Big History in Japan: Introduction

Our moderator Yuri MATSUZAKI is microbiologist and Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, a leading university in science in Japan. She has studied big history with Hirofumi Katayama and others through the Big History Collegium based in J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo and now proposes a transition from story-telling to story-exchange for fertilizing origin stories of the new age.


Hirofumi KATAYAMA is a man who made unparalleled contributions to the development of big history education at undergraduate level in Japan. As Professor of environmental economics and Director of our co-host, the Oberlin Big History Movement (OBHM) at J.F. Oberlin University in Tokyo, he opened a Course that was formally titled Big History for the first time in Japan (2016) that covers 13.8 billion years of history and envisions the future; began the first Big History Seminar in Japan with intensive reading of big history writings and convened the first international big history symposium in Japan (2019); and finally established the first-ever Big History Major/ Minor program in the world that includes about forty related courses as well as the Big History Collegium to study big history with outside scholars, specialists and the general public (2021). In his view, human-centric capitalism has led to two major challenges: biodiversity loss and climate change. Using Julian Huxley’s evolutionary humanism as a clue to rethink such consequences, Katayama tries to conceive an alternative thought – what he calls “cosmic humanism” – that falls into neither human-centrism nor denying the value and meaning of human existence.