German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo (DIJ) Podcast

Money and parenting are two key factors that can bring considerable joy or misery to our daily lives. Empirical studies have shown that while money is generally associated with greater happiness, having small kids can actually be a source of unhappiness, especially for women. In this session, two experts – a sociologist and an economist – explore the intricate relationship between money, parenting and happiness, from a comparative and historical perspective. Professor Ono will present international evidence of marriage, parenting and happiness. Generally, marriage has a positive effect, and parenting has a negative effect on happiness, but there are some exceptions. For example in Scandinavia, the negative effect of parenting disappears, owing largely to the extensive social insurance and institutionalized family support. Another consistent pattern found around the world is that the negative effect of parenting is stronger among women than for men. Professor Ono will also discuss some features of marriage, parenting and happiness that are unique to Japan. Professor Doepke will apply the tools of economic analysis to explain the relationship between love, money and parenting, and how we raise our kids. Loving parents want their kids to be happy and do well, but how to accomplish this is shaped by the economic environment. In countries with high economic inequality such as the United States, parents push hard to ensure their children have a path to security and success. In less unequal nations such as Sweden, the stakes in parenting are less high, and parents can relax and grant more independence to their children. Professor Doepke will also show how the trend towards intensive parenting in many countries puts social mobility and equality of opportunity at risk, and discuss policy options for counteracting this trend.

Japan is enthusiastic about developing and applying innovative technology in the context of health- and elderly care. Research and development in care robotics, sensor technology (mimamori sensā), or ICT applications are widely promoted by the government. Despite these manifold efforts and activities, many devices fall short of meeting the needs expressed by users. Therefore, this DIJ Forum raises the question, what is necessary to fulfil user’s needs in healthcare? What needs to be done to improve user acceptance and usability of technology regarding innovation in health- and elderly care? Our two speakers are best suited to discuss these questions from a cross-disciplinary perspective: Professor Cosentino is specialised in material science, humanoid robots, and patient rehabilitation, as well as sensor system development for elderly people. She will reflect on the challenges to enable user participation by drawing on insights from two research projects: one is the engineering of social robots at Takanishi Laboratory at Waseda University. The other is a collaboration with the University of Siegen on Active and Healthy Ageing by employing communication robots like Pepper in elderly care. On the other hand, Professor Ishiguro will discuss from the angle of social policy and healthcare by illuminating the discrepancy between user expectation, practicality and device acceptance. In addition, she will present data from a comparative analysis on participatory governance regarding elderly care policies in Denmark and Japan. Thus, this forum provides a valuable opportunity for discussing what is necessary for well-integrated innovation for good healthcare practice.

Institutions are the foundations of our society. They help to coordinate individual actions and they are also needed to integrate various social, economic and political subsystems. But institutions cannot not be fully understood by their functional contribution alone. There is also an important normative part. It is too often forgotten, that institutions have normative foundations. In the face of current challenges like the digital transformation, the avance of AI, climate change and new geopolitical power relations, the normative qualities of our social institutions are being challenged with far reaching consequences for social cohesion. Professor Udo Di Fabio, former judge of the German Federal Constitutional Court, has recently published two books on the foundations of modern society, combining historical, legal and sociological perspectives. He will present his main arguments in a keynote adress. His ideas will by commented on by Japanese and German scholars before the general discussion is opened to the floor.

With around 1.5 million foreign workers and over a million permanent and long-term foreign residents, Japan is experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration. In 2019 three new residence statuses were added to the Immigration Control Act. Furthermore, the government promises to foster social integration by strengthening Japanese language education and providing public services in multiple languages. But access to non-temporary or even permanent resident is highly selective. The migration industry plays a key role in international mobility in Asia. Taking a comparative look at the relations between the state and border spanning migration businesses in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea Kristin Surak advances a taxonomy of the ways states partner with migration industries and discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of each. Her analysis focuses on low-paid temporary migrant work programs, including the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), Japan’s major gateway for temporary migrant labor from Asia. Focusing on the recent additions to Japan’s immigration control legislation, Naoto Higuchi identifies a shift from a preferential treatment of foreigners based on “blood ties” to a neoliberal model based on meritocracy. The new residence categories “Specified Skills 1 & 2” enable immigration authorities to select migrants and determine their rights and length of stay based on performance, gauged by language ability and skill acquisition. In contrast, the newly prepared visa status for fourth-generation Nikkeijin looks — at first glance — like a continuation of immigration based on ethnic selection criteria.

Japan’s and Germany’s ambitious national frameworks of Society 5.0 and Industry 4.0 acknowledge the importance of education and research as key success factors in the digital transformation. Universities are not only to develop the necessary human capital and to contribute to technological advances, they are also to play key roles with regard to social inclusion and life-long learning. To do so, they are expected to deepen and widen cross-organizational and international cooperation. Last, but not least they are urged to adjust their core activities of teaching, research and administration to take advantage of new digital technologies. How are universities in Germany and Japan responding to these challenges? How do they see themselves affected? What strategies do they pursue? Our two speakers are best suited to answer these questions based on their leading positions and professional careers in higher education and research institutions in Germany and Japan.

Recreational outdoor sports, such as hiking, mountain biking, and trail running are enjoying increased popularity in Japan and worldwide. Proponents argue that these activities contribute to physical and mental health on the one hand and bring about economic and social benefits for rural areas on the other. At the same time there are concerns of over-use and environmental degradation. Focusing on mountain biking, Prof. Yuichiro Hirano and Prof. Wolfram Manzenreiter will be comparing the current situation in Austria and Japan and try to line out possible futures for sustainable outdoor tourism that benefits rural areas and protect the environment equally.

