Only a few months ago, in March, I stood in Nagoya in a doctoral gown, received my degree, and celebrated the completion of my journey through Nagoya University's Asian Satellite Campuses Institute (ASCI). At the time, graduation understandably felt like an ending, the closing of a demanding but deeply rewarding chapter.

Then, from 31 July to 2 August, I took part in the Nagoya University Asia Academic Forum in Mongolia 2026, and something shifted in my understanding of what graduation meant.

Perhaps I had not left Nagoya University at all. Perhaps I had simply entered another part of it: its alumni community.

For a newly minted alumnus, the Forum was quite an introduction.

Under the theme “Brain Circulation and Interdisciplinary Collaboration through Alumni Networks,” the gathering brought together alumni, academics and friends of Nagoya University from Mongolia, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, alongside professors, alumni leaders and university staff from Japan. Hosted by the Nagoya University Alumni Association Mongolia Branch and co-hosted by Nagoya University and the National University of Mongolia, the Forum was designed not merely as a reunion but as a space where professional and academic relationships could cross both national and disciplinary boundaries. 

What struck me almost immediately was the extraordinary range of lives connected by one university.

Over those few days, I found myself among Nagoya graduates who had gone on to become university leaders and professors, judges and parliamentarians, senior government officials, scientists, physicians, researchers and professionals working across Asia. The participant profiles read almost like a map of where an education can lead: from ministries and supreme courts to laboratories, universities, hospitals and international organizations. 

For someone who had received his doctoral diploma only months earlier, this was both inspiring and humbling. It reminded me that the quality of a university is measured not only by what happens within its classrooms, laboratories or publications, but also by what its graduates eventually carry into the societies they serve.

President Sugiyama joined us in Ulaanbaatar, addressed the alumni gathering and delivered a keynote speech during the academic program. His presence seemed to convey something quite simple, but important: Nagoya University does not regard alumni as people who have merely completed their studies. It regards them as part of a continuing university community.

For me, that idea has particular significance because my own path to Nagoya was through ASCI.

The Asian Satellite Campuses Institute was created to make doctoral education accessible to leading professionals in Asian countries who could not simply put their careers and responsibilities aside and relocate to Japan for several years. Its transnational doctoral programs now extend across a number of countries and academic fields; Nagoya University reports more than 140 enrolments from 11 countries and more than 50 doctoral graduates. 

ASCI belongs to a broader history of Nagoya University creating pathways for professionals across Asia through international programs and partnerships. The numbers matter, but the human consequence matters more. Such programs allow people who might otherwise never have imagined themselves becoming Nagoya University graduates to enter a demanding international academic community without severing their connections to the institutions and societies in which they already work.

I am one of those people.

That is why I was particularly grateful to see Professor Akira Yamauchi, Director of the Asia Collaborative Development Department and one of the central figures behind ASCI, playing such an active role in the Forum. He chaired the alumni and overseas-center discussions as well as the plenary session on future collaboration. For those of us who came through ASCI, the professors and administrative colleagues who have built and sustained these programs represent something very tangible: they created the road by which we arrived at Nagoya.

The Forum also made me think about the future of our own alumni community in Mongolia. Nagoya graduates here are particularly prominent in law and medicine, and that is a legacy of which we can be genuinely proud. The gathering included Mongolian alumni who now occupy remarkable positions in the judiciary, healthcare, government and higher education. But I also hope our community will become increasingly diverse. As a graduate in education myself, I would be delighted to see more Mongolian educators, psychologists, environmental researchers, engineers and professionals from other fields walking the same path.

And then there was another privilege that came with hosting the Forum in Mongolia.

Usually, when academics travel abroad, we introduce our research.

This time, we were able to introduce our home, Mongolia.

The final day's cultural program took our guests out of Ulaanbaatar and into a setting where they could encounter something of the everyday life of Mongolian nomadic families. There were traditional costumes, music and dance, demonstrations of archery, horse racing and wrestling, and opportunities to experience the rhythms of nomadic life more closely. The official program called it a “Nomadic Life Experience.” Before long, however, it began to feel like our own miniature Naadam.

And, as we soon discovered, international academic cooperation becomes unexpectedly competitive when Mongolian wrestling is introduced.

Each delegation was invited to send a courageous representative against a real Mongolian bökh. Most countries sensibly offered one challenger. The Uzbek team apparently concluded that one attempt was not enough and sent more than one. Their ambition was admirable.

The outcome was less so.

Every international challenger was fairly defeated, with one disputed case.

Dr. Anniver Ryan P. Lapuz of the Philippines maintains that his defeat occurred only because, at the decisive moment, he was politely asking permission to remove his sunglasses. I leave future historians to determine whether this explanation warrants a revision of the official record. What I can confirm is that Anniver possessed an excellent sense of humor and kept us laughing throughout our time together.

The horse race produced an equally memorable experiment in decision-making under conditions of insufficient data.

Our international guests were invited to choose horses, but to most of them, understandably, a Mongolian racehorse looked very much like another Mongolian racehorse. Deprived of form guides, bloodlines and expert knowledge, many resorted to the universally reliable method of choosing their lucky numbers.

There was only one problem.

The horses were not numbered sequentially.

Several participants therefore placed their hopes on numbers belonging to no horse whatsoever. Perhaps, in statistical terms, those were the only horses guaranteed not to lose.

Yet the memories I value most are not the formal sessions or even the wrestling controversies. They are the warmth that accumulated in the spaces between them.

I was proud to serve on the organizing committee and was given responsibility for accompanying the Philippine delegation. Initially, I regarded this simply as one of my duties. Very quickly, it ceased to feel like one.

There was no single dramatic incident that created our bond. It was simply the accumulation of small moments, the conversations, jokes, meals, journeys and the remarkable ease with which they made the people around them feel welcome. They struck me as warm-hearted, original and wonderfully natural companions.

