The 2009 ATJ Seminar was held Thursday, March 26, at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers (301 North Water Street, Chicago, IL) from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The complete Seminar program can be viewed, downloaded and printed here.

The Seminar featured a full day of concurrent sessions on literature, linguistics, language pedagogy, second language acquisition, and other topics of interest to Japanese language educators. Most of ATJ’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) also met during the Seminar.

The keynote speaker was Beate Sirota Gordon, who grew up in Japan before World War II, was a member of the SCAP committee that drafted the postwar Japanese Constitution, and served as Performing Arts Director for the Japan Society and the Asia Society. Her topic is “What the Study of Japanese Did for Me.”

A special sponsored session, “Teaching effectively with Genki-related visual materials: Pictorial kanji book and vocabulary picture cards,” was offered from 12:40 – 2:00 p.m. in Sheraton Ballroom III. The speaker was Eri Banno, one of the main authors of the Genki textbook series. The sponsors of this special session were The Japan Times and Kinokuniya Bookstores of America.

ATJ also hosted a special evening event this year, a performance by the rakugo master Ryuutei Saryuu
(柳亭左龍) and a short commentary on rakugo and yose by Professor Kazumi Hatasa (ATJ Board member and Director of the Japanese School, Middlebury College).