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Meeting in Alexandria |
From the end of September to early October, the University of Tokyo held a series of academic meetings on “Death and Life Studies (DALS)” in Cairo and Alexandria in collaboration with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture (SCC), and Bibliotheca Alexandrina. JSPS’s Cairo Research Station took part as a sponsor of this program.
This new DALS discipline has emerged over the last several years. In a rapidly aging society like Japan’s, pondering the nature of death and life is a matter of contemporary urgency that transcends the scope of conventional studies.
The subject addressed was somewhat divorced from popular interest in Egypt; nevertheless, the meetings drew large audiences, who exchanged heated views with the panelists on the platform. Prof. Susumu Shimazono, head of the Japanese delegation, and Prof. Tetsuya Otoshi, coordinator of the meetings, found themselves surrounded by TV crews and newspaper reporters after many of the sessions.
Under a glaring headline that read “Studying Death to Appreciate Life,” the celebrated professor of religious studies Prof. Shimazono was quoted as saying, “The new discipline also aims to study how the Western and Eastern cultures view death, which mankind today has lost the ability to face and understand.” (8 October, 2009, The Egyptian Gazette)
- JSPS Cairo Research Station
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