Perhaps the most unmistakably Philippine moment arrived during our final dinner. Someone at their table began singing. Then someone else joined. Soon the dining table had transformed itself, without planning or announcement, into karaoke. No encouragement seemed necessary. Singing simply happened.

Some cultural reputations, I discovered, withstand empirical testing remarkably well.

To my Philippine friends: thank you for the laughter, warmth and friendship you left behind in Mongolia.

The Cambodian delegation brought another, more unexpected pleasure. Among them was Dr. Sopheak Thav, whom I had met only a few months earlier in Nagoya. We were fellow ASCI graduates at the March gathering, where graduates presented their doctoral research and future plans and were honored on the occasion of receiving our doctoral diplomas. Finding him suddenly in Ulaanbaatar made the vast geography of Asia seem surprisingly small. It was also a lovely reminder that relationships formed through ASCI do not end at graduation. They simply begin appearing in unexpected places.

Our friends from Vietnam brought yet another kind of warmth. Their musical and cultural performance during the evening gathering gave the dinner an energy that no formal program could have produced. They were an exceptionally cheerful group, and their performance helped turn an international academic gathering into something closer to a celebration among friends.

Laos, meanwhile, was represented by Dr. Viengsakhone Louangpradith, who contributed to the healthcare session. Carrying an entire country's representation alone seems an unreasonable burden, so I have only one request for her:

Please bring reinforcements next time. We would be delighted to meet a much larger Lao delegation.

And then there were our friends from Uzbekistan.

Of all the conversations I had during the Forum, one with Dr. Aktam Jalilov remains especially vivid.

After visiting the museum, Aktam told me about seeing an ancient Turkic stone inscription. The sight of its unfamiliar but somehow culturally familiar characters reminded him of the historical roots of his own language and culture. The connection is a profound one. The Old Turkic, or Orkhon-Yenisei, runiform script preserved on monuments across Mongolia and southern Siberia belongs to the early written heritage of the Turkic world. The monumental inscriptions of the Orkhon Valley in present-day Mongolia, dating from the eighth century, are among its most important surviving examples. 

Modern Uzbek identity emerged centuries later through a complex process of Central Asian ethnogenesis. Yet the language and cultural world from which modern Uzbeks emerged forms part of that much larger Turkic historical continuum. The script Aktam encountered therefore did not belong to some entirely foreign civilization. It belonged to an older Turkic world whose linguistic and cultural inheritance spread far across Inner and Central Asia.

Aktam told me that, standing before it, he felt for a moment as though he had arrived in an ancestral land, as though he were meeting brothers separated by history.

I found that deeply moving.

The territory of present-day Mongolia has been home to successive nomadic states and cultures whose histories cannot be contained within modern national borders. UNESCO describes the Orkhon Valley itself as a landscape that became the center of successive Central Asian empires and preserves archaeological remains associated with Turkic and other nomadic civilizations. 

As Mongolians, we are proud to preserve that history. But I think there is an even greater reason for pride when someone from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or elsewhere in Central Asia stands before something here and thinks: this is also part of my story.

History does not always have to be something nations compete to possess. Sometimes it can be something that allows people to recognize one another. Perhaps that, too, is a useful metaphor for an alumni community.
We arrived in Ulaanbaatar carrying different passports, speaking different languages, working in disciplines that sometimes had very little to do with one another. Yet, over three days, we kept discovering common ground: Nagoya, shared teachers, shared programs, overlapping research interests, old friendships, new friendships, and occasionally much older connections than any of us expected.

None of this happened by itself.

My deepest gratitude goes to the Nagoya University Alumni Association Mongolia Branch, Nagoya University, the National University of Mongolia, the Nagoya University Mongolia Center, the Asia Collaborative Development Department, ASCI, the overseas offices and centers, and the many professors, administrative colleagues, organizers and volunteers who worked behind the scenes. The Forum program itself closes with an aspiration that the networks formed in Mongolia will continue to advance “brain circulation and interdisciplinary collaboration across Asia.” 

I had only a modest role in the organization, mostly beginning from the stage of welcoming and accompanying our international guests, and even I was exhausted by the end. Watching colleagues from Nagoya and Mongolia constantly moving between venues, schedules, guests and countless unseen problems gave me a new appreciation for the labor hidden behind a smoothly organized event.

I am especially grateful to our NUAL leaders, the Nagoya University leadership, Professor Yamauchi and his colleagues, and everyone who trusted Mongolia with the responsibility of bringing this community together. Their achievement was not simply a successful conference. They created a place in which a very new alumnus like me could begin to understand the community he had just joined.

I arrived at the Forum as someone who had graduated from Nagoya University. I left feeling that I belonged to it. 

Fortunately, the story does not end in Ulaanbaatar.

At the closing session, our Uzbek friends formally invited us to gather again at the Uzbekistan Alumni-Led Forum 2027. After the warmth, enthusiasm and formidable competitive spirit they brought to Mongolia, I have every confidence that they will be ambitious hosts.

This time, Mongolia had the privilege of welcoming the Nagoya family. Next time, Uzbekistan will welcome us.

And perhaps this is how a genuine alumni community is built: not simply by remembering the university where we once studied, but by continuing to meet, opening our countries to one another, discovering old connections and creating new ones, and finding, each time, that the Nagoya family is a little larger than we thought.

Written by Dr. Boldsuren Bishkhorloo, ASCI 2025 graduating cohort. 
　

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Thank you, Dr. Boldsuren, for sharing this beautiful and inspiring article with us. We are truly grateful for your thoughtful perspective as a proud graduate of ASCI!

Related articles:
https://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp/news/articles/alumni-networks-drive-new-wave-of-academic-collaboration-across-asia/