Happy New Year from Prof. Yasushi Kosugi, the Director of AJI.

I wish you a Happy New Year! I am very much looking forward to meeting you all and collaborating with you again in 2025.

In 2024, we received a lot of warm support and cooperation from you all. Thanks to this, the Institute members were able to work together to develop our activities last year. Thank you very much for your support and encouragement.

This year, 2025, is the final year of the fourth period of the mid-term plan for research development. The new fiscal year, starting in April will mark the end of exactly half of the ten years in which the R2030 Challenge Design aims to develop Ritsumeikan into a next-generation research university. Both the Ritsumeikan Asia-Japan Research Organization and its affiliated institute, the Asia-Japan Research Institute (AJI), will focus on research activities, dissemination of research results, and international collaboration in order to meaningfully complete the fourth period of the mid-term plan and move forward.

Looking back on the last year, in January, the Multilingual International Forum Meridian180 held a workshop titled “New Forms of Local Governance in the Ageing Societies.” Specifically, “multilingual” means presentations and discussions in four languages and five formats: Japanese, English, Chinese (simplified and traditional), and Korean. Meridian180, launched in 2011, concluded its activities with this event. The forum has carried out several forward-looking initiatives, leaving us with significant intellectual harvests.

To develop the international network that has expanded through the activities of Ritsumeikan University, the Global Forum for Asia-Japan Studies will be launched this year. As the first event for this Forum, a multilingual forum, “Discussing Asian Medicine and Innovating Terminologies: Towards a Cross-Border Horizon of the Humanities,” will be held on February 12. Information about this event can be found on the website.

In February last year, we renamed the annual symposium “AJI Global Symposium,” and it was held under the theme of “Challenges for Pioneering Value Creation and Our Future Directions: Visions of the Ritsumeikan Model of Asia-Japan Research.” The theme of this year’s symposium to be held on January 25 will be “Challenges for Pioneering Peacebuilding and Our Future Directions,” with a keynote speech titled “The Day Wars in the Middle East, West Asia and the World End: Three Perspectives for Peace” and a panel discussion titled “The Challenges of Creating a Tolerant Society amidst Rapidly Growing Immigration in Asia.” It will be held internationally online and simultaneous English translation is available, so we would very much appreciate your joining us.

Every research institute has an important role in publishing academic journals and contributing to the academic community domestically and internationally to disseminate research results. To this end, the AJI publishes two English journals and one Japanese journal yearly.

Please see the guide for contributors to know the features of each of the three magazines.

Each of the three journals has its own characteristics. Since all three journals have adopted a strict peer review system and are registered in J-STAGE, we can fulfill our role of making our research results open to the world and I am very pleased to see that our journals are recognized as media for disseminating research results by researchers engaged in Asia-Japan Studies in Japan and worldwide. This is a great encouragement to our editorial board and the members of our editorial office.

Moreover, in 2023, we launched the “Asia Map: Web Magazine for Asia-Japan Studies” as a new medium for disseminating research results. Last year, the National Diet Library registered it as a periodical with the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number).

“Asia Map” has a new format that links content by clicking on a digital map, which is a novel way to open academic information. I am very glad that the experts concerned with Asian regions who write manuscripts for this magazine also like this presentation style. We would be delighted if you would read these essay series on our website.

Among the new developments in our international cooperation in 2024, the AJI made close research collaborations and joint research with Hangzhou City University in China, Nong Lam University in Vietnam, Universitas Brawijaya in Indonesia, Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia, the National University of Malaysia, and the Australian National University.

Although we had a challenging time during the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic in which interactions with overseas countries were restricted, we were able to continue international cooperation through the use of digital transformation (DX). Now that there are no restrictions on the global flow of people, we want to promote more diverse and wide-ranging academic interactions.

Also, one of the most noteworthy international collaborations last year was the establishment of the “International Consortium for Islamic and Halal Economic Research” at the “Second International Conference on Islamic and Halal Economic Research” held in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, in November. The Consortium is expanding its network from Asia to Europe and Africa, and it is expected to develop new and fruitful international research collaborations.

With regard to our policy of supporting next generation researchers, “The Next-Generation Researcher Development Program” is now in its fourth-year phase. We are proud to announce that during the last year many of these next generation researchers, including program members, could obtain full-time positions and have left our Institute.

We have created the “Special News” page on our website where you can check the good news about the situation of our next generation of researchers.

Ritsumeikan University is putting special emphasis on the practice of giving back the research results to graduate schools by strengthening the connection between teaching and research. This connection is expected to be further reenforced this year, and the AJI is working on various initiatives to contribute to this process significantly. Please look forward with us to the next stage.

In addition, the AJI is planning various other activities to develop the Institute further. We will notify you in due course, so please keep up to date regarding forthcoming events by regularly checking our website.

We are looking forward to your continued support and encouragement this year.