As Japan has the sole custody system after divorce, there are a number of parental disputes over child custody and visitation or access nowadays. Currently, only 1/3 of children with divorced parents can have access to their non-custodial parent, and only 1/4 of children obtain child support from their non-custodial parent. In contrast, Germany and other Western countries have implemented joint custody after divorce, which requires both parents to consult with each other and take joint decisions in relation to long-term issues concerning their children. The divergent legal settings and societal conditions between Japan and Western countries yield difficult questions in a cross-border family separation. Prof. Nishitani will address the historical, legal and societal background of these differences in family law institutions between Japan and Western countries with a particular focus on Germany. Prof. Odagiri will show what we have learned about the impact of divorce on children from research in psychology and what actions are now being taken.

10 years after the collapse of the investment firm Lehman Brothers, a shift in discourses on structural labour market reforms is becoming ever more visible. Whereas before the crash many experts and policymakers had argued that market-oriented reforms were necessary to improve labour market and economic performance, the social costs of liberalisation now seem to attract much more attention. Yet the jury is still out on whether this discursive shift has prompted a similar change in policy. While policies emphasising social equality appear to have gained in popularity (e.g. minimum wages, equal treatment for non-standard workers), structural reforms echoing liberalisation are also still on the agenda (e.g. French reforms of labour contract law). This event aims to shed light on this mixed picture of continuity and change by bringing together three renowned scholars from France, Germany, and Japan for a roundtable discussion. They will discuss whether and to what extent the Lehman crisis (a.k.a. the global financial crisis) has indeed led to a lasting reorientation of labour market policy and politics.

Heinz Riesenhuber speaks about technology and Japan at DIJ's 30th anniversary event.

Hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the greatest media spectacle of modernity, Tokyo will be at the center of the world’s attention in summer 2020. The nearly universal reach via television and internet broadcast provides the IOC with multi-billion dollar revenue streams and the host with opportunities for placing highly visible messages about the state of the nation and its future to the world. Japan’s bidding proposal ‘Discover Tomorrow’ outlines the official message of Japan as generous host, reliable organizer, and capable agent of tackling 21st century challenges by means of craftsmanship, creativity, and advanced technology. Turning the host city into the Olympic City, however, comes with a lofty price tag, and hardly any of the major stepping stones within the years-long process are likely to go uncontested. Who carries the costs and who is benefiting from the expenditure, what are topics of concern for promotors and critics alike, what will Japan be like in the years to come, are some of the crucial issues warranting public debate and scholarly exchange. With less than two years ahead of the Games, the DIJ roundtable features three leading experts on sport mega-events to discuss the political economy of hosting the Olympic Games, the difficulties of message control in the post-factual age, and the legacies of the Games for Japan in the 2020s.

Social scientists are frequently concerned with the “local”. However, the social and spatial boundaries of the “local” are often elusive, and subject to change. This is particularly true in Japan, where local administrative boundaries were abruptly redrawn in a wave of municipal mergers in the mid-2000s, initiating an ongoing process of local socio-spatial readjustments. In China, the “local” is the local in center-local relations between the Party central and the provinces, prefectures, counties, and towns. Since the onset of economic reform, the party-state has been incrementally changing the territories of these levels of government into cities. Subnational territories are not constitutionally guaranteed, and the state maintains powers to establish new cities, enlarge and merge existing ones and eliminate others. The two speakers address political and economic consequences implied by differing delineations of subnational spaces.

Going by statistical measures, Japan is reportedly one of the least religious countries in the world. It is thus striking to observe the seemingly disproportionate impact of religious organizations on Japanese elections, legislation, and policymaking. The most powerful of these groups is Sōka Gakkai, a Buddhism-based lay association whose millions of adherents treat electioneering on behalf of its affiliated political party Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party) as a component of their religious practice. Since its founding in 1964, and particularly since it partnered with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1999 in the governing coalition, Kōmeitō has exerted a decisive political influence. And, while the party’s representatives consistently promote Kōmeitō as a brake on LDP efforts toward remilitarizing Japan and revising the 1947 Constitution’s peace clause (Article 9), Kōmeitō has reversed its stance on security issues – a move away from its founding pacifism that has alienated some of its Gakkai supporters.

In 1970, nine members of a Japanese New Left group called the Red Army Faction hijacked a domestic airliner to North Korea with dreams of acquiring military training in order to bring about a revolution in Japan. The North Korean government accepted the hijackers ̶ who became known in the media as the Yodogō group ̶ and two years later they announced their conversion to juche, North Korea’s political ideology. A superb example of investigative journalism, Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodogō Exiles offers Kōji Takazawa’s powerful story of how he exposed the Yodogō group’s involvement in the kidnapping and luring of several young Japanese to North Korea, as well as the truth behind their Japanese wives’ presence in the country. Takazawa’s careful research was validated in 2002, when the North Korean government publicly acknowledged it had kidnapped thirteen Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s, including three people whom Takazawa had connected to the Yodogō hijackers. Embedded in his pursuit of what truly happened to the Yodogō members is Takazawa’s personal reflection of the 1970s, a decade when radical student activism swept Japan, and what it meant to those whose lives were forever changed. This talk will trace the story of the Yodogō exiles to North Korea, Kōji Takazawa’s involvement in their story and his work of investigative journalism.

