The Tradition and Inheritance of Hosei Accounting Spun by "Writings"--Exchange between Alumni and Current Students that Transcends the 60-year Era (Professor KAWASHIMA Kenji, Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Business Administration)

University classes transformed by COVID-19

It has been two years since the corona disaster began. During this time, the university has undergone a complete transformation in the way classes are taught and the learning styles of students. My accounting class has also taken on an online format, with class videos available on demand to approximately 350 students. As a matter of fact, for subjects such as bookkeeping and accounting, which involve a lot of memorizing techniques and rules, there are many learning advantages to on-demand classes that students can watch repeatedly at their own pace whenever they want. However, its biggest drawback, I believe, is the inability to build connections among students, in other words, the inability to make friends among students. What can be done to alleviate students' sense of loneliness and isolation?

Therefore, in my class, I decided to create a system in which comments and questions about the class videos are constantly shared among all students, and further comments and answers are given by students to the content of the videos. In other words, it is an attempt to build an online platform for students to connect with each other on the theme of accounting classes, and to add new value to the classes by collecting and connecting the diverse information and opinions of each student.

One e-mail received from an alumnus 60 years ago

Just as we were thinking about ways to further strengthen the connection among students, we received an e-mail from an alumnus who had studied at TUAT about 60 years ago. The person was Dr. Katsuo Wajiki, who had qualified as a certified public accountant while still a student at TUAT, and after graduation had been engaged in domestic and international auditing practice at a foreign audit firm, and had also been involved in education and research at TUAT.

In his e-mail, he mentioned that he would like to donate his library to the university when he moves to a new house. So we asked him to send us 12 cardboard boxes of his collection to see its contents. The books ranged from academic Japanese and foreign books on accounting and auditing, books on the companies and industries he was in charge of auditing, and books and materials he used in planning the accounting and auditing systems he was involved in.

While sorting through his collection, one book caught my eye, which at first glance showed that he had read it thoroughly. It was "Fundamentals of Accounting" by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, published in 1960, and was the textbook that Dr. Wajiki had actually used and studied during his university days. I was surprised when I opened the book. I was surprised to find a large number of "writings" in the margins, written by Dr. Wajiki at that time. I stopped my organizing work and lost no time in reading each and every one of his writings. I caught glimpses of Mr. Wajiki's thinking that went beyond the contents of the textbooks, and it was a strange sensation as if I had time-traveled 60 years back in time.

In the lower left margin, he wrote: "All corporate activities are monitored in terms of expenses/expenses and revenues/income, and the excess of revenues over expenses/expenses over the total revenues/income is calculated as profit. The main points of the profit perspective of the so-called revenue-cost approach, which was the practice in the 1960s, are written in dark blue letters by a fountain pen.

In the upper right margin, the English word "Going Concern," a term that is frequently used in practice today, is written. It must have been a cutting-edge term at that time. The so-called Going Concern audit started in Japan in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2003, more than 40 years after this article was written.

The educational resource of "writing" utilized in the Corona Disaster

After reading it, I considered the writing itself to be an extremely valuable and unique educational resource. I immediately took pictures of some of the writing and distributed them to current students, and received numerous positive responses, which seemed to be refreshing for many students accustomed to digital teaching materials. Some of them said they were proud to study accounting at a university with such a long tradition, and I felt that this was a positive response that would motivate students to learn more.

In my classes, I now instruct students not to stop at just reading Professor Wajiki's writings, but to "practice" the writings themselves. Students write in their textbooks as much detail as possible about what they have researched and discussed in and out of class, and then share this information with all students. Each student regularly takes a picture of his or her textbook with a smartphone and posts the image online, so that everyone can learn from each other's writings. This is another new class experiment made possible by the Corona Disaster and the online connection of all students.

Examples of writing practices by current students: Students share not only the content of their schoolmates' writing, but also their own particular writing style, such as the use of color and sticky notes. In class, a "writing contest" in which students vote for their favorite writing is held as a sideshow to motivate students to write. The winner, Kosei Miyashita (Faculty of Business Administration, 3rd year, upper center), said, "I love Hosei University, so I used more orange and blue highlighters, which are the university's colors." He created his own special page by writing technical terms and the meaning of the class content while chewing on it.

Interaction between alumni and current students carries on the tradition of Hosei Accounting

The 1960s, when Dr. Wajiki was enrolled as a university student, was in the midst of Japan's period of rapid economic growth. At that time, those who studied accounting at the university must have been working hard in their studies with high aspirations to contribute to Japan's economic development as advanced accountants. Now, more than 60 years later, the current students are absorbing a great deal of knowledge and passionate spirit from the writings of their seniors, feeling the breath of those seniors as they write. It is an exchange between seniors and current students that transcends the time of 60 years.

Good friends, good seniors, and good ties - through the writings of our seniors, we are strongly hoping that the tradition of Hosei Accounting will be carried on in the present, and that it will lead to further development in the future.

(First published in Hosei University Hoyukai Bulletin, No. 32, July 2022)