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For those of you who are interested in trends of music therapy around of the world, I would love to report on our annual conference held in September. The theme of this three-day conference was “The Identity of Music Therapy – Its Professionality and Generality.” Though it was held in Sapporo, Hokkaido, which is in the far north of Japan, we had a large number of attendees.Many of the attendees participated in the pre-conference seminars on September 11th. We were allowed to choose one of five topic/population areas for each timeslot: theory, elderly adults, mental health, children, and workshops. Five guest speakers from overseas were Dr. Gerhard Kupski, Dr. Helen Odell-Miller, Dr. Jacqueline Robarts, Dr. Karin Schumacher, and Dr. Stuart Wood. Japanese music therapists are always enthusiastic about music therapy techniques in other countries even though it is difficult to use them without adapting to our culture. One great thing I noticed about the seminars on children, which I attended, was that the seminar topics were related each other. Most of them touched on emotional attunement, and so it was like one long seminar.The conference on September 12th and 13th also sparked our passion for learning. Attendees were busy looking at the program because there was a special symposium by keynote speakers, three special lectures, 10 symposia, 41 oral presentations, and 92 poster sessions. We also had a special program this year – lectures on how to give a presentation in English. The aim of this program was, needless to say, to encourage Japanese music therapists to take a chance and present at WCMT 2017.Unfortunately, the number of paper submissions to the JMTA journal seems to be decreasing lately. We love to learn, but we hesitate to speak up. I hope WCMT 2017 will be a great chance to move forward for us!Kumi Sato, JapanWFMT Student Delegate for the Western Pacific(Untitled illustration of map of Japan obtained November 1, 2015 from http://free-illustrations.gatag.net/2013/10/07/220000.html)
