紅葉の美しい季節になりましたが、みな様いかがお過ごしでしょうか。今学期もなかば終わり、私の会長としての任期もなかば終わったこととなります。

My term as President so far has been quite occupied with preparations for the International Conference on Japanese Language Education, which is going to be held at Columbia University next August. The steering committee has been working very hard, and with the special effort of the Program Committee, we have been able to come up with an attractive program for this two-day conference. This conference targets all areas of interest to the ATJ membership, and invited panels include ten varying topics such as classical Japanese, modern literature and film, language and culture, articulation, K-12 curriculum, classroom instruction ideas, study abroad, heritage language, second language acquisition, and linguistics. This is the first time such a conference is to be held outside of East Asia, and it promises to be a truly exciting event. We hope many of you will be able to attend. Registration and housing information will be available at the conference web site early next year: www.japaneseteaching.org/icjle.

On September 17, we had our annual mid-year ATJ board meeting in Madison, WI. This is always an enjoyable event as it provides the board members an opportunity to get to know each other and take one full day to have in-depth discussions on ATJ-related matters. Here is some of what was reported on and discussed.

• The number of members remains about the same as the previous two years at 859 (as of August 2005). Last year, Makino sensei proposed the membership "doubling campaign." I hope each of you tries to encourage one new person to become a member.
• The membership fees remain at the current level. However, due to the rising postage cost, international postage fee will be raised to $25.
• The Association is working toward on-line payment of dues. This should become available by the beginning of next year so that registration for the International Conference can also be done on-line.
• The Bridging Scholarship program continues to be a great success. About 100 scholarships are awarded out of 600 applications each year. Please encourage your students to apply.
• The ATJ will hold its annual board meeting and the membership meeting in conjunction with the 2006 AAS conference in San Francisco. We will not hold the Seminar then, however, since the Seminar will be replaced by the International Conference (ICJLE). Instead, we hope to hold several SIG meetings/workshops on Thursday afternoon and Friday evening. Please see the Call for Proposals for the Japanese as a Heritage Language (JHL) SIG inside this issue, and further announcements of SIG activities by email.

In addition, there was quite a bit of discussion on the future of the ATJ Seminar, following the next year’s ICJLE. We plan to hold our Thursday Seminar in conjunction with the AAS annual conference in Boston in 2007. In the meantime, the board will explore various options, and I hope we can report on a more concrete proposal next year.

The board also discussed how best to respond to an urgent appeal for help by the Louisiana Association of Teachers of Japanese for the Japanese language teachers in the regions affected by Katrina. Our heart goes out to them. A call for help was sent to all the members of the ATJ and NCJLT via email, and it is also included in this Newsletter. Please respond if you can.

This year's ACTFL conference will take place in Baltimore on November 18-20, and the Japan Foundation’s Los Angeles Office will host the 2^nd Annual Symposium on Japanese Language Education in the US on November 20 right after the ACTFL conference ends. The Symposium will provide an opportunity to meet representatives of both the national and regional organizations in the US and should provide interesting and fruitful discussions. I hope to see many of you there.