In 1991, Michio Tsutsui started the Technical Japanese Master’s Program at UW. It sought to provide an increasingly global economy with a niche workforce: bilingual engineers. This two-year program, which began admitting students from other disciplines in 2000, is the only one of its kind in America. It will shut down when Tsutsui retires in December. “You have to have a pool of bilingual specialists in key fields,” said Tsutsui, a professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering. “And most likely those people shouldn’t just be used as translators. The benefit is so limited. Rather, they should be working in the field.”