午夜剧场

While I was enrolled in the 午夜剧场 Graduate School, I decided to study abroad in a doctoral program in the UK. This was primarily triggered by the words of Professor Yoshitake Kobayashi, a leading expert in fundamental Bach research whom I had the strange fortune of meeting through my studies of the Satsuma biwa at the time. He told me, "If I were to study handwriting today, I would use computers." There, I collaborated with experts in historical musicology, image processing, and robotics to work on research extracting knowledge from original musical scores and verifying the insights of experts.

Cross-border research through the cooperation of different specialized fields is essential for truly solving the massive and complex problems of modern society, and I was fortunate to have gained this rare opportunity at a young age. One of the things I felt was most important is that in order to understand the insights of sophisticated experts, the more innovative those insights are, the more important the mutual relationship of trust becomes.

We always have a habit of viewing things from a starting point created by the habit of "self." At that time, I was unable to take an objective view of that starting point, and I had a bitter experience where an expert with outstanding insight closed their heart to me. The trigger for this was my statement, "Is there scientific evidence for that?" In the past, when I encountered things that were not easily understood from my own perspective, I would say such things without thinking deeply. However, this severed my interaction with the other person and gave me an opportunity to rethink deeply. Was I making a sincere effort to perceive things from the other person's standpoint? Was I forcing things into my own framework? How should I have spoken?

The tacit knowledge of experts, which is important in cross-border research, includes many things that cannot be converted into data with current measurement technology. Looking back at history, there is the fact that the society we live in today is built on the foundation of original discoveries and inventions made by a handful of people that would have been difficult to support at the time. I feel that many of these things can only be recognized through a complex back-and-forth between sensation and concept, and many cannot be reached solely through the accumulation of thought. Recently, the number of people with this kind of awareness has increased, and it seems that more researchers are taking on challenging themes that were previously difficult to have recognized.