During the past week in Colorado Springs we have experienced all four seasons: pelting rain, snow—sufficient to cancel public schools and strand colleagues—blooming cherry trees and brilliantly warm sunshine. Those of you in other parts of the country may not see such an array of weather packed into a single week, but no doubt you share with me a sense that the academic year will end soon and summer begin. As I look back over the past year as President-elect of our association, I am grateful to many in ATJ who have provided important leadership, both as our representatives to the outside as well as strengthening the association from within. I experienced first-hand the results of Naomi McGloin's organizational skills and the hard work of the 2006 Seminar Committee and many other volunteers at the International Conference on Japanese Language Education (ICJLE) last August at Columbia University in New York, co-hosted by ATJ and National Council of Japanese Language Teachers (NCJLT). The conference was an unmitigated success, with varied panels of high quality, inspiring speakers, and an impressive gathering of scholars from around the world. Wesley Jacobsen represented our association at the Tōronkai at ICJLE and has challenged all members of ATJ to find ways to secure the financial future of ATJ through the creation of an endowment so that we can be less dependent on soft grant money. I look forward to continuing to work in my next capacity of President of ATJ with members of the executive board in furthering these goals.

In my autobiographical blurb that appeared last year on the election slate for ATJ president, I expressed my interest in continuing "to explore further opportunities to learn from each other through sharing our scholarship and successful classroom practices. " In order to keep the field of Japanese vibrant and accessible to ever-widening groups of students (not just those on the academic track), we need to keep looking for innovative and diversified ways to teach language, culture, and literature. I encourage you to continue to develop such courses and to share them with others at future ATJ seminars.

We all share a common goal: that of using Japanese to open up other worlds to our students, to make the "other" another way to look at the world. In his thought-provoking and inspiring keynote presentation at this year's ATJ Seminar in Boston, "Nostalgia for the mother tongue: How Tora-san, Murakami Haruki, Kobayashi Hideo, and other assorted characters are perpetually trying to go home," Prof. Hosea Hirata showed clips from the Tora-san film series to emphasize the connection between the mother tongue and furusato. Perhaps one of our goals is to help students appreciate the emotional appeal of furusato and to recognize its many manifestations and expressions.

Six years ago I was given the opportunity to address some of you at the ATJ general membership meeting to talk about a special issue on "Teaching Asian Literatures" that I had edited for the AAS publication Education About Asia. I advocated the use of literature across the curriculum—using literary texts to better understand history, politics, and culture. The panels at the ATJ seminar this year showed me that Japanese is moving closer to our Level 1 and 2 language friends where a course in French Literature is taught in French or one in German Film is taught in German. No doubt there are quite a few Japanese programs around the country that offer similar kinds of content-based instruction of literature and history on the undergraduate level. This is a welcome change from when I was in graduate school (what seems like a short time ago); all of the graduate level literature courses were taught in English, although we read Japanese texts.

With the advent of the new Japanese AP program, I predict that over the next five to ten years we will see more and more high school students enter our college programs with a substantial background in Japanese. Being able to offer discipline-based or interdisciplinary courses in Japanese will provide these students with linguistic and analytic tools unheard of a decade ago and will give them an incentive to delve further into Japanese studies. We will also need to continue to work on articulation between high school and university, using the 5Cs—culture, communication, comparison, community, and connection—to provide our students an entrée into another world.

Among the wide variety of topics offered in the panels of this year's ATJ seminar in Boston, in addition to panels that discussed literary and linguistic analyses, I was interested to note an increase in pedagogy panels dealing with an array of topics: acquisition, culture, immersion programs, interaction, discourse, study abroad, grammar instruction, instruction to hard-of-hearing students, teaching/learning resources, and technology. In order to provide a venue for the dissemination of pedagogical ideas, I have proposed to the ATJ Board and the Editors of our journal that we explore ways to share this information in a peer-reviewed format. While discussion is still under way, the tentative date for this special issue will be the fall of 2008. This special issue of the ATJ journal will help us share new ways of teaching language and discipline-based courses.

I look forward to working with you to in particular during the coming year of my presidency to promote the teaching of Japanese language, literature, linguistics, and pedagogy.