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This article discusses the impacts of the East Asian Leaders Program (EALP) organized as a trilateral collaborative educational program participated by students from Japanese, Chinese, and Korean universities. The East Asian Leaders Program has been operated under the CAMPUS Asia initiative led by the governments of the three countries, aiming at cultivating talents who contribute to promoting mutual understanding between the three countries. The empirical analysis of this study was designed by a mixed method approach collected from 16 Japanese students. The results showed that the East Asian Leaders Program has cultivated students’ attitudes and skills for mutual understanding, including acceptance/willingness to understand, ability to consider different perspectives, self-expression and assertion, and initiative and resilience. As this study indicates that the East Asian Leaders Program is effective for fostering students’ attitudes toward mutual understanding, further policy development should consider encouraging universities to develop such practices to increase intra-Asian student mobility as an alternative strategy for the internationalization of higher education.

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19nerships, is strongly concentrated on Russia, other postSoviet countries, and neighboring countries.At the same time, Kazakhstan's universities are aware of their comparative advantage in higher education provision among Central Asian countries. The respondents in our study mentioned that the recruitment of foreign students should not exclusively focus on European countries. Instead, more attention should be paid to attract more students from neighboring countries. Whether this institutional demand fits into the national strategy, and thus gains support from the government, remains to be seen. The Language GapLanguage can also create a sense of distance: poor proficiency in foreign languages, particularly in English, is reported to be another major barrier to internationalization. Participants in our study frequently cite this as an obstacle at various levels: for instance, student and faculty mobility, research collaboration, and international office operations. This also extends to the lack of availability of Englishlanguage programs in Kazakhstani institutions, as well as qualified teaching staff. In comparison, respondents who report excelling in foreign languages see this as a strength for developing international partnerships. The rectors of those institutions lagging behind in foreign languages say that they are investing in improving language proficiency as an important step toward internationalization. Open Dialogue and CooperationThe above factors certainly do not cover every aspect of the process of internationalization of higher education in Kazakhstan, and further research in our project will look into these. Even so, one can see key areas of potential challenges that the Kazakhstani government and higher education institutions face. In the first place, there is a wide gap between Kazakhstan and more developed countries in terms of internationalization. Secondly, there is also a gap developing within the country between institutions, particularly between metropolitan and regional ones. The Kazakhstani government has demonstrated its ambition to internationalize its higher education institutions, as evidenced by its policies and financial support. Higher education institutions are also actively participating in the process. However, there needs to be a more open dialogue and closer cooperation between the government and institutions to align their visions and construct effective support mechanisms, in order to make further progress in internationalization.

Despite intensive research efforts over the past 3 decades, the structural analysis of sulfur-vulcanized natural rubber (NR) remains challenging owing to the complexity and low population of its sulfur moieties. Herein, solid vulcanized NR samples and NR samples reacted with sulfur and other reactants in an organic solvent were analyzed by solid-state NMR with fast magic-angle spinning and solution NMR, respectively. The present high-field two-dimensional NMR analysis revealed six novel sulfur moieties in these samples, including cyclic sulfides, cyclic di/polysulfides, and crosslinked structures with a vinylidene group. While previous studies reported a variety of sulfur-crosslinked structures in NR, our analysis identified only two dominant types of crosslinked structures that matched those reported previously. Our NMR assignments for the crosslinked structures were inconsistent to a large extent with those presented in the previous studies; thus, in the current work, the crosslinked structures were reassigned using the new data. Based on quantitative NMR analysis, this study also provides the first tangible evidence that cyclic rather than crosslinked sulfides can be the dominant sulfur moieties in vulcanized NR. These results may drastically alter the previously established structural landscape of sulfur-vulcanized NR.