Ballot forms were sent to members in February. If you are a regular member of the ATJ, please vote. Short biographies of the candidates can be found below. Select up to FIVE (5) candidates to serve on the Board of Directors from April 1, 2001 to March 31, 2004, to fill the vacancies created by those whose terms expire on March 31, 2001. Your ballot must be received in the ATJ offices no later than March 10, 2001, or you can bring it to the ATJ general membership meeting to be held from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. on March 24, 2001 in Ballroom 7 of the Chicago Sheraton and Towers, Chicago, IL. The ballots will be counted at this meeting. Members who have not voted by mail may vote at that time. Note: Your ballot will be invalid if your membership has expired.

Jan Bardsley
Associate Professor of Japanese Language & Literature
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Jan Bardsley has been involved with Japanese teacher associations in southern California and the southeastern U.S. She has recently contributed articles to "Education About Asia" and "U.S.-Japan Women's Journal"; her book of translations, The Bluestockings of Japan: Feminist Fiction and Essays from Seito, 1911-1916, will be published soon by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. "Women and Work in Japan" is a course which she has taught both at UNC and at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture.

Charles I. Igawa
Ph.D., President, California Association of Japanese Language Schools
Charles Igawa is interested in the following: First, the field of heritage J-language edu- cation (JHL) represents a significant part in the overall North American J-language education development. Yet the JHL field still remains a largely unexplored target for academic research and its status is relatively unknown. There ought to be more concerted effort to remedy such a situation, and ATJ can (and should) play a key role in doing so. He feels that he can personally contribute to such an effort because of his long involvement in efforts to preserve the institutions within the Japanese-American immigrant communities that provide J-instruction. These institutions play a significant role in the preservation of the collective J-heritage and for providing early exposure to the language for both J-A and non-J-A youths. In addition, many of these institutions are pro- viding opportunities for adults to continue their Japanese studies or receive their first Japanese language lessons. Cooperative ties between these immigrant-community based J-language institutions and ATJ can foster the development of more systematic ap- proaches in pedagogy and curriculum development in the JHL field. Through cooperation with J-instruction in secondary and college levels, the JHL field can address the issue of overall articulation in J-instruction. Second, he feels that ATJ ought to become more involved in promoting intedisciplinary and comparative inquiries. As a social scientist whose interest in JHL is primarily socio-linguistic, he wishes to contribute to the promotion of such an orientation in the future ATJ activities.

Wesley Jacobsen
Director of the Japanese Language Program at Harvard University
Wesley M. Jacobsen was born in Japan, where he spent the majority of his childhood years. After earning a B.A. in Mathematics and Religious Studies (Wheaton College, Ill, 1974), he went on to do graduate work in linguistics, completing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1981. After teaching Japanese and linguistics for twelve years at the University of Minnesota, he joined the faculty of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where he has been Director of the Japanese Language Program since 1993. In addition to his administrative duties there, he teaches courses in Japanese language and linguistics and is engaged in research on how concepts of time, modality, and transitivity interact with each other in the grammar of Japanese and on similarities and differences between English and Japanese in how such concepts are encoded in grammar. He has spent research leaves in Japan at the National Language Re- search Institute in Tokyo, Kobe University, and Dokkyo University. Currently, he is directing a project to develop web-based interactive teaching materials in Japanese and other East Asian languages. His publications include The Transitive Structure of Events in Japanese (Kurosio Publishers, 1992) and various articles in journals and book col- lections on topics such as conditionals, negation, passives, agentivity, aspect, and transitivity. He is the co-editor of On Japanese and How to Teach It (Japan Times, 1990) and editorial advisor for the Kodansha Basic English-Japanese Dictionary (1998).

Phyllis Larson
Associate Professor of Japanese, St. Olaf College
After completing her Ph.D. in Japanese at the University of Minnesota in 1985, writing on Yosano Akiko, Phyllis Larson taught in two high school Japanese language programs and at Macalester College before moving to St. Olaf College. She has taught Japanese language (all levels), Japanese literature in translation, Japanese film, first-year seminars, and "Family and Self in East Asia" in a new humanities sequence entitled "Asian Con- versations." She is finishing a three-year term on the Executive Committee of the Association for Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL), where she has enjoyed working on common professional issues with colleagues from a variety of languages and institutions. During her sabbatical in 1999-2000, she spent four months in Japan as a Ful- bright Researcher, working on a book on the writer Tamura Toshiko. Currently, she serves on the Steering Committee for a Rockefeller Brothers Grant for "Technology Across the Languages," focusing on using technology effectively to teach language and on integrating language and cultural studies.

