Research must be shared, says prize winner

Associate Professor of Japanese, Nathan Hopson, was awarded the Faculty of Humanities' Dissemination Prize for his excellent communication skills, which he has demonstrated in more than 60 podcasts about Japan in the New Books Network. In the podcasts, he converses with international researchers who have published books on topics ranging from Japanese castles and green tea to nuclear accidents and security policy.

Hopson was surprised and very pleased to receive the Dissemination Prize. The award makes him feel that he is in the right place – a faculty which has established its own dissemination prize emphasizes the importance of knowledge sharing as much as Hopson himself does. For Hopson, communication is one of the fundamental ideas of research.

– The second half of the research needs to be the communication. You have to be able to explain to someone else why it matters and what is important about it.

The award nomination confirms this: "In the [podcast] episodes, Nathan demonstrates what a skilled communicator he is, how easily he can navigate various fields of knowledge, and how adept he is at critically but always kindly highlighting complex topics through nuanced, well-formulated, and informed questions. His solid knowledge of Japanese history and society is particularly evident in the many conversations in Japan-related episodes."

Food and Communication

Hopson's own research primarily focuses on Japanese nutrition policy and history. He has always been interested in food and nutrition and was on the verge of choosing nutrition science as his field of study, but Japanese history won out. He started his research career focusing on Japan's intellectual history, but after some years he decided to shift his focus to the role of nutrition in Japanese society.

Food is something everyone can relate to, providing a good starting point for disseminating Japanese history and culture – and it is much easier to get students interested in food than in intellectual history.

Why Japanese?

Hopson's interest in Japan began when he was a child; his grandparents were part of the Allied occupation forces after World War II, and his uncle was a comic book artist with an interest in Japanese culture.

When he took a summer course in Japanese as a teenager, it just "clicked" – and he found that his brain was suited to the way the Japanese language works. What he likes about Japanese is precisely what sets it apart from Germanic languages like Norwegian. While many Germanic and Romance languages focus on "things," on nouns – how they are declined, what gender they have, which preposition to use – the Japanese language cares little about such things.

– In Japanese, nouns do not have singular or plural forms, and no gender;  everything is determined by the verb, not the noun, he explains. 

Bergen

Nathan Hopson is American and has previously been affiliated with several American and Japanese universities. He has spent a total of 15 years in Japan. When asked what brought him to Bergen, he explains that the family was on the move from Japan when the position at the Department of Foreign Languages came up. The opportunity to help build a new master's program in Japanese was crucial in choosing the University of Bergen.

Hopson is clearly proud of the first master's students in Japanese who are graduating this year.

– Being part of something that is growing, that is new and interesting, is a good feeling, he says.

The Japanese study programme at UiB are among those that receive the best feedback from students, according to the Student Survey. Hopson believes this is due to the well-structured and well-organized programme, something he greatly appreciated when he joined the Japanese team. 

Food is More Than Nutrition

In his research, Hopson has been particularly interested in the Japanese school lunch and the role it has played in both nutrition policy and nation-building. Japanese children receive lunch at school for nine years, until they are 15 years old. It is a carefully composed lunch, planned by nutrition researchers to ensure a nutritious and healthy diet.

Hopson explains that Japan has long traditions in nutritional science. The country established the world's first nutrition institute after World War I, as part of the goal to build a strong and modern nation. The first state-subsidized school lunch was introduced in 1932.

An inspiration from Norway was the Oslo breakfast introduced in 1929 to ensure that children from poor families had enough food, but which became an offer to all schoolchildren in Norway until the 1960s. Norway and Sweden were also used as models for Japanese nutrition policy in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the school lunch in Japan is not just about nutrition. Hopson also looks at how it is used to develop social skills and shape a Japanese identity. Every day the students have this unifying experience: they eat the same food, in the classroom, together with their classmates and teacher. The school lunch also involves students learning to interact with others. They serve each other food and clean up after themselves. They learn about hygiene, discipline and cooperation. Social skills are important when you have 124 million inhabitants living in an area slightly smaller than Norway. 

– What really interests me is how the knowledge created in the laboratory is enacted as a matter of policy: how the meals are planned, influencing what the children eat for nine years of their lives, and how that affects the everyday culture.

Podcasting

In 2018, a friend asked if Hopson would be interested in interviewing authors of books about Japan. The interviews were to be used in podcasts from the New Books Network, an academic network that produces podcasts on a variety of research topics. Hopson had some radio experience from Japan and said yes, without fully knowing what he was getting into.

Today, he is very happy with the people he has met and all the books he gets to read about ever-new aspects of Japanese society. It gives him insight into topics ranging from Japanese basketball to the introduction of hospice care in a country with a different relationship to life and death than in the West. It also provides inspiration for new topics he can share with students in his teaching.

The New Books Network was founded in 2007 by Marshall Poe, an American professor of Russian history. His goal was to find other ways to disseminate research than the traditional ones – including outside academia. The network's podcasts now reach around one million listeners each month. All contributors to the podcasts are volunteers. Some advertising helps finance the operation.

Right now Hopson is working on the first episode of a new podcast funded by the Toshiba International Foundation, where the idea is to gather groups of researchers for bilingual roundtable discussions in Japanese and English. The goal is to break out of the English-language bubble that research on Japan can sometimes find itself in.

Hopson greatly enjoys his role as a podcast host and communicator, emphasizing how important it is to reach others with the knowledge generated by research.

– Research for the sake of research is not enough; it must be shared.