Three alumni of Nagoya University successfully translated a Japanese legal textbook on public international law into Uzbek language. Dr. Alisher Umirdinov (LLM 2009, LLD 2012) (photo), Ahadjon Khakimov (LLM 2017) and Dr. Husain Radjapov (LLM 2016) introduced Nobuyuki Kato and others, Visual Textbook of International Law (Yuhikaku, 2017) to Uzbek students in a local language in Tashkent by the end of 2021. The translated textbook also successfully got the official permission from the Ministry of Higher Education of Uzbekistan and now it is considered as an officially recommended textbook in Uzbekistan.

Getting into uncharted waters of translation world, it took almost 3 years for Nagoya University alumni to get the book ready in their mother language. The greatest difficulty was how to deal with copyright issues of pictures that have been used in the original textbook in Japan. Dr. Alisher Umirdinov, current associate professor at Nagoya University of Economics still vividly remembers that difficult period:

“We were literally lost. The amount required for the financing copyright issues of visual materials was huge and the project was about to enter deadlock. At last, what we did is to take a contact with our alma mater, especially professor Dai Yokomizo and to ask financial help for this extremely important educational project in Uzbekistan.”

Thanks to extraordinary financial support from the Asian Legal Professionals Support Program of the Graduate School of Law (GSL) and from the Asian Satellite Campuses Institute (ASCI) of Nagoya University, and to a very sophisticated technical support of professor Dai Yokomizo of Nagoya University GSL, the translation project was finally completed in September of 2021 and subsequently published in December of that year. One of the members of our translation project, Ahadjon Khakimov (LLM 2017), who is senior lecturer at Tashkent State University of Law, notified that the translated book got a huge attention and many university students are now reading it in their international law courses in Uzbekistan.

Importantly, the translation of Visual Textbook of International Law is just one part of a big translation project that has started by Nagoya University alumni in Uzbekistan. Project members are also aiming to complete and publish the translation of several well-known Japanese legal textbooks in their country during 2022.