Blog English

For the third year in a row, the Japan ICU Foundation partnered successfully with our great ICU Alumni DC Chapter in staffing a special ICU booth at the annual Sakura Matsuri – Washington, DC street festival. As the largest single-day event of its type in the U.S., organized by the Japan-America Society of Washington, DC, it provides us a great opportunity to reach many new and interested prospective international students for ICU. Many thanks to all of our hard-working ICU alumni and friends in DC who made this the best year thus far!

Kumiko Makihara is an ICU alumna who writes about her impressions of life in Japan and the United States, two countries she has been traveling back and forth between for most of her life. Her columns have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, as well as in the books Reimagining Japan: The Quest for a Future That Works and Tsunami: Japan’s Post Fukushima Future. She is currently working on a book about her son’s experiences in a Japanese primary school.

Rethinking Peace Studies participant Bahia Shehab stars in the critically acclaimed short documentary Nefertiti’s Daughters, directed by Mark Nickolas. The film just won first place at the 2015 Athens International Film + Video Festival in the Short Documentary Category.

The JICUF is launching a one-month campaign in North America in support of the ICU Sakura Fund. We will be featuring original haiku composed by and/or photographs of sakura taken by the following five members of the ICU community on a weekly basis during the month of April. Please scroll below to see the first installment in this series. We hope you enjoy!

ICU student and Study Abroad Scholarship recipient Mari Ohgushi shares her experience on what it’s like to study abroad at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

Rethinking Peace Studies II: Memory was held on March 27 and 28th on the 20th floor of the bell tower of Riverside Church in NYC. Rethinking Peace Studies (RPS) is a collaboration between ICU, Rutgers University and the Japan ICU Foundation that seeks to critically rethink the discipline of peace studies.

ICU professor of international relations and Rethinking Peace Studies participant Giorgio Shani is set to deliver a talk tomorrow evening at Rutgers University.

Thomas John Hastings, JICUF Senior Research Fellow in Science & Religion, is organizing an academic conference titled “The Presence and Future of Humanity in the Cosmos: Why Society Needs Both the Sciences & the Humanities”. The conference will be held on the ICU campus from March 18-23, 2015 and bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

The following article was written by Japan ICU Foundation trustee Bill Lesher. Bill will be completing his term as a trustee at the end of this month. His support and guidance over the years has been invaluable, particularly in the area he is most passionate about, interreligious understanding.

Emiko Imori is an ICU student spending her junior year studying abroad at the University of California, Berkley. She is also one of four students to receive the JICUF’s Study Abroad Scholarship, which was inaugurated this year.