We are pleased to return to our series that introducse you to members of OEGlobal Board of Directors. In this episode, we take you to Nagoya, Japan, for a conversation with Takaya Yamazato, who joined the board in 2024. Listen in to learn more about Takaya’s background, motivations, and vision for open education. You will also hear right in the opening music a fascinating insight into his many talents and his research into the micro details of one of the most iconic paintings.

As professor and Deputy Director at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Nagoya University, Takaya’s specializes in wireless and visual light communication and also leads Nagoya University’s OpenCourseWare initiative, working with faculty to publish and enhance course content. He describes how their OCW effort are much more than uploading content aimed at supporting materials to “preserve a legacy of teaching excellence.”

We offered Takaya the option to reply to our questions in his natural language, but he went beyond that in replying in both English and Japanese. He shared his responses in notes as a PDF we are sharing as a download, which is well worth looking at because Takaya added photos to show key locations near his location in Nagoya, a beautiful photo of him as a child, and examples of his open education achievements.

Side by side photos of Takaya Yamazota sitting in his office and Alan Levine in his home library.
In the OEGlobal Voices studio with Takaya Yamazota (left) and Alan Levine (right).

You find many inspiring and global level viewpoints from Takaya:

We believe that this is a message that will bring back the way of education from the bottom up. The education that a person needs now is to grow people who are able to do the right thing. We must grow people who are not just for efficiency, profit, or national gain, but also for the good of the world.

Open education has the potential to provide a space for that reflection. It can create opportunities for ethical reasoning, global dialogue, and personal transformation, not just academic advancement.

Takaya Yamazota

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Episode 84 TranscriptDownload

Notes on This Episode

We are pleased to offer this conversation with Takaya’s voice heard in both English and Japanese and offer a transcript of the English portions. Unfortunately the Descript editing tool we use was unable to process the dual languages, so we lack the usual listen option with the transcript and its GenAI summary.

The episode required additional editing in Audacity to add Takaya’s audio and we used MacWhisper to obtain a transcript of his responses in English. But we do offer as a bonus the full musical track that Takaya shared so we could we use in the episode’s introduction and closing. You should listen to the full episode to appreciate the story behind the music.

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 84

diverse regions and disciplines, all united by the belief that education should be freely available and socially meaningful.

It’s not just about strategy, it’s about values. And it’s given me hope that open education can help build bridges where politics cannot.

Takaya Yamazota

Italian researchers discovered the letters “LV” hidden in the Mona Lisa’s pupil, unseen for centuries, and only revealed thanks to modern technology with very precise microscope lenses.

Similarly, in telecommunications, the LDPC code was overlooked for decades before being rediscovered and becoming fundamental to today’s wireless standards.

And these examples remind us if we evaluate ideas only by today’s capabilities, we may miss tomorrow’s breakthrough.

That’s why our OCW is designed not just to present knowledge, but to inspire, reinterpretation, and rediscovering. I believe open education should be an invitation not just to learn, but to look again with new eyes.

Takaya Yamazota

Our open licensed music for this episode is “Ceramic Feeling” recorded from a live performance by Takaya’s band “Rough Diamonds” and is shared under a Creative Commons By Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

Rough Diamonds band featuring Takaya Yamazota on bass guitar, photos shared by Takaya Yamazota shared CC BY-NC-SA.