A central part of Society 5.0 – Japan’s vision of fully digitally connected future – focuses on how connectivity, big data and AI can contribute to solve Japan’s pressing problems in the field of elderly care. Prof. Thomas Bock, a leading German engineer in the field of building robotics, and Prof. Shuichi Matsumura, a leading Japanese engineer specializing in system design for housing and urban spaces, will talk about the potential of the digital revolution for elderly care in living environments. Questions addressed are: How can sensor technology and connectivity support care-taking? How far are we away from implementation? Which countries are taking the lead? What major obstacles need to be overcome?

Are we about to witness fundamental changes to established work practices or just the addition of ‘non-standard’ options to a fundamentally outdated system? – Observers of recent work-related regulations of the Japanese government are divided on whether the country really is on its way to a place where women and other ‘atypical’ employees can shine, or whether the latter are just supposed to stabilize a system that always treated them as second-rate members. In this panel, we bring together a German and a Japanese expert on diversity issues in order to evaluate current political and societal trends towards a more diverse work force and, by extension, a more diverse society. By contrasting insider and outsider perspectives as well as academic and practical views both speakers will provide the audience with new insights on the opportunities and risks growing diversity entails for Japanese companies, employees, politics, and the country at large.

On October 22 Japan is heading to the polls for the third time in 5 years. The 2017 snap election has given candidates and parties little time to prepare and has made it difficult for observers to predict results as Japan’s party system seems once again in flux. The opposition camp is undergoing a major transformation as the Democratic Party, until September the biggest opposition party, has de-facto dissolved. Its members have joined two new parties: the Hope Party founded by Yuriko Koike, Tokyo’s governor, or the Constitutional Democratic Party, established by former DP secretary general Yukio Edano. Not least because of this division of the opposition the 2017 election could prove decisive, e.g. by clearing the way for constitutional revision. Prof Koichi Nakano is professor of comparative politics, Japanese politics and political theory at Sophia University in Tokyo. His research focuses on a variety of issues of contemporary Japanese politics from comparative, historical, and philosophical perspectives, including globalization and nationalism; the Yasukuni problem; language, media and politics; amakudari and administrative reform in Japan. He also has a keen interest in the politics of Britain, France, other western European countries, and the EU. Dr Chris Winkler, is lecturer in Japanese politics in the Modern Japanese Studies Program at Hokkaido University. Prior to joining Hokudai, Dr Winkler was senior research fellow and head of the social science section at DIJ. His main research interests are ideologies and how they shape policy formulation and politics in post-war Japan.

Since the 1990s, local democracy and representation in Japan have been changing. Political reforms at the national level, decentralization, reduced clientelism, and broader socio-economic challenges such as depopulation have transformed the roles of local legislatures and executives. These changes have not least affected important national policies. The talk will analyze overall trends in the “quality” of local democracy in terms of some indicators of responsiveness, accountability and participation in local representation at municipal and prefectural level. It will further discuss how changes in local representation and local party organizations have affected national processes regarding public works, energy, and security. The talk concludes with reflections on how aggravated regional inequality will affect decentralization and the quality of local and national democracy in the near future. Professor Yamada Kyohei will comment on Dr. Hijino’s latest research and amend the discussion by analyzing how changes in institutions and patterns of political competition at the local level affect political competition at the national level. A particular focus lies on how the increased volatility in national elections affects calculations and decisions of majority-seeking political parties. He will further discuss how political competition at national level affects the central government’s willingness and capacity to change or not to change the population size of local governments.

Not that long ago, the term “Japanese career women” almost had been a contradiction in itself. Times have changed and Japanese women pursuing a career is a much talked about topic in politics (“womenomics”) and the media. But has the situation really changed for career women “on the ground”? What are their opportunities and what are their challenges? To what extent are professional expectations and expectations in their private life contradicting each other? And finally, are contradicting expectations resulting in identity conflicts and what are the strategies to cope with these conflicts? These are questions to be addressed in the presentations. The presentation by Markus Pudelko is based on more than 70 interviews that he has conducted in Japan over the course of several years.

‘Victimhood nationalism’ is a working hypothesis to explicate competing national memories over the historical position of victims in coming to terms with the past. The hereditary memory of victimhood consolidates the national solidarity beyond generations and justifies nationalism by endowing the victimized nation with the moral sympathy and historical authenticity. Without a reflection on victimhood nationalism, the postwar Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (‘coming to terms with the past’) cannot be properly grasped. Victimhood nationalism is intrinsically transnational since victims are unthinkable without victimizers. The transnationality of victimhood nationalism demands a histoire croisée to comprehend the entangled past of the victimized and victimizers. A transnational history of ‘coming to terms with the past’ would show that the vicious circle of victimhood nationalisms, based on the antagonistic complicity of nationalisms between the victimizers and victims, has been a rock to any historical reconciliation effort. The talk will focus on a transnational history of victimhood nationalism in Korea, Poland, and Israel with Japan and Germany as counterparts.

In most postindustrial societies, we presently experience a transformation from a gender order based on difference to a more flexible one. In the sphere of production, we witness a highly increased women’s labor market participation, based on the support of equal opportunity and diversity schemes. However, a large part of female employees are working in irregular or precarious jobs, and this trend is extending to male wage earners. In the sphere of reproduction, fathers are seeking opportunities for stronger participation, for example through child care leave. Institutional rules are getting more flexible against the backdrop of economization and growing insecurity. Moreover, biological dualism in the concept of gender is changing towards diverse gender concepts and supporting individual life careers.

