Seki Seminar Newsletter (vol.1)

Akinori Seki Seminar at Tokyo Keizai
University held a special lecture with Mr.
Kazumasa Kakimi in association withAAEE, Asia Association of Educationand Exchange. This was the final event ofthe AAEE “Mero Sathi Project”. At thebeginning of the seminar, Prof. Seki
asked Mr. Kakimi some questions thateveryone might have been interested in. The answers were brilliant and not
only made us smile, but also changed our outlook towards people. He told usthat “The surest way to be happy is to make others happy.”
Through our experience so far, how many times have we ever acted forother people? In my case, I can count them, so I found I have not done enoughfor other people. The program provided us with a lot of tips and we want to put
them into practice.
In the middle of this special lecture,
one of our project members, Yuto Ishii(he was in our seminar last year) talked
about what our seminar did last year
and ideas that he got from this seminar.
He said, “Learning language is just thefirst step in connecting people fromdifferent countries. We have to haveconsideration for others. It is the mostimportant thing.” This was his

Yuto Ishi, the former seminar member

conclusion about learning language.
Finally, Prof. Seki concluded theevent by raising a question to theaudience about whether we have tried
our best to make others happy.

Prof. Akinori Seki

Special Lecture by OK Baji (Kazumasa Kakimi)
graduated fromWaseda University; he worked at
Junshin Women’s High School. As his
hobby is hiking; he wanted to try toclimb the Himalayas and one day hedecided to do it. While climbing there,
he almost died, because of theavalanche, and his supporter for theMr.

Kakimijourney at the mountain peak was
killed in the avalanche. This incident
shocked him so much that he visited the village his supporter grew up in.
When he went there, he found that a lot of people there had a difficult life.
For example, children didn’t go to school and had to work from age 6. After thisvisit, he decided to quit his job and started to help them as a volunteer in Nepal.
Now he is called “OK Baji”. It means OK Grandfather. After he started hisvoluntary job, he built more than 200 schools, brought sick people to thehospital, and so on. Whenever someone was in confusion, he always asked
about their problem and helped them. This is the reason everyone who knows
him; definitely greets him and shows respect towards him.

What our seminar did for this event
We didn’t know about thisevent until two weeks ago. We
were really surprised when weheard about it. Because it wassuddenly decided, we chose theevent leader within one day.
This was our first event, so westarted to address it step bystep. First, Prof. Seki said
“please invite at least 50 people”, so we passed out pamphlets in our university
during lunchtime, posted on SNS , asked the public relations department topost our pamphlets on the University’s homepage, and went to some shops to2

put our pamphlets in. Then we thought how we should conduct our event.
During the discussion, Prof. Seki said “Let's try to make an original event” We
couldn’t help but open our mouths. Anyway, we had to think about what wewould do in the event, so we decided to make background music, because someof our members could play instruments, like taiko (a Japanese drum), flute, andguitar. After we decided what we would do, the time left was very short, sothey practiced their instruments seriously. However, after of all these efforts wecould hold a nice event.

What we learned:
It was hard for us to conduct
the event, because we had
never managed an event until
our seminar started, but every
one of our seminar’s members
tried to do their best forsucceeding. We were sure it
was a big success. Although wefaced
variousdifficulties
throughout the event due tolack of experience, we were stillable to learn some important tactics. Especially, we learned that being flexible isquite important in preparing for an event like this in a short period of time. We
would like to make good use of this experiencein our future activities.
By the way, one of the main themes of Seki
Seminar 2016 is ‘Sustainable Development’. Do
you know what it is? This summer we are goingto visit Vietnam and do a joint-research about
this topic with college students in Vietnam for 2weeks! Now we are studying hard and thinking
about how we can tell Japan’s appealing points
to Vietnamese students.
Thank you for reading!

Date of issue, 25/6/2016
Published by Akinori Seki Seminar
Tokyo Keizai University3(Chief Editor: Yuki Yamada)