Eighteen students, including those from Southeast Asia, Japan and other parts of the world, were divided into four groups to hold intense discussions in English about various global sustainability issues. They were creating a rough draft of a poster they would use for next week's presentation.
"I think economic development makes water political. People fight over it," one woman in a group whose presentation theme was "Water Supply in China," said to her group in a classroom of Sophia University in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward. She wrote it down on the draft of the poster.
The class is the "Introduction to Trans-Disciplinary Human Development," part of SAIMS, a one-semester program at Sophia for exchange students who come from universities in ASEAN member states.