After a winter of record warmth and virtually no snow, the temperatures have finally returned to their normal cold levels here in the Northeast, and we are hearing forecasts of snowfall over the next few weeks. Whatever this winter has brought you in your part of the country, I trust that your new year has gotten off to a good start.

This will be my last newsletter message to you as President, as Joan Ericson will take over from me in that role at our March annual meeting, and I in turn will inherit the position of Past President as Naomi McGloin retires from that position. As part of this annual transition in leadership, the third member of our leadership "triumvirate," our new President Elect, will be chosen along with three new Board members in the election currently underway. If you have not done so already, please complete and return before March 1 the ballot that has been sent to you for this purpose.

We are now just months away from the launching of the Japanese Advanced Placement Exam this May. This is an event all of us in Japanese language education have anticipated as an opportunity for increased dialogue and cooperation between teachers at the college and pre-college levels. Much is still unknown, however, about how this event will unfold and what its immediate impact on the field will be: figures are not available, for example, on how many high schools are currently offering courses leading up to the exam (somewhere around 200 seems to be a good guess), nor is it clear how many students will take the exam, what their breakdown will be along parameters such as heritage vs. non-heritage, nor, of course, how they will perform on the exam. That there will be an impact, both short-term and long-term, is nevertheless without question. This can already be seen in the efforts being spurred among funding agencies such as the Japan Foundation to address the potential shortage of teachers qualified to teach high school courses at the AP level, particularly given the steps already made by the Chinese government to generate a base of teachers for similar purposes on the Chinese side. There will also be a number of ways in which those of us who teach Japanese at the college level will feel a very concrete impact, such as the fact that the AP Japanese exam relies fully on a computer keyboard format for student input, without requiring the skill of writing characters by hand as taught in most traditional courses. How we respond to or adjust to such changes are questions that will require thought and discussion. Whatever the outcome, it will benefit us to be familiar with the content and goals of the AP exam. ATJ will continue to keep you informed about opportunities toward that end, which I urge you to avail yourself of. For example, read the AP Japanese News section on the ATJ website, as well as announcements of workshops and other events to be held this summer; there will also be an AP update session during this year's ATJ Seminar.

Following a one-year hiatus due to the International Conference on Japanese Language Education sponsored by ATJ last summer at Columbia University, our Thursday Seminar will be back this year. The schedule for this and other ATJ-sponsored events at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, to be held this year in Boston from March 22–25, is given on the first page and in the center of this newsletter. I look forward to seeing you in Boston for those events.