日本語で読んでください

The spotlight is on Tsukuru Nukamori, Japan Electronics College, Japan.

Japan Electronics College (JEC) is a vocational training institute specializing in computer, electrical, and electronic engineering. Located in Tokyo Shinjuku, it has 25 departments across nine fields including computer graphics, animation, game development, information processing, digital transformation, and electrical engineering. Enrollment is around 3,000 students per year.

The school’s mission is to ‘cultivate engineers and creators who will shape a new era,’ and it does so by ‘training beginners to become professionals.’ To that end, it consistently hires faculty members with industry experience and favors industry-academia joint curriculum development. One outstanding result has been a graduate employment rate of 90.7% (March 2025).

In the ‘creator field’, many graduates have contributed computer animations to major hit films, whilst others in the ‘IT field’ have made an impact in Japanese theme parks, railways, subways, airports, and construction. For 2026, JEC has announced that it will introduce a four-year professional game development course of study in the Department of Advanced Game Development.

In all JEC departments, over half of the curriculum is dedicated to skills development through hands-on practice, while also delivering theory covering essential computer operations, software basics, and introductory industry-specific technologies, including a laboratory equipped by Oracle Academy. In fact, JEC was the first college in Japan to adopt Oracle Academy resources for joint curriculum development, resulting in teaching resources for the IT Department’s two- and three-year Information Processing and Information Systems Development courses.

Faculty member Tsukuru Nukamori incorporates the Oracle Academy database, Java, and cloud resources into his classes geared to preparing graduates to become systems engineers, database engineers, and project managers.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from Waseda University, Tokyo, and entered the commercial world in start-ups focused on web development, Java, and Linux. He eventually founded his own business before transitioning into teaching 20 years ago.

Oracle Academy: What is the makeup of your classes and teaching resources?

Tsukuru Nukamori: I am in charge of the Department of Advanced Information Processing. Most students are between 18 and 21 years old, having entered right after graduating from high school. However, there are also students in their 30s, so the age range is quite broad. The Department of Advanced Information Processing offers a three-year course, where the students tend to be relatively young. Each class has about 50 students.

Including myself, there are four full-time and 10 part-time instructors. We all have received Oracle Academy training, and many of us hold Oracle Master certification. I myself have been working with Oracle databases and open-source databases since 1998 in business-related systems development jobs. The other instructors also have experience as system engineers in the IT industry.

In addition to furthering our technical skills training, we also participate in training sessions focused on teaching methodology and student mental health support. I recently attended a course on counseling techniques for students with developmental disorders.

Oracle Academy: That’s great. In teaching, do you use the full curriculum from Oracle Academy for your database classes?

Tsukuru Nukamori: What I do — because the curriculum is very comprehensive and goes into a high level of technical detail — is selectively extract specific parts of the coursework into digestible overviews, tailoring the content to suit the level and needs of my students. Despite somewhat simplifying the excellent slides, case studies and quizzes, I find the database and Java resources from Oracle Academy to be invaluable to us as teachers.

Oracle Academy: We understand that you also use the Oracle Academy Cloud Program?

Tsukuru Nukamori: Using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) environment is a cost-effective way to provide cloud learning and teaching. The hands-on experience with OCI gives students practical knowledge of cloud computing, data management, and deployment, which is crucial in today’s job market. In my classes, I show Oracle virtual machines and the Oracle Autonomous Database. In the first semester of the third year, during the Cloud Systems course, they learn how to launch VM instances, build application servers using PHP and other technologies, create autonomous databases, and establish connections from the application servers to the databases. Alongside this, I also teach foundational concepts such as storage, networking, containers, and security.

Oracle Academy: Do they incorporate OCI into their graduation and advancement projects?

Tsukuru Nukamori: Certainly. Last year for example, students working in small teams created a number of capstone projects required in the undergraduate final year. One of them — using JPages to split web content into pages and lists — used Oracle Cloud to create a MySQL database and a web server, with Laravel deployed for the backend and React for the front-end.

Let me enumerate a few more graduate projects from last year using OCI and Oracle databases: a service to support a cycling tour; a task management app; a smart lock service; an algorithm learning program; apps for tourism, on-campus goods exchange, and others.

For advancement projects, required for assessing promotion to the next academic year, students work in pairs to develop a system around a common theme. Last year’s theme was Table Ordering, a reservation system for restaurants and live music events.

I am very pleased to have access to OCI at no cost, which provides a development environment for these important graduation and advancement projects.

Oracle Academy: Are you considering any other resources down the line?

Tsukuru Nukamori: We are interested in exploring how the course Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning in Java could be applied in relevant subjects in the future, and how to integrate or introduce parts of it within existing curricula.

Oracle Academy: Great! Lastly, what are your interests outside of teaching?

Tsukuru Nukamori: Since I have taught IT subjects, I’ve naturally been interested in the future evolution and advancement of the technology.

In particular, I am interested in the progress of its implementation in the physical society, such as autonomous driving and robotics, as well as its applications in fields like finance and life sciences.

Thank you, Tsukuru Nukamori, for your passion for Oracle Academy and for preparing your students to make a positive impact.