• Takashi Shimizu Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

• Mareshi Saito Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo

In the process of modernization, many people were separated from their families or rural communities they belonged to, and became independent and autonomous individuals. At the same time, because of the rapid expansion of industrialization, they had to live a life within an organization – such as the government, companies or the military.

On the one hand, this brought a new problem of how they could find their organizations. On the other hand, conflicts between individuals and their organizations also took place. Especially, in a society under the shadow of death – that is, a society where people are exposed to the risk of death caused by, for example, the Spanish flu, tuberculosis or other kinds of infectious diseases – those problems of whether people can be affiliated and how they can live a good life in an organization were much important.

In this seminar, we will talk about how people dealt with such problems in areas of management and literature – which are often regarded as far distant areas – by using the example of modern Japan. We will also discuss how we can connect management and literature.

Takashi Shimizu (Ph.D. in economics, The University of Tokyo) is Professor of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo. He is a scholar of management and business history who is specialized in corporate systems and interactions between legal systems and corporate behaviors. Recently he published a book titled “感染症と経営：戦前日本企業は「死の影」といかに 向き合ったか (Infectious Diseases and Management: How Japanese Companies coped with the Shadow of Death before WWII)” from Chuo-Keizaisha Publishing.