In his presentation Tomoki Sekiguchi will report on a growing number of Japanese firms that are hiring non-Japanese employees in their domestic workplace in order to promote uchi-naru kokusaika or internal internationalisation of management. One major source of their recruits is international students who have studied in Japanese universities, and some Japanese firms have also begun to recruit non-Japanese employees from overseas universities. Despite this important trend, we still know little about the experience of foreign employees in their daily work in Japan, such as possible discrimination and communication problems when working with Japanese bosses and colleagues. In his presentation, he will show the results of the survey administered to the foreign employees working in the Japanese workplace, focusing on the causes of their perceived discrimination and its effect on their attitudes and behaviours.

To most Americans, it is perfectly obvious that the two atomic bombs ended World War II. Yet at least four other developments helped persuade Japanese leaders to surrender. The Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan on August 8 may have been more decisive, some historians argue. However, the other three factors are rarely discussed. The Allied blockade increasingly deprived the Japanese home front of food and fuel. In its final phase called “Operation Starvation”, the U.S. aerial mining campaign stopped nearly all food imports, resulting in widespread malnutrition. Nor have historians fully considered the expansion of the U.S. firebombing campaign to nearly 60 small and medium cities during summer 1945. Bombing and food shortages led millions to flee the cities, crippling Japan’s capacity to wage total war. Finally, Japanese officials and industrialists closely followed the recent defeat of Nazi Germany, which had fought to the finish. Influential elites passionately wished to avoid a similar Allied invasion, and they pressed top leaders to end the war before Japan’s infrastructure and its people were obliterated.

On its surface, Japan’s health system appears to be one of the world’s best. The country provides universal access to health care and scores well on most public health metrics. For example, the Japanese have the longest life expectancy and among the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, and they lose significantly fewer potential life years to disease than do the citizens of almost any other country. And Japan consistently spends less on health care than most other developed countries do. However, Japan’s health system – like those in many other countries – is under severe stress. An increasing number of patients are finding it difficult to obtain the right care at the right time and place. The quality of care delivered varies markedly. Many of the cost-control measures the system has implemented have damaged its cost-effectiveness. The system’s funding mechanisms are insufficient to meet rising costs, and given the current economic situation, the country has few good options for meeting the funding gap. As a result, the sustainability of Japan’s health system is now in question, and decisive action is necessary.

Japan and South Korea are home to numerous multinational firms, particularly in highly globalized manufacturing industries such as automobiles and electronics. Both countries also have distinct business cultures and management systems which arguably lend strong competitiveness to their leading multinationals. However, the business activities of Japanese and Korean firms are increasingly being transferred to overseas locations, resulting in the need to attract, nurture and retain talent from all over the world. How can firms with strong national roots manage their global human resources competently without giving up their home-grown competitive strengths? How can they effectively integrate managers who neither know the business cultures nor the languages of their firms’ home countries?

Deutschland und Japan wurden nach ihrer Niederlage im Zweiten Weltkrieg zwar keine Atommächte, konnten auf dem Gebiet der Atomenergie aber dennoch eine führende Rolle übernehmen. Während Deutschland nun allerdings den Atomausstieg beschlossen hat, hält Japan auch nach der Katastrophe von Fukushima weiterhin an der Kernenergie fest. Die beiden Referenten werden auf die Entwicklung der Kernenergie-nutzung in beiden Ländern zurückblicken und anschließend der Frage nachgehen, wie es zu diesen unterschiedlichen energiepolitischen Positionen kommen konnte. ドイツと日本は、第２次世界大戦に敗北し、今日まで核兵器保有国とならなかったが、原子力発電の先進国へと発展した。しかしドイツ政府が脱原発を決めたのに対し、日本政府は福島事故後もなお原子力発電の存続をめざしている。両国の原子力発電の歩んできた道を、二人の講演者がふりかえり、なぜ両国で利用路線上の相違が生じているかを話し合う。

Contrary to widespread skepticism, the Abe government announced new policies for the advancement of women in society and is seemingly committed to promote and implement these policies. Yet, despite this impressive rhetorical commitment, many questions remain unanswered: What are the political motivations and strategies behind the “gender turn” of the Abe cabinet? What are the potential effects on Japan’s gendered political economic regime? Do we now witness a new era of concrete measures and ambitious gender equality polices in Japan, or is this all just cheap talk? The DIJ is honored to welcome two distinguished experts in the field as speakers to this DIJ Forum, who will discuss this topic from their respective perspectives as a former high-ranking government official on the one hand and as an academic, on the other hand.

Japan and Germany, just as other European and Asian societies, are undergoing rapid social, economic and cultural changes. These include demographic changes, economic and political instability, the erosion of traditional institutions, changes in communication, as well as effects of natural disasters. These developments are related to changes in norms and values, and come with an increasing number of alternatives for individual and social decision-making. With the number of choices also increases the risk of making a wrong decision. To remain capable of taking any action at all, individuals need to trust in others, in expert knowledge and in abstract institutions. Therefore, trust – as the social lubricant that keeps societies running, and risks – as the challenges faced by a given society, are topics central to the analysis of any social system. The DIJ is honored to welcome two internationally renowned experts on trust and risk as speakers to this DIJ Forum, which is presented together with the German-Japanese Society for Social Sciences.

