The 2008 ATJ Seminar, held in Atlanta on Thursday, April 3, was attended by almost 200 members, who listened to more than 60 paper and panel presentations, participated in meetings of most of the Special Interest Groups, and had a chance to talk with colleagues from all around the country and the world.

As part of the larger Association for Asian Studies (AAS) meeting that took place the same weekend, ATJ sponsored a special round table session in honor of the late Hiroshi Miyaji, who served in 1990-96 as (in the words of one audience member) as ATJ's "first activist president."

Participants in the round table, who studied or worked with Miyaji-sensei, shared their memories of him while also commenting on changes that have taken place in the teaching and study of Japanese language and culture in recent decades. The session chair was Maggie Childs (University of Kansas); panelists were Carole Cavanaugh (Middlebury College), Mutsuko Endo Hudson (Michigan State University), William Kelly (Yale University), Seiichi Makino (Princeton University), and Nobuo Ogawa (Middlebury College).

The links below will take you to MP3 audio recordings of each panelist’s comments as well as a portion of the discussion that followed. The audio files are large and may take several minutes to reach your computer in their entirety. When all the audio players are displayed, you can click on the "play" button of whichever one you would like to hear. Clicking on the "pause" button will pause the audio file which is playing. You may start and pause each of the comments as often as you like.

There are also links to the PowerPoint presentation that accompanied Mutsuko Endo Hudson's remarks on trends in Japanese language education and to a slide show of photographs from Miyaji-sensei's life and career.

The session was recorded on both audio and video tapes. If any member is interested in obtaining a copy of the video DVD, please contact the ATJ office at