Although the program unfortunately concluded in academic year 2020, the questions it raised and tackled over the course of a decade remain valid today, as the path that Japan took in the postwar years and how it has interacted with Asian neighbors continue to provide lessons today. Taking on the legacy of the Japan-Asia Studies Program, a new lecture series has been devised under the leadership of Professor Shigeto Sonoda, and we are most appreciative to have the opportunity to be able to publish the lecture transcripts as a Global Asian Studies report. Asia has been described as being “near and yet so far” from Japan, and wars of the past remain embedded in Asia’s present. It has been said that there are two trends in Japan’s international cooperation during the postwar period. One is the “international line,” which aims at international public interest in line with predominantly Western perspectives, and the other is the “domestic line,” which has its origins in postwar reparations. The Cross-boundary Cancer Studies network traces its own origins to the Asian Cancer Registry and Information Network meeting held in Nanjing in 2007 (the “Nanjing Conference”), and this network has continued to this day, following in large part the “domestic line.” https://www.nature.com/articles/450772c In 2022, war revisited Europe for yet another time in its history, and the future of Japan’s postwar relationship with China, which has long been questioned and considered, and which Cross-Boundary Cancer Studies has dedicated much effort to nurturing, is now facing an uncertain future. Could we really dare to hope that by facing together the vexatious challenge of cancer we could transcend past hatred and suspicion and work together to share issues that are common to all Asian societies, thus enabling pan-Asian solidarity? Can we create wisdom sufficient enough to overcome the foolishness and original sin of human existence through Cross-boundary Cancer Studies? It is with such hopes lodged in our hearts that since 2011 we have been conducting interdisciplinary cancer research based on the late Dr. Akaza’s firmly-held belief that “cancer is a mirror.”

Cross-boundary Cancer Studies is a lecture series designed to decipher the present state of Asia through both the uniqueness and universality inherent in cases of cancer, but it has proved difficult in practice to share questions and devise a system through which to provide the lectures during the course of the academic term. The advantage of interdisciplinary research is that examining multiple areas at once may result in new discoveries that individual researchers had previously been unaware of. However, when collecting and deciphering cases based on such diverse perspectives and specialties, we nonetheless felt the necessity for some kind of unifying baseline perspective that would undergird our research and study. Moreover, even within Asia, as medical care has become ever more sophisticated and the values being pursued are increasingly converging with those of the West, we struggled with the question of how to ascertain a real picture of Asia that would take into account both the high degree of regional disparities, coupled with the high universality of cancer medicine. It was with these issues and considerations in mind that from this year, the program shifted focus to throw a spotlight on Malaysia, based on the BEAUTY (Bringing Education And Understanding To You) Program, an actual program supported by the Sustainability Division of Astellas Pharma Inc. https://www.astellas.com/en/sustainability/program-in-malaysia In cooperation with the National Cancer Society Malaysia (NCSM), the goal of the learning process was to provide the participants with both opportunities to learn and to make their own suggestions regarding the BEAUTY Program. The BEAUTY Program is targeting more than one million Malaysian residents and involves various processes, including the establishment of a database for cancer education, a cancer prevention registry portal, and community participation sessions for raising cancer awareness in the local community. These processes are focused primarily on beauty salons and barber shops as community touchpoints. This community-based approach has real potential to go beyond a narrow circle of researchers and truly involve local communities, accumulating the combined power not only of medical science, but also of humanities and social sciences, to decipher and better understand the current state of Malaysia, and, more broadly, a fast-changing Asia. Forty years ago, around the time when the Look East Policy began in Malaysia, I was a student at Waseda University. It was during my time as a student working for the Japan-side partner organization of the ASEAN Council of Japan Alumni (ASCOJA) that I first started to be involved with Malaysia. Later, I made a promise with Mr. Tanaka Nichijun, a Buddhist monk who was a prison chaplain for Class-BC war criminal, to 'do our utmost to overcome the tragic legacy of war. That is what has driven me to continue the activities of the Asian Cancer Forum. Having become deeply involved in the BEAUTY Program in Malaysia, I can now appreciate that neither of the abovementioned traditional approaches to international cooperation are truly applicable to the current reality. I understand most keenly that facing the realities of 21st-century Asia means more than Japan simply trying to atone for a past war, or imposing Western logic in the course of providing poverty relief. We must find an approach that is imbued with an entirely Asian perspective. Seeking as it does to realize a world in which no-one is left behind, the concept of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) could also be perceived as a riddle: in a world in which the progress of science has blessed us with increased longevity, but at the expense of increased cancer incidence, how can humanity survive with limited and finite resources, while also giving free rein to human ambitions and aspirations?