Naoto Kan had to cope with the Fukushima nuclear accident during his term as Prime Minister of Japan. What did really happen during and after this unprecedented disaster in Japan’s post-war history? After his resignation as Prime Minister, Naoto Kan has given his personal account of the accident on many occasions and continues to work towards a nuclear free Japan. In his speech he will talk about his experience of one of the most dramatic events in Japanese history and certainly the most challenging for any head of government. He will also give insights about the current discussion on nuclear energy in Japan. 菅直人氏は総理大臣在任中に東日本大震災に遭遇し福島原発事故の処理という重責を担った。この戦後未曽有の事態において、本当に起こった事は何だったのだろうか。 総理退任後菅氏は、この事故に対する彼自身の立場からの脱原発日本へ向けて、数々の活動を続けている。彼がここで語ってくれるのは日本史上最も劇的ともいえる事態を経験した、他の誰よりも過酷な挑戦をくぐりぬけた一国の指導者によるものである。また、今の原子力エネルギーに関する議論に対する洞察でもある。

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the consequent shutdown of all nuclear reactors, Japan has been forced to re-consider its energy and climate policy speeding up the expansion of renewable energy and granting it a larger share in its future energy mix. However, a stronger reliance on renewables may not only be a necessity, it might also come as an opportunity, given the abundance of renewable energy resources in Japan and their increasing price competitiveness due to continuing technological advances. Can resource poor Japan, that presently imports more than 90 per cent of its primary energy supply, become an energy rich country? If so, what is needed to achieve such a fundamental transformation?

In his inaugural lecture, Franz Waldenberger, the newly appointed Director of DIJ, outlined the research program that the institute will pursue over the coming years (see also https://dij.tokyo/research). Welcoming words were delivered by Dr. Hans Carl von Werthern, Ambassador of Germany to Japan, and Dr. Harald Rosenbach, Executive Director of the Max Weber Foundation, Bonn.

Research and innovation are of vital importance to the competitiveness and welfare of leading industrial economies such as Japan and Germany. How do the two countries perform in this respect? The two speakers, both outstanding scholars and experts in the field, will assess the strengths and weaknesses of their respective national systems of research and innovation. After the two presentations, the similarities and differences between the two countries will be further elaborated in a discussion among the two speakers.

On the occasion of completing his tenure as director of the DIJ after ten years, Florian Coulmas gave a lecture entitled, ‘About Time. Globalization, Chronoethnology, and Japanese Culture.’ He argues that conceptions of time, time regimes and temporal patterns of events and activities constitute a rich base for cultural analysis. Drawing a wide canvas from the adaptation of the European mechanical clock in the sixteenth century to scheduling public transport in one-minute intervals nowadays, he shows how technological and social progresses interact, sometimes modulated by culture.

Public understandings about the Japanese Red Army (Nihon Sekigun) are based largely on information promulgated by the Japanese government and circulated widely by mass media during the nearly three decades that its members were beyond reach in the Middle East. The participants have contributed to the myth-making, both by their public writings and by what they did not reveal. Some pieces of contradictory information have been available for a long time, but many blanks were filled in with widely circulated myths. Even scholars who studied the group have perpetuated mistaken views based on the limited information available. The formal dissolution of Nihon Sekigun and a set of new trials of returnees from 2000 to 2010 have now made it possible to construct a rather different picture of the group. The dissolution freed members and former members to talk about internal aspects of the organization that they had kept secret for decades. In a new book in progress, Dr. Steinhoff is examining the recent material in light of her four decades of research on the various branches of the original Sekigunha. Her research includes prison interviews, participant observation of trial sessions and the activities of trial support groups, and extensive reading of the group’s writings in Japanese. Her talk will debunk several widely believed myths about the Japanese Red Army and analyze the origins and implications of these myths.

This study on Japanese women’s current career opportunities finds traditional Japanese gender roles to be mostly still in place, rendering it highly difficult for Japanese women to pursue a career in domestic organizations. It is suggested that Japanese women do not perceive male oppression as the (main) problem and obtaining the same rights and duties not as the solution. Instead, what women mainly require is a substantial redefinition of the work life balance in Japanese organizations. In this sense, the fault lines are not so much between men and women but between organizations and employees. Furthermore, Japanese women choosing to work for foreign employers in Japan did not so because of professional concerns alone, but also because of emotional factors. As they often reject the constraints of traditional Japanese gender roles, working for foreign employers signifies for them the pursuit of a liberating Western lifestyle. Moreover, Japanese women working for foreign companies often perceive themselves as outsiders in Japanese society, but also as a kind of avant-garde, possibly setting new trends in Japanese working life and perhaps in Japanese society at large.

The primary pathways through which environmentally persistent radioactive substances enter people’s bodies is food. After 3.11 Japanese authorities and scientists were unable to provide clear guidelines on possible effects of internal radiation. They took weeks to set up a monitoring system. In response to this, many citizens took matters into their own hands to monitor food and measure the level of contamination. This talk analyzes citizen radiation measuring stations and their role in filling the critical knowledge gaps on food safety issues after the nuclear accident. Theoretically, this paper analyzes the citizen radiation measuring stations as an instance of citizen science, and explores its relation to science governance and democracy. It asks who the “citizens” were in citizen science in post 3.11 Japan. The question of representation in scientific matters is central here. Who was deemed the right kind of person to talk about the issue of food contamination? The notion of “citizen” emerged as a counterpart to experts, but who could actually fulfill the idealized role of a citizen was heavily contested. In this limited space, women found the symbolic power of “mother” as an ideal-type citizen. The talk also explores the complicated terrain of the maternal representation in the history of anti-nuclear movements in Japan.

