News & Stories

Fostering MIT’s Japan connection

Born and raised in Japan as part of a military family, Christine Pilcavage knows first-hand about the value of an immersive approach to exploration. “Any experience in a different context improves an individual,” says Pilcavage, who has also lived in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Kenya. It’s that ethos that Pilcavage brings to her role as […]

Turning a childhood interest into a career path with MIT Open Learning resources

Hinata Yamahara was 10 years old, on a family trip to Osaka, Japan, when he started riding the train alone. Those train rides sparked an interest in something he didn’t have words for at the time — how cities are built, and how people navigate them. Now at 17 and applying to colleges, Yamahara has […]

New optical sensing system will improve space domain awareness

Earlier this year, the first of two space domain awareness (SDA) payloads, called the QZS6-HP1, launched from Tanegashima, Japan. Recently, that payload collected its first imaging data, a moment known as first light. Sponsored by the United States Space Force (USSF), MIT Lincoln Laboratory designed, built, and delivered the two payloads as part of a […]

Samurai in Japan, then engineers at MIT

In 1867, five Japanese students took a long sea voyage to Massachusetts for some advanced schooling. The group included a 13-year-old named Eiichirō Honma, who was from one of the samurai families that ruled Japan. Honma expected to become a samurai warrior himself, and enrolled in a military academy in Worcester. And then some unexpected things […]

MIT conductive concrete consortium cements five-year research agreement with Japanese industry

The MIT Electron-conductive Cement-based Materials Hub (EC^3 Hub), an outgrowth of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub), has been established by a five-year sponsored research agreement with the Aizawa Concrete Corp. In particular, the EC^3 Hub will investigate the infrastructure applications of multifunctional concrete — concrete having capacities beyond serving as a structural element, such […]

Lessons from Fukushima: Prepare for the unlikely

When a devastating earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the protective systems at the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant complex in Japan in March 2011, it triggered a sequence of events leading to one of the worst releases of radioactive materials in the world to date. Although nuclear energy is having a revival as a low-emissions energy […]

Preparing to be prepared

The Kobe earthquake of 1995 devastated one of Japan’s major cities, leaving over 6,000 people dead while destroying or making unusable hundreds of thousands of structures. It toppled elevated freeway segments, wrecked mass transit systems, and damaged the city’s port capacity. “It was a shock to a highly engineered, urban city to have undergone that […]

Tech in translation

The Sony Walkman and virtual reality headsets are not just prominent examples of personal technology. In the hands of Paul Roquet, they’re also vehicles for learning more about Japan, the U.S., global technology trends — and ourselves. Roquet is an associate professor in MIT’s program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and his forte is analyzing how […]

Virtual worlds apart

What is virtual reality? On a technical level, it is a headset-enabled system using images and sounds to make the user feel as if they are in another place altogether. But in terms of the content and essence of virtual reality — well, that may depend on where you are. In the U.S., for instance, […]

MIT-Japan Program establishes the Patricia Gercik Memorial Fund

The MIT-Japan Program has announced the establishment of the Patricia Gercik Memorial Fund. The endowed fund will provide supplemental stipends to students seeking internships in Japan. Gercik served as managing director of the MIT-Japan Program for almost three decades and introduced hundreds of MIT students to Japanese culture, history, and in-country internship experiences. MIT-Japan is […]