How did you get involved with JASC and how do you feel about your experience?

I got involved with JASC when I was an undergrad at Boston University.  One of my professors who did research on Japanese education told me about it and said I should think about applying.  So I did. I was excited to go, and that was the 42^nd JASC.   liked it so much I signed up with the AEC for the 43^rd, so I ended up going twice.  Those JASCs were life-changing in many ways, in that it gave me a clear idea of what I wanted to do immediately after college, which is, to spend time in Japan. I lived in Japan for a year and a half after the 43^rd JASC while working and figuring out what I wanted to do after that in my life.

I taught English while there, and did a couple of research projects to prepare for graduate school. It was the first time I’d lived in Japan, even though most of my family is there. It was interesting being able to experience a part of Japan through the JASC, outside family circles. I had wanted to experience Japan as an independent adult for a while, and through JASC it worked out.

At the time, when I was thinking about graduate school, the experience of JASC and then living in Japan made me want to study in an International Relations program. That’s what I applied for, and then went to GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs. I could have pursued a couple of different majors, economics, political science, or a more general public policy degree, but I think the reason that I chose the International Relations degree was because of the JASC experience. In that sense, JASC got me started, and then along the way I took a detour into science and technology policy within the degree program. That is what I’m doing now.

When I was with American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), I was responsible for helping to organize annual meetings of science and technology policymakers, and certainly being an AEC, trying to help put together a JASC is something I looked back on. Being an AEC impacted my ability to bring together a group of people from different countries and get them to talk productively about issues.

I haven’t been in touch with many fellow alumni and that is unfortunate. I’ve come to the reunions and a couple of receptions over the years because I’m only a few blocks away and the JASCs tend to come through DC.

I guess I should mention that one follow-up that I did have to JASC is that the last time JASC was in DC, I was able to work out a field trip to the National Institute for Health (NIH) for one of the study sessions, what do you call it now? Roundtables! That was a great intersection of AAAS and JASC, because I was able to go with them on this day to NIH where we were able to talk about biomedical research, and also international scientific cooperation.

Do you have and advice or anecdotes to share?

On my first JASC, clearly the most memorable part was the Alaska trip, because it was so sort of outside the experience of the American side, much less the Japanese side, to spend a week in the middle of summer in Anchorage and points even farther out. I remember things like when the school buses were rumbling through not very well-paved roads, and it just being summer and the sun not going down until 11, and wandering around in the middle of the night when you can still see each other.

But on the Japan trip, the 43^rd JASC, one of the things that stood out as a negative was that there ended up being a lot of tension within the JEC, which we got mixed up in, exactly how much involvement the Japanese delegates had in planning, organizing, setting up the Conference (as opposed to the JEC). I remember that as being something to watch out for, for the AEC or JEC not to promise too much in the way of participation, saying that these decisions have to be made long before the students get there, and it’s really hard to change plans in mid-stream. That was the one mess that, if I were doing JASC, again I would have tried to do better, to clearly delineate what a JEC does, and what kind of input or agenda-setting power the other students will have.

And please don’t do a ferry ride between Honshu and Hokkaido again. That was awful. It was an experience I’ll always remember, but not as positively as the midnight sun in Alaska. Being on this boat, where a lot of people got sick, and also, we’re just stuck on a boat for 19 hours. It was from Niigata to Hokkaido, so it’s not just across that little straight, it was further down Honshu. That was a low-budget compromise: we had to do the cheapest thing. That was the cheapest way to get there, and also to get in one night’s sleep.

Over time, JASC has become a really pleasant memory, especially my first one, maybe because it was the first one for me. Maybe also because something just seemed to gel with the 42^nd JASC, perhaps, it was a sense that we were all learning about, first of all, Alaska, also, for some reason there was this camaraderie that emerged despite the odds, and that year the AEC had lost three to four members throughout the year. So last-minute replacements were brought in, they were scouring past JASCs, as well as one or two people who hadn’t been on a previous JASC. That was an interesting challenge, and also there’s the challenge of putting something together in Alaska. And yet, we all had great interactions. Less so the one in Japan, To this day I’m not really sure why that didn’t go as well. Maybe we didn’t do a good enough job as AEC. We didn’t have it as together, although I think we selected a great delegation.