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.
June 1, 2016: Introduction to Philippine and Rizal
We were pleased to invite Dr. Aser Javier, visiting professor from University of Philippines Los Banos, to introduce Philippine and our destination Municipal of Rizal, Laguna Province. Dr. Aser used diverse data to let us understand the situation of the country and the city where our participants will visit in this September. Fieldwork always starts with knowledge and understanding of the field and its people.
June 1, 2016: Japan’s Education Development
In today’s seminar, Prof. Liu at GSID introduced historical trajectory of Japan’s education development and current issues in education sector which Japanese society is facing to.
He also specifically introduced some critical issues and practices in Toyota City which were considered as concerns shared by each working group of DFW2016.
May 25, 2016: Japan’s Eco-Model City: Toyota
Toyota, as a city which is famous for automobile industry, also has rich natural resource. How to balance urbanization, social development and environment protection is a focus of the city’s development strategy. Prof. Kiyoshi Fujikawa, introduced policy and practice of Toyota as Japan’s Eco-Model City in today’s lecture. How to balance urbanizaitoin with rural development seems like a big challenge for this city. Understanding the delimma and exploring solution will become a possible topic for the DFW groups.
