The AATJ Lifetime Achievement Awards honor members of AATJ who have demonstrated a lifetime of achievement in Japanese education at the national and international level.
Mari Noda
Professor Mari Noda’s long career as a Japanese educator began when she became a Japanese lecturer at Cornell University in 1976. After teaching at Cornell for many years with the late Professor Eleanor Jorden, she received a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell in 1990 and then taught at The Ohio State University for 33 years, from 1990 to 2023. She also served as the Director of the Language Program at the Kyoto Consortium for Japan Studies (and as a Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University) during the 2008–2009 academic year. Additionally, she was an Instructor of Japanese at Portland State University (1987–1990), the Japanese Program Director in the International Engineering Program at the University of Cincinnati (summer 1992), and the Director of the Language Program in the Japan Study Program for the Great Lakes College Association (summers 1987–1993).
Noda-sensei has been a leader and champion of Japanese education, serving as the President of ATJ (the predecessor to AATJ) from 2008 to 2009, as a Board member, and as the Chair of the Study Abroad Special Interest Group for nearly two decades, shaping the organization’s direction and advancing its mission. She has contributed to the fields of Japanese education and Japanese studies at the local, state, national, and international levels. In addition to teaching at The Ohio State University, she has trained future educators through numerous teacher training workshops. Furthermore, she has authored articles and books on Japanese education, as well as textbooks and multimedia materials.
I am deeply honored to receive this award from AATJ. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the AATJ officers for their tireless work on behalf of the organization, and to all those who made this award possible. I am indebted to my colleagues, whose insightful ideas and invaluable feedback have been inspirational. I feel truly blessed to have had the opportunity to work with both graduate and undergraduate students, whose dedication, creativity, and innovative ideas continue to energize me.
The highlight of my career has been working with more than 2,000 participants in the teacher-training programs, particularly those offered by the Alliance for Language Learning and Educational Exchange (ALLEX) and its predecessor Exchange: Japan, as well as The Ohio State’s Summer Programs East Asian Concentration (SPEAC). I share this honor with them, my fellow trainers, and the dedicated staff members who have made these programs possible.
I am indebted to my mentor, the late Eleanor Harz Jorden, whose principled approach to linguistic analysis and language pedagogy guided me. Finally, I want to thank my family members near and far, especially my husband and co-conspirator, Galal Walker, and my daughter, Amelia Nakahata, for their patience, wisdom, and good humor.
