On Wednesday, March 19, 2025, Professor Osamu Sakura’s retirement commemorative event titled “Connecting Knowledge, Going Around Academia” was held at the Fukutake Learning Theater on the B2 floor of the Fukutake Hall at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies. This event was organised to provide an opportunity for Professor Sakura, who will be retiring from the Interfaculty Initiative at the end of March, to look back on his 25 years of research and education with colleagues and to consider the future of interdisciplinary activities.

The event began with Professor Sakura providing an overview of his research, speaking about his fundamental interest in continuity and boundaries, and the relationship between continuity and discontinuity, while sharing questions he had when observing the Pacific Ocean and Mount Fuji during his childhood. On the topic of his research journey from observing primate groups to science communication, he described his interest in the various functions of animal groups and how they change according to circumstances, the awareness he gained from his struggles with paper submissions during graduate school, and how his interests expanded to issues of continuity and discontinuity across various fields, including the relationship between artistic works and environment, and the relationship between word meanings and context.

The subsequent panel discussion was structured in three parts, featuring Professor Mari Oshima, Professor Naoya Sekiya, and former Dean Hiroshi Harashima, who respectively  discussed communicating science and technology to the general public, the relationship between science, technology, and society in light of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the development of the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies and Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies and its efforts to promote interdisciplinarity. Former students involved with each of these topics joined the discussion midway, sharing memories from their research and the interdisciplinary perspectives acquired during their graduate studies.

With over 200 in-person and online participants, the event was well-attended and came to a successful conclusion. Some participants commented, “It was an event that made me want to learn more about Professor Sakura.”

During the reception, many anecdotes illustrating Professor Sakura’s character were shared in greetings from colleagues. There was lively interaction among faculty members, alumni, graduate students from other laboratories, and staff of the Interfaculty Initiative, creating a time for everyone to reaffirm how grateful they were to have been able to conduct research under Professor Sakura at the Interfaculty Initiative and Graduate School. The event concluded with the presentation of a photo and message book along with a bouquet from the lab volunteers.

Text: Nozomi Ohtsuki (Historiographical Institute The University of Tokyo, Project researcher, Former Sakura Lab)
English proofreading: David Buist (Project Senior Specialist)