A symposium titled "Big History and Liberal Arts" was held in late November at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo.
Big history involves super-interdisciplinary studies, and a movement to explore the position of humankind in the universe and tackle today's pressing issues on a global scale, by looking back at the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe and mobilizing knowledge from a multitude of disciplines such as cosmo-physics, geology, biology, anthropology and historiography.
The symposium — in which professor David Christian from Macquarie University in Australia, who authored the best-seller "Origin Story" and was visiting Japan for the first time, and professor Barry H. Rodrigue from Symbiosis International University in India spoke and held a panel discussion along with this writer — turned out be quite stimulating and I learned a lot from it.