My specialized field of study in anthropology seeks the answer to the question “What is a human being?” As we confront social crises and environmental crises due to such things as poverty and war, how should we continue to live our lives? Venturing outside beyond daily life and conventional wisdom to experience how people live in that place, how they think, and their way of doing things to obtain ideas to answer our questions is one of the goals of anthropology.
I have lived alongside the Penan, the indigenous people on the island of Borneo, Malaysia, twice a year over the span of 20 years. They are a hunter-gatherer tribe who are “impressive others” for us who live with capitalistic values based on individual ownership. Whatever they obtain from the forest is shared among everyone, and there is no disparity between the rich and poor or a concentration of power in their society, where nobody owns anything. Perhaps this society, which is rooted in its sharing economy, provides a hint on how to overcome the unprecedented crisis in our modern world. I think about this while spending my time hanging out with the Penan, and this has become my fieldwork.

The word “Education” contains the meaning of “to lead outside,” and it is important that, even in the Advanced Seminar, through fieldwork, you can discover things not possible while indoors. Students research various topics on culture such as ramen and manga in addition to funerals and other rituals as well as the celebrity idol industry. However, I hope that through their research, students will visit places to experience how other people live and think in a way that is different from their own daily lives. I want my students to experience the interesting part of anthropology during the limited amount of time we have.
Starting this year, we have changed the learning method that focuses on text such as literature and theses, and had my seminar students work on producing YouTube videos based on their fieldwork during their third year. Beyond learning that takes place in the university or on a desk, we will study through the process of thinking in motion, not thinking first and then moving to action. One of the major themes I am currently working on in the seminar room is exploring this new type of seminar together with students.

My reason for studying at CIC was because I wanted to study many topics such as international cooperation, gender, languages and communication. In my first year, I was deeply impressed by what I heard during Professor Okuno’s classes about what ethnic minorities outside of Japan thought about gender. I also chose to take the Okuno Seminar for my third year Advanced Seminar because a senior student of the Okuno Seminar had worked on research about celebrity idols, which I was considering researching myself.
The Okuno Seminar gave me the ability to convey my thoughts in clear language. During my third year group reading, by experiencing the ideas of other seminar students that were different from my own, I was able to gradually relativize my own way of thinking and take an objective view. By relativizing my own thinking and then presenting this repeatedly, I increased my ability to think about things logically and my ability to output ideas.

I am currently working on my graduation research based on the topic of “Idol Industry and Emerging Religions - An Introduction to the Study of Japanese and Korean Enthusiasm-.” The fact that I myself am a fan who is fanatical enough to follow along on an overseas tour of celebrity idols has triggered me to choose this topic and review literature as well as survey celebrity fans using a questionnaire with the aim of finding similarities with new religions.
The reason I came up with this topic was because I took a course about the Japan-Korea celebrity idol industry when studying abroad at the National University of Singapore. When I consulted Professor Okuno about my research topic, he pushed me to relativize my own way of thinking and take an objective view, introduced me to documents about new religions and economic anthropology, areas where I was particularly lacking in knowledge, and helped me to broaden my perspective on how I consider things.

When I joined the university, I could never have imagined that I would be writing my graduation thesis about aspects of my own celebrity fanaticism. Through daily classes, overseas study, and Advanced Seminar, I have encountered diverse perspectives, which I feel have greatly broadened how I see things and my interests.