Since the early ’90s, Italy has accommodated migrants from all over the world who often regard Italy as a transit country rather than a place where they will settle permanently. Italian clinicians recognize that providing appropriate mental health services to these migrants is difficult because of the great diversity of their origin countries and motives for migration. Additionally, there is little possibility of their becoming Italian citizens. The methods for treating mental illness among non-Western patients often differs from modern Western methods, but it is nearly impossible to fully understand migrants’ cultural differences because of the wide variety of cultures among patients at the clinic. Moreover, working toward a patient’s social inclusion as a means of treatment may be inefficient when they are not willing to become an Italian citizen. To tackle these problems, clinicians refer to French ethnopsychiatry proposed by Tobie Nathan, wherein any discourse, including the patient’s traditional etiologic theory, is accommodated and used in a complementary way. The aim of this study is to show how therapists use ethnopsychiatry in Italy by examining mainly their statements on the use of patient’s discourse, such as witchcraft discourse. The findings suggest that ethnopsychiatry can help identify how migrants confront their own mental illnesses and can transcend the limits of modern Western mental health practices. Therefore, it may be argued that the use of ethnopsychiatry can emancipate therapists from the scheme of conventional mental health practices and assist them in developing an adequate treatment method for each migrant.

This is an introduction to the special issue on university-level history education in Japan and the world, including the papers which were originally presented at the international symposium, Globalizing University History Education: Diversity, Trans-borders, and Intersectionality, held in Osaka in August 2019. After the symposium, the organizing committee selected six papers, representing major outcomes of the discussions, for publication in the Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies. It appears to be time to discuss university education, in which humanities and foreign/area/regional studies are required to cope with various issues including historical ones in the globalizing world. What kind of handling of history education is possible or impossible for us? In what way are universities working on the common issue of the world? We believe these six papers are the most successful ones in dealing with global issues through specific case studies.

Osaka University is one of the key research universities in Japan, and the Graduate School of Letters (Humanities) has received research funds under ‘21st Century Center for Excellence’ and ‘Global Center for Excellence’ programs of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The Department of World History is the hub of global history studies in Japan as well as in Asia, and it hosted the First International Congress of the Asian Association of World Historians (AAWH) in May 2009. The Department is conducting four global history research projects: (1) Silk Road and Central Eurasian world history, (2) Maritime Asian history, (3) History of the Chinese Empire, and (4) World-System from Asian perspectives. The Asian History Section of the Department of World History at Osaka University has a longstanding tradition of archival research in a number of languages: Turkish, Mongol, Tibetan, Manchurian, and of course, Chinese, regarding ‘Inner’ Asia (now often called ‘Central Eurasia’). In the last two decades, the study of Asian Maritime history focusing on the East and South China Seas, and partly involving researchers from the Japanese History Major, has also gained importance. Under the influence of these two leading research groups, studies in Chinese and Japanese histories, which are dominant in the historical discipline in Japan besides ‘Western History’, have shifted their regional investigative focus away from the conventional ‘East Asia’ perspective (essentially China, Korea and Japan) and towards a broader and more flexible area of ‘Eastern Eurasia’ including maritime regions. As a result, polygonal collaborations among scholars working on Central Eurasia, China, Japan, and Maritime Asia (including Southeast Asia) are developing. Valuable methodological and analytical connections could be established between archival research and field surveys, and between perspectives on global relationships and the micro-analysis of local societies.

The topic of this article is the translation or interpretation of medieval Japanese historical terms into foreign languages, specifically Chinese and English. The author is a researcher of medieval Japanese history, and her research focuses on Buddhist temples in regional society in late medieval Japan. A part of her work in this project is to conduct trial classes on Japanese history with international students. In 2017, the author gave a lecture in Japanese on religious powers and wars in medieval Japan to Vietnamese students, at Vietnam National University in Hanoi. In 2019, as a guest lecturer in Professor Kayoko Fujita’s class at Ritsumeikan University this semester, the author lectured on Buddhist history of pre-modern Japan in English to international students. These teaching experiences inspired the author to reconsider the approaches to translating and interpreting historical terms into English, and what differences occur when translating or interpreting the same terms into Chinese. The author writes the majority of her research articles in Japanese and Chinese, and she conducts translations of medieval Japanese history books written by Japanese and British scholars. Theses intellectual endeavors involve constant contemplation of the most appropriate ways to describe historical terms unique to Japan in Chinese and English. This is an extremely important issue because it is closely connected with the global dissemination of Japanese history studies. First, the author will briefly introduce the current teaching situation regarding medieval Japanese in China, using Fudan University as an example. Second, she will share her findings through her experiences teaching medieval Japanese and translating/interpreting medieval Japanese historical materials. Third, she will conclude the features of the dissemination of medieval Japanese history studies, focusing on the differences between China and the United States.