The recent upsurge in concern about hate speech has largely focused on a relatively new right-wing group, the Zaitokukai, short for ‘Zainichi Tokken o Yurusanai Shimin no Kai’, meaning ‘the Citizen’s Association that rejects special privileges for Japan-resident (Koreans)’. Officially, this organization has the limited and specific objective of eliminating the legal apparatus which gives special privileges to members of Japan’s Korean community. This is one face of the Zaitokukai: a pressure group lobbying for the correction of what it sees as a social injustice. The other face of Zaitokukai is the violent hatred expressed against Koreans in street demonstrations, deliberately held in urban districts with large Korean populations, describing Koreans as vermin, calling for them to be killed, and displaying fascist symbols. The leadership of Zaitokukai has not distanced itself from these extremist displays. Clearly we need to look at events on the street, considering not only the meaning of words, but also the way they are uttered, the places where they are heard, and non-verbal expressions such as flags and placards. But we also need to examine the Zaitokukai’s official face. Though the stress on removing special privileges may be a cynical ploy to gain political respectability, the fact remains that the Japanese state’s creation of the category of “special permanent resident” (tokubetsu eijūsha), and its almost-exclusive application to Japan’s pre-war Korean minority and their descendants, has made Koreans an easier target for the Zaitokukai. We need to study the Korean minority in Japan, what their ‘privileges’ are, how they were won and why they are controversial now.

This presentation is about language choice in Okinawa. Three languages are at issue, Ryukyuan, Japanese, and English. The Japanese language spread campaign in the Ryukyus from 1880 onwards entailed restrictions to the freedom of language choices and local identities in the Ryukyus. Hence, it was contested and needed coercion and ideological enforcement in order to be realized. Japanese language use in Ryukyuan families and neighborhoods from the 1950s onwards differs however. It was carried out in a quest for freedom from US occupation by Ryukyuans themselves. That the hopes for improved societal well-being associated with exclusive use of Japanese have not come true is crucial for our understanding of current efforts of language revitalization. These are carried out in the name of freedom and are contested by some because more freedom always coincides with less security. The desire to balance security and freedom makes communal life conflict-ridden. Which of the two desires will prevail over the other in the Ryukyus is not entirely clear yet, but it appears that the pendulum is swinging towards the freedom end at the present.

Could contemporary urban Japan provide a living example of the 18th Century Italian notion of public happiness? The question is by no means far-fetched. Daily life in Japan is rich in examples of “public happiness,” as I’ll show through a number of anecdotes and examples. Yet Japan’s performance is mediocre under the usual subjective and capabilities/eudaemonia-based metrics of well-being. This talk proposes that public happiness ought to be considered a third, collective type of “happiness” that complements the usual, more individually-based conceptions. While public happiness doesn’t necessarily arise from government policies, it certainly can be impaired by them, particularly when such policies have quantitative targets such as productivity and growth. The failure of metrics to detect public happiness in Japan suggests that policies based on qualitative principles might be better for protecting and promoting it. An historical example of how a local government intervened in a traditional festival illustrates how qualitative considerations can enhance public happiness in practice. To conclude, I’ll propose a group of six qualitative “design principles” as candidate heuristics for policy-makers, among other actors.

Entrepreneurship is regarded as an important factor for innovation and economic growth. However, Japan has been characterized by the lowest level of entrepreneurship activity among the OECD countries for more than 20 years. Since the 1990s, the government tried to stimulate business start-ups, especially in high-tech industries, without obvious success. There are only few empirical studies on entrepreneurship in Japan. However, such studies would be necessary to support and evaluate public policy to promote entrepreneurship. This lecture presents the results of a 4-year panel survey of Japanese entrepreneurs in manufacturing and software sectors, who started their businesses in 2007 and 2008. Based on this survey data, we show who research-oriented founders are and how they perform. Moreover, we also investigate the determinants of R&D investment, innovation outcomes, and employment growth of these start-ups.

The historiography of the First World War has over the last few years quickly shifted beyond the confines of the fields of Flanders and the Somme. The ripples from the seismic change that the First World War enacted were instantly felt in countries beyond Europe’s borders. The participation of non-European countries, the economic and military mobilisation of the British and French Empires means that the war must be looked at from a global context. Internment in the First World War perfectly highlights this global phenomenon. Britain ran a global camp network that stretched from the Isle of Man, to South Africa, India, the Caribbean and Australia, while France transferred many of its prisoners of war to its possessions in North and West Africa. Neutral countries as far away from Europe as Chile even had internment camps. Japan housed around 4,800 Prisoners of War, taken after its successful siege of Tsingtao. This talk will offer a comparative perspective on the treatment of Germans in internment from 1914-1920. The “myth” of the good treatment of Prisoners of War in Japan is being challenged as more and more research into the camps is done. In contribution to this debate, the main question this talk will seek to address is how did prisoners from the colony of Tsingtao fare in comparison to their counterparts from the other German colonies? Mahon Murphy is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science under the supervision of Professor David Stevenson. His thesis concerns the establishment of prisoner of war and civilian internee camps to house internees from the former German colonies. In the course of his research Mahon has received a one year research grant from the DAAD and a Gerda Henkel/l’Historial Peronne Bourse. He is currently a visiting Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin where he is participating in the 1914-1918-online.net online First World War encyclopaedia. His chapter on the cultural impact of First World War internment in Japan will be published early next year in an edited volume by Brill.

