Will Hehemann | School of Agriculture, Fisheries and Human Sciences
In 2012, Dr. Maki Eguchi moved from Japan to Arkansas, becoming the first Fulbright foreign language teaching assistant to work at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB). At UAPB, she taught marketing and Japanese language courses for one year.
Now an assistant professor of literature at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, she stays involved with educational programming in collaboration with the UAPB Office of International Programs, striving to educate her students and colleagues about African American culture and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
This year, Dr. Eguchi gave a presentation titled “Cultural Diversity in Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the U.S.” at the Local Societies and Multicultural Coexistence symposium, a yearly event organized by the University of Tsukuba’s College of Japanese Language and Culture and the Graduate Program in International and Advanced Japanese Studies. The event was attended virtually by students and faculty of University of Tsukuba and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Korea. The symposium was conducted in both the Japanese and Korean languages with simultaneous interpretation and translation.
“In my presentation, I talked about my experience teaching Japanese language and culture at UAPB,” she said. “I also spoke about the history of UAPB and of HBCUs in general. Part of my presentation addressed current racial issues in Japan.”
Dr. Eguchi said the Japanese government established the Multicultural Coexistence Promotion Program in 2006 to improve the livelihood of Japan’s foreign residents. The number of foreign residents in Japan is increasing because of the continuing trend of economic globalization, as well as population decline in the country.
“Japan is still a homogenous country, and the issue of race and racism is not as obvious to people daily,” she said. “It is often possible to see inappropriate representations of racial minorities in mass media. In my presentation, I insisted that racial discrimination is not irrelevant in Japan and that we need to look carefully at discrimination around us.”
Other presentations during the symposium focused on some marginalized communities in the country, namely the Ainu ethnic group indigenous to northern Japan and Koreans in Japan.
“I introduced one of the core educational values shared at UAPB – to respect and embrace diversity and actively support efforts that combat prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination,” Dr. Eguchi said. “As Japan’s multiculturalism progresses, we have many things to learn from education at HBCUs.”
At the end of the symposium, presenters took questions and comments from the audience.
“Some questions I received had to do with life in the American south and at HBCUs, which is not common knowledge in Japan,” Dr. Eguchi said. “We also had discussions with the event coordinator and other presenters. We learned that both HBCUs and Korean ethnic schools in Japan encourage students to understand their own culture and history while also having an open mind to diversity.”
She said the College of Japanese Language and Culture works to analyze linguistic and cultural phenomena in Japan and understand them from a global perspective.
“Our goal is to train creative individuals who can collaborate with people from other backgrounds and future generations in the forthcoming multicultural society,” she said. “The yearly symposium is an opportunity to share our educational and research outcomes with audiences from local communities and partner institutions from other Asian countries.”
When preparing for her presentation, Dr. Eguchi discovered that there was little information on HBCUs published in the Japanese language. She plans to publish a report based on her presentation and make it available online.
Dr. Eguchi’s research at the University of Tsukuba focuses on representations of animals in literature and animal studies. In 2018, she published a book titled “The Representation of Sheep in Modern Japanese Literature.”
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