Koichi Ikeda, President of Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies, with Akihito Ishikawa (Chair of International Exchanges Center) and Nakaya Shinsuke (vice Chair of International Exchanges Center), visited Tamkang on March 24th, taking one gigantic step for the exchanges between two universities.

As President Flora C. I. Chang indicated, Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies, preceded by University of Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (France), Curtin University of Technology (Australia) and Universite De Sorbonne (France), is the first Japanese university establishing bi-degree cooperative ties with Tamkang.

Last year Deng Chia-yun, graduate from Department of French, acquired bi-master degree from Tamkang and Universite of Jean Moulin Lyon 3. This year Tamkang’s three graduate students from Graduate Institute of French take courses there also aiming at bi-master degree. So far no one has gone to Curtin University of Technology because of her higher criterion (570 points in old TOFEL). Lin Sheng-bin, doctoral student from Graduate Institute of Chinese, is currently studying at Universite De Sorbonne and, hopefully, will be endowed bi-doctoral degree in the future.

During the panel discussion, President of Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies, Koichi Ikeda, repeatedly complimented Tamkang’s status equal to Waseda University in Japan; he even describes Tamkang as a huge ship, and Nagasaki a small one. Alluding to the Japanese saying “A life however small can have complete ideas; smallness or bigness has equal power of life,”he looked forward to the bright future of the relationship with Tamkang and wished to maintain friendly academic exchanges.

Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies specializes in cultivating experts in foreign languages. There is only one college in the university, divided into seven departments: American English, British English, German, French, Japanese, and Chinese. As President Koichi Ikeda emphasized, Nagasaki University of Foreign Studies is a single-subject, small-sized university. Her first president Akimasa Mitsuta was born in Taiwan, and he once visited Tamkang in 2004. In the same year, an agreement of academic exchanges was contracted during the visit of Tamkang delegate led by the ex-President Chang Horng-jinh. President Flora C. I. Chang went there last year, and exchange of students, as well as active interactions, started since then. (~ Han-yu Huang)