The aim of this paper is to show how individual research can provide case studies for university-level global history courses (e.g., World History from Global Perspectives) based on the example of a recent field of historical study, Maritime Asian history. Inevitably, it discusses why research groups at Osaka University can assume the role of case study providers for university-level global history. Accordingly, this paper firstly describes the activities of unique research groups in recent years, with particular focus on Osaka University. The Research Group on Maritime Asian History (Kaiiki ajia shi kenkyukai, Kaiikiken) constitutes one of the most active branches of Handai shigaku (Historical Studies at Osaka University). They are well known for their early work in global history research and education in Japan (Minamizuka, 2009; Mukai, 2009). As I was a member of this research group and several projects related to Handai shigaku, this paper refers primarily to content-based contributions for the Global History program at Osaka University with additional references to contributions to projects at the University of Tokyo and Doshisha University that were of particular interest to me. A common theme in this paper relates to the current circumstances surrounding Japanese universities that have been encouraged to “globalize” their educational content. Essentially, most of them have been offering inflexible nationstate-oriented curricula that were too rigid to efficiently incorporate contemporary global issues. This concern goes beyond the pedagogy specialists in the education departments of national universities because the modernization of educational programs to include globalization is also crucial for the survival of the humanities and social science departments in research universities. The sharp decline of 18-year-olds in the population of Japan is likely to cause an existential crisis in universities as the raison d'être of humanities and social sciences departments has been seriously questioned by society. These programs are criticized for being ineffective for analyzing contemporaneous globalization themes and trends. How is this adaptation possible for researchers of historical studies who are also responsible for education in their universities? To answer this question, I chose the topic of the “historical diaspora in Maritime Asia.” As my principal research field, it concerns the history of the Muslim diaspora in pre-modern Maritime Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the current state of history education in local universities by referring to the case of Shizuoka University. In recent years, the study and value of the humanities have come under growing pressure and debate in Japan. Many Japanese universities face a decrease in the number of professors and research funds in the humanities, including history departments. In national universities, the number of professors of the humanities are rapidly decreasing compared with the number of professors of the natural sciences. This problem is more serious in local universities than large-scale research universities. In these difficult conditions, how did we deal with history education at our university? In this paper, I will focus on two points. First, I will examine the situation of local universities by referring to the case of Shizuoka University and present the process we took to reform undergraduate history education. However, there was a limit to how far the history curriculum could be reformed, as each year Shizuoka University faced a decrease in professors and research funds. Therefore, secondly, I discuss how we set up a new society of history education, which was supported by other faculty members and high school teachers. The Society of History Education in Shizuoka (静岡歴史教育研究会) was established in 2010. I will consider the role played by the Society in bridging history research and history education, combining the efforts of high schools and Shizuoka University, and integrating Japanese History and World History into society.

When entering the center of Athens, we first see the Hellenic Parliament once served as the palace of Kings Otto and George I. Then, along Panepistimiou Street, there are many historical buildings: Numismatic Museum (housed in the mansion of Heinrich Schliemann), Archaeological Society at Athens, Bank of Greece, and ‘the Trilogy’ of neo-classical buildings including Academy of Athens, University of Athens, and National Library of Greece. Most of all, the University of Athens played a significant role in the modernization of Greece in terms of human resource development as well as symbolism in the capital landscape. Well, what kind of role is the University of Athens playing in history education in Greece of today? How is it placed in the European and global contexts? In this paper, I analyze some characteristics of history education at the University of Athens, with a particular focus on the context of archaeology in Greece. In what follows, after an overview of the university (1), I will illustrate briefly the undergraduate curriculum (2) and the additional postgraduate programs (3) at the Department of History and Archaeology in the School of Philosophy. Then, within the framework of history and archaeology education in Greece, the activities of foreign schools in Athens will be highlighted (4). Finally, I will draw attention to the current situation of archaeological research and teaching in Greece under the global financial crisis (5).

This article on history education at German universities does not offer a detailed analysis of its relevant structures, but only a very brief sketch (1). Instead, it places a special focus on the theoretical concepts of ‘historical consciousness’ and ‘historical culture’ (2). These concepts have not only played an important role for the education of future history teachers at German universities for thirty years, but has also gained considerable prominence in cultural studies-oriented historical research and teaching in Germany (‘cultural turn’). In addition, it shows a rather close connection to the newly established master’s programmes in ‘public history’ (3), which have been expanding history education at German universities for a number of years and are still on the rise.