Sachiko Matsunaga
Associate Professor of Japanese, California State University, Los Angeles
Sachiko Matsunaga (Ph.D., 1994, Japanese linguistics and pedagogy, University of Hawaii) is the coordinator of the Japanese program and the director of the Japanese Studies Center at California State University, Los Angeles (CSLA). As her numerous publications (e.g., JATJ) and presentations (e.g., ATJ seminars) indicate, her research interest has been on the Japanese writing system, processing of Japanese scripts, acqui- sition/pedagogy of reading, on-line testing, and learner needs arising from different backgrounds (e.g., heritage versus non-heritage learners). Professionally, she is also interested in teacher training (CSLA offers a credential degree in Japanese), and the use of technology in assessment (e.g., portfolios on the Web). At her institution, she has been organizing annual Japanese speech contests for local high school and college students of Japanese, as well as cultural/educational events (e.g., guest lectures, music performances, and Ikebana workshops) for the public. At the community level, she has served four years as a board member for the Teachers of Japanese in Southern California and has been actively involved in planning, organizing, and holding workshops twice per year and in editing newsletters for the organization's 160 members.

Yasuhiro Omoto
Lecturer in Japanese at the University of California, Berkeley
Omoto Yasuhiro would like to contribute his expertise concerning teaching Japanese online. He has created a website called NihongoWeb which includes copyright free/safe materials for Japanese teachers, especially those who must to teach without any help from their institutions. His next goal is to build an online community where teachers and students can exchange ideas freely.

Tsuyoshi Ono
Assistant Professor teaching Japanese language and linguistics
in East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona
Tsuyosho Ono specializes in conversation and grammar, language change, and research methodology, focusing particularly on the way in which frequent patterns in con- versational interaction become habituated as linguistic structure. Recently he has begun investigating the implications of discourse-based studies of Japanese for language peda- gogy. He has co-authored a number of articles on various morphosyntactic aspects of both Japanese and English. He is currently building a corpus of conversational Japanese and preparing to write a book exploring what the study of language change and the micro- scopic analysis of conversational data can tell us about the nature of Japanese grammar.

Haruo Shirane
Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture
in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University
Haruo Shirane is a specialist in classical and early modern Japanese literature and has written widely on prose fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural theory. His publications include The Bridge of Dreams: Poetics of The Tale of Genji (Stanford, 1987), the Japanese edition of which won the 1993 Kadokawa Gen'yoshi Prize, The Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (Stanford, 1997), winner of the Haiku Society of American Book Award, and Canon Formation: Gender, National Identity, and Japanese Literature (Stanford, 2000), and he is the editor of Early Modern Japanese Literature. An Anthology (Columbia UP, 2001). He is Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University and presently on the MLA Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures.

Christopher Thompson
Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Culture, Ohio University, Athens
Chris Thompson began his teaching career as a Japanese teacher at the secondary level in the public and private schools of Florida and Indiana. In 1989, he became a Teaching Associate at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School (Uni High), where he created teaching materials for the secondary classroom featured in the JLTN Quarterly (the "Yellow Newsletter"). He became active in state- and national-level Japanese teachers organizations and served on the board of the National Council of Secondary Teachers of Japanese from 1992-1994. In 1996, he succeeded Ms. Carol Bond as Director of the Center for the Improvement of Teaching Japanese Language and Culture in High School (CITJ) at Uni High. Since completing his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Illinois in 1998, he has been Assistant Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at Ohio University, where he is the Director of the OU-Chubu Study Abroad Program. As a member of ATJ, he is currently serving as an editorial board member of the LangNet Project and is a member of the Bridging Scholarship Selection Committee.

Suwako Watanabe
Associate Professor of Japanese and International Studies, Portland State University
Suwako Watanabe obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 1990. Her research interest includes language assessment, curriculum development, and discourse analysis. Her publications include "Concurrent Validity and application of the ACTFL OPI in a Japanese program" (JATJ) and "Cultural differences in framing: American and Japanese group discussions" in Framing in Discourse. She is an ACTFL- certified OPI tester and trainer. She has been actively involved in the development and implementation of standards for Japanese at the secondary level in Oregon, including the Oregon Benchmarks for Japanese and the Oregon Japanese Oral Performance Assess- ment. She has been a presenter, director, and trainer at numerous workshops and confer- ences, both regional and national, such as ACTFL, AAS, ATJ, PNCFL, and COFLT (Confederation in Oregon For Language Teaching). She served on the board for COFLT, PNCFL, and ATJO (Association of Teachers of Japanese in Oregon). She was President of COFLT in 1999-2000 and President of ATJO in 1995-1998.