants worked hard to improve their research designs.

Well done! DFW working groups!

June 23

Today, we inivited Prof. Kenichi Nishimura from Osaka University to give us a lecture about mayors’ attributes and performance of local governments in the Philippines. Prof. Nishimura introduced his recent research project which aims at exploring the relation between Mayors’ attributes and mayors’ political behaviors as well as performance of local government units (LGUs) in the Philippines. This lecture not only provided us knowledge about the relation between Mayors’ characteristices but also gave us hints about what is good governance in the context of the Philippines.  Indicators or variables shown is the lecture were very useful for our participants to design their own research.

We were very pleased to have two joint sessions for both OFW and DFW this week.

June 20  Research Ethics

Prof. Yoshiaki Nishikawa gave us his 2nd lecture about survey ethics for participants of both OFW and DFW.  Prof. Nishikawa provided his lecture by utilizing fieldwork experience of himself and his student to explain ethical issues in the fieldworks. The lecture was very helpful for both OFW, DFW and individual works of our participants in the future. It also raised many questions for researchers attending the lecture.

June 22 Research Proposal

Prof. Frank Peddie, as a super supporter of OFW program since last year, provided us a lecture about how to prepare and write a research proposal. Based on his exmperience of last two years’ OFW and DFW, Prof. Peddie introduced skills of writing research proposal as a team. The lecture is also uesful for our participants who are supposed to conduct their own individual works next year.

June 15, 2016

In the 7th preparatory seminar of DFW2016, we were pleased to invite Mr. Tatsuyoshi Suzuki to join our group presentation session. This session aimed to have our participants to clearly present their research interests and reasons for choosing their topics. Meanwhile, we planned to invite Mr. Suzuki to give comments and raise questions about their presentation and reserch topics to our participants. Mr. Suzuki patiently listened to three presentations, gave comments, and exchanged ideas regaridng the research topics and the feasibilities. Based on feedback from Mr. Suzuki, our groups will reconsider their research topics and improve their research designs.

June 15, 2016

Today, we were very pleased to invite students of GSID to share their fieldwork experiences in the Philippines with OFW2016 participants. We invited Ms. Natsumi Yoshida, Razel Navalta, Mew Aunticha, and Luiza Nakamura, the WG2 of OFW2015 to share their experiences of OFW2015. The presenters provided a detailed introduction about their activities at each stage of OFW in 2015. Their interesting stories about their OFW motivated OFW2016 participants to raise many questions. In the 2nd presentation, we were pleased to have Mr. Rodmyr Datoon, D3 students at GSID, to share his tips in conducting fieldwork in the Philippines. Mr. Datoon introduced many practical methods for conducting fieldwork in his homecountry. The skills for conduting data collection sounded very important and helpful for our participants. He also gave many advices for preparing the fieldwork. We hope those know-how about fieldwork can provide references for participants in OFW2016. Thousands of thanks go to our presenters!

Maraming Salamat!

June 8, 2016: Rural/Community Development in Japan as An Alternative Development Approach

“Welcome back to GSID! And thank you very much for your interesting and informative lecture!” This is a meesage we would like to send to Prof. Yoshiaki Nishikawa who kindly offered a lecture for DFW2016 yesterday.

Prof. Nishikawa is a former faculty member of GSID. Currently, he is teaching at Graduate School of Economics, Ryukoku University. As a speicalist in agriculture and rural development, Prof. Nishikawa provided us a unique and comparative perspective of agriculture and rural development in the beginning of the lecture. Then, he introduced history of Japan’s agriculture and uniqueness of agriculture in Japan. The lecture became more interactive with hot discussion as Prof. Nishikawa shifted his talk to current practices in Japan’s agricultural modernization. He vividly presented the importance of “locality” and diversity in agriculture and rural development. We hope our participants can be inspired by this lecture and consider more deeply for their study in Toyota this year.

June 8, 2016: A Contemporary Look at Local Development and Local Governments in The Philippines

Dr. Aser Javier from UPLB gave us a lecture about updated information and discussion on local development and govenance in the Phillipines. His talk started with introduction about background of local situation in the Philippines. Then Dr. Aser applied Structured Contingency Theory to his talk regarding practices of local development and local government. Dr. Aser also provided detailed explanation about outcomes of these practices by LGUs. The session closed with an interactive Q & A between Dr. Aser and participants.