As I write, 10 students in our Master of Arts Asia Pacific Policy Studies (MAAPPS) program are in Japan already or traveling there to spend August 15-26 in an intensive collaborative learning activity with students from Hitotsubashi University.
This will be the first time that the MAAPPS program is reaching out directly to a partner across the Pacific and looks to be a win-win-win situation where the collaboration will add up to much more than the sum of its parts.
In a graduate program devoted to the understanding of policy in the Asia Pacific region, we are acutely aware of the differing perspectives that geography will give on policy; understanding a particular policy decision may involve very different questions and approaches whether the analyst is in North American or in Asia. It is an exchange between these perspectives and cross-fertilization in policy approaches that we are hoping for in engaging with Hitotsubashi in our first active collaboration.