Category Archives: Trade Course Material

As the group begins to gather, here is a brief schedule of some of the planned activities for the course.  Special thanks for the teams at both UBC and Hitotsubashi who put this all together.

August 16th(Tues)

• Meeting with DPJ House of Representatives member, Mr. Yamazaki
• Diet Tour

August 17th(Wed)

• Meeting with Mr. Ogawa of the Japan Foundation
• Meeting with former Ambassador to Canada, Mr. Numata
• MOFA visit

August 19th(Fri)

• Meeting with Mr. Kokubu of Asahi Shimbun
• Negotiation Simulation Orientation

August 21st (Sun) – August 24th(Wed)

• Negotiation Simulation at Akakura Onsen
• Nagano Prefectural Office Visit (Aug 22nd)
• MAAPPS Info Session at Canadian Embassy with Dr. Julian Dierkes (Aug 24th)

August 25th (Thurs)

• Meeting at Keidanren
• Meeting at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Japan with Mr. Anderson and Mr. Lawlor
• MCRI project discussion with Dr. Wada and Dr. Shimizu of Waseda University.

August 26th (Fri)

• Presentation at the Canadian Embassy
• Reception

Have you ever felt the things you learned in school weren’t actually all that applicable? Sure, it’s for knowledge’s sake itself. But after learning about a plethora of policy theories for the umpteenth time, I am craving a lesson on how these policies might actually play out. My frustrations with classes started years ago when I noticed a disconnect between what I was learning in the classroom and “the real world”. What I mean by this is that I wasn’t being given any indication of what I could do with this knowledge once I graduated. Fast forward to graduate school at UBC, where the first week of classes I posed the question to our MAAPPS advisor, “Can we take the course outside of the classroom…maybe to Japan?” The answer was “why not?” So thereout began our journey to take the learning outside of the classroom and into the actual policy realm.

The last ten months have been spent developing the course, and what a task that has been! A strong, motivated team of 10 MAAPPS students have been holding regular meetings to delegate tasks ranging from proposal-writing, fundraising, curriculum development, logistics planning to securing meetings with diplomats and foreign officials from Canada and Japan. This has probably been some of the most challenging months of our lives, however perhaps some of the most rewarding too.

*A word to professors who want to whip their students in shape for a life of academia: make them plan a course.

While the course development work is nearly over, the actual simulation is about to begin. Stay tuned to hear more about our daily rigorous activities, site visits, and our meetings with embassy officials and our Japanese counterparts.

As the MAAPPS program has evolved over the past decade, we have been shaping it more and more toward applied learning and professional development – largely in response to student requests along these lines.

The first step in this direction was the experimental offering of Asia Pacific Policy Projects that would challenge participants to address a single, tightly circumscribed policy challenge in the course of a term. Past projects have focused on mining regulation in Mongolia, history education in Cambodia and selective adaption of international norms in trade regimes.

Some courses have also adopted more interactive formats for course discussions, such as staged debates, scenario discussions, case studies.

The present plans for our two-week collaboration with Hitotsubashi University takes this notion one step further by

1. selecting a topic that is current, pressing and accessible to students: trade negotiations between Canada and Japan
2. transplanting the course to the locus of policy-making: in this case, Tokyo,
3. collaborating with a local institution to benefit from a multi-perspective approach to a given policy challenge,
4. relying on the academic literature and experts on trade agreements in the preparation for discussions,
5. involving students deeply in the planning of the course,
6. adding as many meetings with stakeholders in this policy issue to the learning activity: the Canadian and Japanese governments, businesses, etc., and
7. introducing a formal simulation of trade negotiations into the activities (largely at the initiative of the participants)