Japan Disaster Commemoration Event (at Columbia)

[Jonathan-Keisuke]

Dear Columbia Japan Relief,

My name is Jonathan Yanagawa, and I am a 5th-year undergraduate at Brown University. I learned about the various disaster-related events that your committee and Professor Eguchi has organized last year at Columbia, and I am writing to ask about a potential collaboration regarding the commemoration of the Japanese disaster. 

Several of us students from Brown, Dartmouth, UPenn, Princeton, Middlebury, and possibly Harvard or MIT, are planning a series of commemoration events for the Japanese earthquake among East Coast schools during the spring. As we approach the one year anniversary in March, this project seeks to provide an opportunity to reflect upon the disaster by learning about the current plight and hearing voices from the ground. We would like to host a panel of speakers who have been involved in the relief efforts to speak at all the participating universities, and we were wondering if you were interested in becoming part of this event series. Ideally, we would invite two speakers from Japan, and each participating school would host a lecture panel (for which we could potentially receive TEDxtalk approval) at their respective campus. Given that we have the majority of Ivy League schools participating in this series of events, we would very much like Columbia to host a lecture as well if possible.

Members from each of the delegate schools have already met together to begin reaching out to candidate speakers, but we would be more than happy to hear your input and fill you in on what we have decided so far. Please let me know if you have any questions, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Happy New Year,

Jonathan