The Japanese word, Ikumen which originated from Ikemen (handsome men) refers to those “cool” fathers who are actively involved in caring for their own children. This word has become well-known among the Japanese public as evidenced by it being nominated one of the top 10 words in 2010 Buzzwords-of-the-Year Contest. In this lecture, we focus on this Ikumen phenomenon by describing historical and contemporary social, economic and political factors that contributed to the increase of Japanese fathers’ participation in child care. Antecedents and consequences of fathers’ participation in child care will also be examined from sociological perspectives. Most of the findings presented in this lecture come from the data collected in two projects, “Gender Sensitive Approaches to Work-Life-Balance” and “Parenting in IT Society.” Our analyses show that workplace factors as well as family socialization are significant factors affecting paternal involvement. Implications of our research findings will also be discussed in relation to policies, education and practice. Masako Ishii-Kuntz is a Professor in Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. Her areas of specialization include family sociology, gender studies and quantitative methods. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from Washington State University. She has also taught at the University of California, Riverside prior to her current position. She has published three books (plus two in press) and more than 120 peer reviewed articles, book chapters, reviews and research reports. Her recent research focuses on how fathers and mothers of young children utilize IT tools and SNS (social networking service) in their child caring activities.

Many developed countries including Japan are undergoing comprehensive demographic change, marked by a growing share of elderly people. Product and service innovation can play a role in coping with the resulting societal challenges, especially when these help to support the preservation of elderly people’s personal autonomy. The range of these age-specific innovations is enormous and includes, for example, mobility aids and household devices but also special financial products. Is Japan a lead market for such innovations?

Japan today faces many enormous challenges. These include a huge public debt larger than that of Greece, Italy, or the U.S.; the clean up of the triple disasters in March 2011; and with opposition to nuclear power mounting, an increasing energy crisis. Yet Japan is not the EU or the U.S. but has many other advantages that the EU and U.S. do not. Japan, however, has one major problem in which it does not have an advantage: its political leadership. Despite high expectations after Japan’s electoral and administrative reforms of the 1990s and after Prime Minister Koizumi seemed to fulfill these hopes, Japan’s political leaders have all disappointed. Why? Japan’s politics has been the problem and not the solution. Japan has had one of the worst records for stable and effective political leadership in the democratic world. What has happened to Japan, once admired for its effective governance? Why, despite a formal cabinet government and parliamentary structure similar to the U.K.’s in many ways is Japan still often an “Un-Westminster” system? This presentation will look at the structural and political reasons for Japan’s increasingly frequent and ineffective political leaders seemingly incapable of solving Japan’s problems, including both formal institutions and “informal institutions:” short-lived prime ministers; fragmented and non-cooperative political parties; unfair and complicated electoral systems; and frequent elections and a dysfunctional bicameral parliament.; when fickle, floating voters are added to this institutional mix, the result is the ineffective political leadership Japan has had since Koizumi. Prime Minister Abe today is the first prime minister since Koizumi who may have the capability to surmount these problems. Will he? And will what he brings about be what Japan needs?

Following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Japan has witnessed a proliferation of discourses where people are enticed by the notion, “Rise up, Japan,” to participate in national recovery and reconstruction. In it, women are mobilized as chief practitioners of “crisis management” whereby they are urged to acquire a series of techniques, technologies, as well as dispositions in order to cope with the current crisis and prepare for future emergencies. Examining disaster management discourses and practices that proliferate via websites, instructional manuals, and community fairs in post-Fukushima Japan, this presentation analyzes how the emerging culture of crisis management pursues gendered strategies as it instructs women to maintain proper bodies and orderly homes so as to ensure their own and their families’ survival in large-scale disasters and crises. Far from a top-down imposition, it is a bottom-up endeavor where women leaders, intellectuals, and crisis management advisers insist on the importance of women’s involvement in national affairs. Situating the current crisis management culture in a larger historical context, the presentation points to its similarities to the pre-1945 Japanese life improvement movement and the cold war US civil defense programs where women and home also constituted the focal sites of discipline and regulation, thereby suggesting a need to critically re-examine and re-consider the meanings of women’s mobilization to the post-disaster nation.

The political uncertainty of Japan’s post-Fukushima energy policy should not be surprising given the country’s energy constraints. Japan, an economic powerhouse operating within a geographically constrained landmass with virtually no independent energy sources to fuel and stabilize its economic needs, is trapped between two conflicting political problems: a growing segment of the Japanese electorate who reject essential facilities such as electric power plants and transmission wires being built in their backyards versus an equally large segment of the electorate who naturally expect a stable, environmentally safe and inexpensive flow of electric power to support their high standard of living and industrial production. That both expectations are technically and financially incompatible has led to the current political challenge. This lecture places Japan’s post-Fukushima energy challenges and its public policy decisions into perspective by analyzing it in cross-national context. Using heretofore-unexamined archival documents, microeconomic data, and qualitative interviews with key actors in a time-series, this talk explores how and why governments in three developed democracies—Japan, Germany, and UK—pursue the reform of their electric power markets over a long period. The talk emphasizes how periods of stasis (controlled by positive feedback or self-reinforcement) in terms of “policy image” are occasionally offset by bouts of frenetic institutional change. Variations in deliberation timetables, shifting voting patterns in committees, sporadic law promulgation, increasingly negative public opinion polls, and fluctuating media attention cycles (the dependent variables) are analyzed by using the ubiquity, consistency, and strength of foreign economic ideas and events (the independent variables) to explain the transformation of both formal and informal institutions in Japan. Should a media-transmitted image shift be the principal factor behind crisis-induced agenda-setting and decision-making behavior, this talk explores the “real-world” financial, environmental and technological trade-offs of policy objectives prioritizing renewable energy over nuclear power and fossil fuels.

