miscellanea about Yu Umezawa

*Outreach

During my childhood, I used to play in nature from dawn to dask, and received many surprises, impressions and discoveries from nature. Questions inspired by such experiences and well-thought out TV documentary programs made my motivation to select current jobs. In recent years, however, we've lost lot of woods and fields around our towns, and artificial constructions prevent children from playing at river and tidal shallow areas. Overprotection by parents, who are not familiar with nature, also prevent their children from experiencing exciting adventures. Most of children living in city areas didn't have any choice but going supplementary private school, or playing with TV games. Against these deplorable situations, Japanese government (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) started new edcation programs a couple years ago. In this program, they tried to prepare many hours for comprehensive education including field science, rather than stuffing knowledges from the textbooks. However, it was no wonder that this system failed soon, because few teachers, parents and volunteers had skills to spend children in nature. I hope to become one of the person, who can share many time with children to enjoy nature.

Article published in Honolulu Advertizer class for highschool student Activity at Chiba High SchoolOcean Science CommunicationsClean-up activity at Nagasaki

*weblog

This weblog is currently somewhat private one, to report my life for my family and friends, who live in Japan and somewhere else. But in future, I may write some ideas and progresses on my studies. Mirror site in English are also provided for non Japanese-speaking friends. But it includes some Japanese words, since the server is managed by Japanese company, SONY blog service.

Copyright Dr. Yu UMEZAWA. All rights reserved. Last update Jan. 2006