Professor Atsushi Makino of the Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, specialises in lifelong learning.  He is one of the Executive Directors of the Japan Education Research Association and The Japan Society for studies in Adult and Community Education.

Makino wrote the PIE (PASCAL International Exchanges) paper Quiet Dynamism of Local Communities -­ Restructuring of Grassroots Municipalities and Lifelong Learning in Japan for the city of Iida where he identifies the “turning point” in policy and practice across the nation.  Such changes are through a process of “decentralisation, diversification, and multiplication”.  How can the “Kōminkans” (community learning centres) become the “nodes of dynamic networks” sought in this transformation and “serve as the nucleus of future local communities, resistant to social changes?” he asks. 

This is what he perceives as a key question applicable to other countries at the Cities Learning Together conference that have cities in transition for lifewide development and lifelong learning.  That is, how do cities and communities help people “survive their lives proactively in response to globalisation and the trend toward a consumer society”? 

Keenly involved in administrative and educational system reform, Makino is engaged at local and national level government in the context of Japan’s social change.  He returned to senior posts in Japanese universities after 14 years with the National Institute of Educational Research in China.  Apart from the Japanese lifelong learning position in the East Asian Region, he is engaged in educational thought reform in modern China, community education in mainland China and Taiwan, and educational demographics in a diversifying society.