This lecture puts the Great East Japan Earthquake into perspective by analysing it in the context of other major disasters. Using micro- and neighborhood-level data from four disasters in three nations over the 20th and 21st centuries, this talk will investigate standard theories of recovery and resilience. Bivariate, time series cross sectional, and matching analyses show that more than factors such as individual or personal wealth, aid from the government, or damage from the disaster, the depth of social capital best predicts recovery. Social capital works through three main mechanisms: elevating voice and suppressing exit, overcoming collective action barriers, and providing informal insurance. Should social networks prove the critical engines before, during, and after disaster, this suggests a new approach to disaster mitigation for NGOs, individuals, and governments. Daniel P. Aldrich is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University on leave for the academic year 2012  ̶  2013 as a Fulbright research professor at Tokyo University. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from Harvard University, an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published two books (Site fights and Building Resilience) and more than 80 peer reviewed articles, book chapters, reviews, and OpEds in locations such as the New York Times, CNN, and the Asahi Shinbun.

This lecture highlights recent developments in international and comparative happiness, with particular focus on work, marriage and family in Japan. Our empirical study uses large-scale international data set to examine the determinants of happiness in a comparative perspective. We hypothesize that welfare states redistribute happiness among policy-targeted demographic groups in these countries. We apply multi-level modeling and focus on public social expenditures (as percentage of GDP) as proxy measures of state intervention at the macro-level, and happiness as the specific measure of welfare outcome at the micro-level. We find that aggregate happiness is not greater in the welfare states, but happiness closely reflects the redistribution of resources in these countries. Happiness is “transferred” from low-risk to high-risk individuals. For example, women with small children are significantly happier, but single persons are significantly less happy in the welfare states. This suggests that pro-family ideology of the welfare states protects families from social risk and improves their well-being at the cost of single persons. Further, we find that the happiness gap between high versus low-income earners is considerably smaller in the welfare states, suggesting that happiness is transferred from the privileged to the less privileged.

A growing number of older persons in Japan today lack reliable future caretakers of their family grave. By performing numerous memorial rites and maintaining their family grave, the bereaved typically transform the family dead into benevolent ancestors. Then, what will happen to those whose ashes are not interred in a family grave? In this lecture, I will examine one alternative to the family grave system—the scattering of ashes conducted by a citizen’s group, the Grave-Free Promotion Society (Sōsō No Jiyū O Susumeru Kai). Contrary to the common assumption that childless people usually elect ash scattering, a number of the Society’s members have adult children. What are the views of people who have adopted the scattering of ashes as a way of disposing of their own remains? Given that a grave remains a symbolic locus of familial continuity, the scattering of ashes seems to challenge the cherished ideas of filial piety and respect toward ancestors. By “returning to nature” through ash scattering and joining a benevolent force larger than their small family, older urbanites seek self-sufficiency in their postmortem world and attempt to lighten the survivors’ ritual burden to maintain family graves. Ash scattering ceremonies reveal people’s attempts to remake their ties with their family, and serve as windows onto new patterns of generational relations in low fertility Japan.

We have been witnessing new trends of business activities. One of them is involving those who are lacking resources. The best example is poverty-reducing business (base of the pyramid = BOP) in developing countries. In the past, businesses involving the poor were too risky and costly to make any profit. Then, why did firms come to engage in such activities? I argue that firms came to successfully develop viable business models to reduce risks and transaction costs. This transformation involved a sequence of diverse changes, starting with those in socio-economic values, such as sustainable development, triple bottom line, and human security in the 80s and the 90s, and then advancing to the development of new institutions, which functioned to reduce risks and transactions costs. BOP business models are the natural outcome, making use of such transformation. But this transformation is made possible by using such methods as: - a multi-stakeholder approach with complementary and cross-boundary collaboration among firms, NGOs and international organizations; - a good governance approach based on equality, transparency and accountability; and - an action-oriented and appropriate approach based on the rationality of stakeholders. I shall give some examples of how BOP businesses operate in India. Then, for the recovery and reconstruction of disaster-stricken Tohoku area, I have developed a few projects in which I apply similar concepts and tools as a coordinator of multi-stakeholders based on local rationality. In a country where business activities for those who are lacking resources are not important, I shall try to see how institutional substitutes are made and who actors are.

How are women around the world coping with, learning about and sharing information they need or encounter to become ideal mothers? Would you believe 50 percent of them say they would rather give up their engagement ring than their mobile or PC connection? Based on an eight year research project entitled “Real Mothers” in Japan, in addition to this current study involving over 40 focus groups across 14 countries and an extensive survey of over 9,000 mothers in eight countries, this project delves into the nature of the “Mommy Economy” and the ambitions and desires of today’s mothers. This lecture will help your understanding of: - The role that today’s mothers see themselves playing; - Their abilities, desires and readiness to share information conducive to their social worth; - How mothers of Japan, China, USA and other countries compare in coping with the balancing act of life, understanding them as triathletes in the way they are taking on the convergence of their roles of ‘family-me’, ‘self-me’, and ‘work-me’.

If the 2008 financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that Americans save too little, spend too much, and borrow excessively. How did Americans come to be such miserable savers, and what might they learn from Japan and European countries which have fostered enduring cultures of saving while often restraining consumption and credit? Drawing from his new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves, Garon tells the story of how states in Japan and Europe actively shaped popular savings habits over the past two centuries by means of moral suasion campaigns, postal savings systems, and other institutions for small savers. Japan looms large in this global and comparative history, for it both emulated European practices and offered its own savings-promotion models to the West and rising Asian economies. The lecture is illustrated by evocative savings campaign posters from Japan and other nations.