English
Shozo YOKOYAMA, Ph.D.
The English education team comprises four instructors—one a native British speaker—responsible for diverse programs tailored to healthcare contexts. They teach general English alongside specialized courses such as English for Medical Professionals and English for Nursing Professionals, which prepare students for international clinical communication. Additional offerings include preparatory English for overseas placements and targeted language support for university administrative staff.
The group also delivers medical communication training in Japanese, grounded in Non-Violent Communication (NVC) principles developed by Marshall Rosenberg. This initiative seeks to embed empathetic, non-confrontational dialogue in clinical settings. By emphasizing compassionate listening and honest expression, the program helps future healthcare workers reduce misunderstandings, ease tension, and foster deeper, more humane connections with patients—addressing relational dimensions often sidelined in conventional biomedical education.
In the liberal arts curriculum for medical, nursing, and health sciences students, three instructors teach Medical Humanities. This interdisciplinary field—still relatively rare in Japanese medical schools—explores intersections between medicine and areas such as literature, ethics, philosophy, history, and culture. It encourages reflection on illness, healing, suffering, and care through humanistic lenses, nurturing ethical reasoning, cultural sensitivity, and narrative awareness alongside scientific expertise.
A particularly innovative course within this framework is “Acting the Heart, Listening to Life Stories: Learning Dialogue and Empathy through Playback Theatre”. Drawing on Playback Theatre—an improvisational form where performers spontaneously reenact real-life stories shared by participants—students actively practice deep listening, storytelling, and embodied expression. The method engages cognitive intelligence (analytical understanding), emotional intelligence (empathy and feeling), and somatic intelligence (physical awareness), helping learners develop the capacity to truly receive and honor patients’ personal narratives. In patient-centered care, this ability to transform lived stories into therapeutic resources is viewed as essential. The course thus aims to produce not only technically skilled clinicians but also compassionate, fully human practitioners attuned to the emotional and existential aspects of illness.
Complementing these classroom efforts is a distinctive international clinical placement program. For the past 20 years, the institution has continuously dispatched students for one-month clinical rotations at partner universities and hospitals in countries including Thailand, Taiwan, China, Italy, Slovenia, and others. Launched with the first group sent to Thailand two decades ago, the program has run uninterrupted and remains uncommon in Japanese undergraduate medical education. Its sustained quality and impact earned official recognition from Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) as a Good Practice (GP) exemplar, highlighting its role in cultivating cross-cultural competence and global perspectives.
Collectively, these integrated initiatives—specialized medical/nursing English, NVC-informed empathetic communication, a rare Medical Humanities curriculum featuring Playback Theatre, and a pioneering two-decade overseas placement program—represent a comprehensive, forward-thinking approach to health professions education. They deliberately extend beyond the traditional emphasis on biomedical knowledge and procedural skills to develop graduates who are linguistically capable, interculturally fluent, narratively sensitive, emotionally intelligent, and globally aware. In doing so, the programs aspire to educate reflective, compassionate professionals ready to deliver humane, patient-centered care in increasingly diverse and complex healthcare environments.
