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May. 28, 2004 The 1st International Dyslexia Symposium in Japan was A Great Success Maki Koyama, University Laboratory of Oxford

RIKEN and Oxford-Kobe Joint International Symposium was held in Kobe from 18th until 20th April 2004 with the aim to kindle Japanese people's interest in dyslexia. The symposium comprised two parts: the Open Day on 18th for the general public and the Workshops on 19th and 20th mainly for researchers and specialists. The Open Day successfully integrated science with education, with participation of Japanese educationalist, policy makers, teachers, parents and the press. We hope that this will lead to further recognition of dyslexia in Japan, which allows researchers to understand the nature of dyslexia and subsequently to form the standard diagnostic criteria for Japanese dyslexia and appropriate educational intervention programmes. The Workshop stimulated experts on dyslexia and reading from biological, physiological and psychological fields. 19 researchers from 6 countries and 11 researchers from Japan congregated in Kobe to share their academic knowledge and interest. Languages they approached in their research are alphabetic (i.e. English, Finnish) and logographic (Japanese, Chinese), thus cross-linguistic effects on dyslexia and reading were highlighted as we expected. Despite success of the symposium, in reality, the question -"what is dyslexia?" - still puzzles many people in Japan. Developmental Dyslexia is defined as unexpected difficulty in learning to read and write despite having normal general intelligence and educational opportunity. Sadly, it often deprives children of their motivation and self-esteem. In the UK and the USA, its prevalence is estimated between 5% and 17%. However, it has been argued that dyslexia is far less prevalent in Japan or China because these languages use logographic rather than alphabetic, phoneme-based, scripts. More precisely, Chinese characters or Kanji words are read at the whole word level (i.e. holistic), while English words are analyzed based on knowledge of orthographic-phonological correspondences (i.e. analytic). However, recent findings suggest that reading logographic scripts, in particular, Chinese, may significantly rely on phonological processing like English does, albeit with further investigation needed. In addition, genetic, physiological and brain imaging studies have shown that developmental dyslexia results from impaired development of auditory, visual and motor aspects of brain function, irrespective of language. Combining aforementioned findings with the fact that the existence of dyslexia has been reported in both China and Japan, and it is now considered that a common brain anomaly may manifest itself in rather different ways between logographic and alphabetic languages. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude again to Dr. Kobayashi of CRN for his participation in the symposium as one of the chairs, and Ms. Tokoro of CRN for helping to advertise the symposium in the CRN website. In line with the goal of CRN that people from different disciplines work together to better understand children, I believe that research on dyslexia and reading in Japanese will provide educational implications for Japanese children with learning difficulties in reading and writing. My experience of organizing this symposium served as the first step of my research into the understanding of Japanese dyslexia. Let's Talk!

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