LLRC Faculty Spotlight

Sharing, Appreciating, and Respecting Japanese Cultures with Students 

Professor Eva Nagase teaches Japanese language, culture, and literature courses at SBU. She founded the Summer Study Abroad Program in Mishima in 2005. Since then, she has been taking about 20 students to Japan each year. The Mishima program is probably the only long-standing faculty-led study abroad program in the SUNY system that offers students with the experience of living with Japanese host families. For this program, Prof. Nagase has solicited a total of 200 Japanese families in Mishima, Japan. Many of the SBU students who participated in her Mishima program have been keeping in touch with their host families. This year, some students visited their host families that they stayed with in 2007, after 16 years!

The moments she finds most rewarding are when her students spontaneously use the Japanese language that they have learned, capturing the right moment with the contextually appropriate Japanese word and natural intonation.

Prof. Nagase has been co-advising Taiko Tides, a Japanese taiko-drumming club at SBU for about 20 years. She says:

We have an amazing group of students in Taiko Tides, coming from diverse cultural backgrounds. They are hospitable, kind to one another, and respectful of the traditional art of Japan. My co-advisor and I do not really “teach,” but only provide the environment where we can share what we learned with them.

Prof. Nagase also serves as the faculty advisor for the Japanese Student Organization (JSO) and the Asian Student Alliance (ASA). She offers a furoshiki wrapping workshop every year for JSO members. When anti-Asian sentiment rose during the recent pandemic, Prof. Nagase became one of the organizing members of the newly formed Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Mentorship Program at SBU.

Prof. Nagase organizes annual seminars for graduating seniors interested in the Japan Exchange Teaching (JET) Program, a prestigious employment opportunity funded by the Japanese government. This program provides Japanese-English bilingual college graduates with opportunities to support English education in Japan. We are so proud that we produce many recipients of the JET program.

The JPN program is expanding, currently offering 11 sections of JPN 111 annually: 8 in the fall, 2 in the spring, and 1 in the summer. An SBU alumna who served in the JET program for three years in Japan now came back to SBU and teaches one of these JPN 111 sections at SBU (see LLRC Faculty Spotlight on July 22, 2023). Prof. Nagase hopes to secure a space on campus for students of Japanese to hang out and converse freely in Japanese or to hold a weekly roundtable to collaboratively support their continued learning. She wants to remind her students to enjoy the process of learning Japanese, emphasizing that it can be a fun experience.

Interviewed and written by Eriko Sato

November 8, 2023