イベント

• Tomoko Matsumoto Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Science

• Sawako Shirahase Director of TCJS

What impact did modernization have on elite society? Previous research indicates that many feudal elites from pre-modern societies managed to maintain their status within elite circles even amidst the process of modernization. However, the mechanisms through which these feudal elites sustained their position in elite society, as well as the integration of newly emerged business elites into this framework, has not been fully explored. This study aims to address these inquiries by examining the network structures established by elites through kinship and marriage. By constructing new data on the kinship and marriage relationships among feudal political elites and new business elites in early 20th century Japan, a pivotal period for its modernization, this study seeks to shed light on the origins and transformations of the ties between feudal elites and business elites throughout the modernization process.

Tomoko Matsumoto (Ph.D., The University of Tokyo, 2016) is an associate professor at Tokyo University of Science. Her research revolves around public opinion, representation, and economic inequality. Her work has appeared in journals such as British Journal of Sociology, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Economy, and Japanese Journal of Political Science.

• Kenji Banjo Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

• Rieko Kage Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

This presentation explains the changing of Japan’s foreign policy towards the activities of League of Nations and other related international organizations in the Interwar Period, which aimed for the establishment of peace and humanitarianism. To investigate this, this presentation focuses on three fields of activity of international organizations: establishment of compulsory jurisdiction at the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) and making of bilateral arbitration treaties, discussion concerning immigration and treatment of foreigners at the League of Nations, and the making of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War in 1929. In addition, this presentation focuses on bureaucratic process of the making of Japan’s foreign policy towards international organizations in this period, especially the making of divisions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan which deals with international organizations.

Kenji Banjo is a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He received a PhD from the University of Tokyo in February 2023. He specialize in the field of the history of Japan’s foreign policy in the Interwar period, especially relationship between Japan and the League of Nations and other related international organizations.

• Paride STORTINI Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo

• Sawako SHIRAHASE Director of TCJS

Japan has a leading role in the funding of UNESCO and of projects for the preservation of cultural heritage. While recent scholarship in cultural heritage studies has focused on state action and seen the process of “heritagization” as an example of secularization, this presentation will use case studies from Japan to show the agency of Buddhist institutions that have appropriated and used discourses and practices of cultural heritage to build religious communities of lay supporters and transnational collaborations. The main case study will be the Silk Road imagery and Sino-Japanese relations developed at Yakushiji, Nara, which will be compared to Indo-Japanese international aid activities at Tsubosaka-dera, Nara prefecture, and Naritasan Kurume, Fukuoka prefecture. While cultural heritage has been often criticized for its connection with nationalist projects, this presentation will question whether the use of “Buddhist heritage” at this religious sites can foster transnational communities of memory.

Paride STORTINI is a JSPS research fellow at the Religious Studies department, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He received a PhD in History of Religions from the University of Chicago in 2022. His research focuses on the history of Buddhism in modern and contemporary Japan. He is specifically interested in ways in which Buddhism has provided cultural repertoires to reshape Japanese identity through transnational intellectual networks, migration, and the construction of cultural heritage. His articles have appeared in Journal of Religion in Japan, Religions, Japanese Religions, and Journal of World Buddhist Cultures.

• Takaaki Asano Faculty of Law, Kansai University

• TAMARUYA Masayuki Professor,Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo

Among acts of political violence, the assassination of a political leader is considered to have a particularly significant impact on people’s attitudes or psychology. We analyze public opinion in Japan before and after the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with survey data from voting advice applications (VAA). Our results reveal three findings. First, public opinion shifted to the right or conservative after the assassination. Support for the Liberal Democratic Party, the victim’s party, increased slightly, while support for the left-opposition parties decreased. There was also an increase in support for strengthening Japan’s defense forces and for restricting personal or privacy rights in order to keep order. Second, our results suggest that the rightward shift influenced by the assassination of Abe occurred independent of pre-event partisanship or policy positions. Third, women were more affected by the assassination than men.

Takaaki Asano is Assistant Professor at the Department of Law and Politics, Faculty of Law, Kansai University. He is also an associate investigator of the research team of the UTokyo-Asahi Survey. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Tokyo in 2022. His research interests include political communication, voting behavior, and the structure of political preferences. His works have been published in Political Behavior, International Journal of Press/Politics, Social Science Japan Journal, and Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties.

• Yurie MOMOSE Project Research Associate / Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

• Sawako SHIRAHASE Director of TCJS

In recent years, there has been a growing interest among researchers in clarifying the relationship between social exclusion and health inequalities. This is because most early quantitative studies took in the aspect of health as one of the indicators of social exclusion along with other aspects such as economic status, unemployment, lack of political involvement, and social isolation, and so on. A growing number of studies are concerned with social exclusion and health inequalities; however, it has rarely been discussed whether there are gender differences or gender gaps in the relationship between the two, social exclusion and health inequalities. For this analysis, we will use the nationally representative panel data from the Japanese Life Course Panel Survey 2007-2021 (waves 1-15). The analysis showed that the situation of social exclusion affecting health inequalities(subjective health, mental health, and health problems limiting work and home activities) was different for genders. Furthermore, when analyzed separately for men and women, the items of social and economic aspects that affect health inequalities were different for men and women.

Yurie Momose is Project Research Associate / Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo (From April 2023) Visiting Research Scholar, Office of Population Research, Princeton University. (From April to June 2023).

• Izumi Mori JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow (RPD), Sophia University

• Kenneth Mori McElwain Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

Private junior high schools are often viewed positively in the media as providing a superior educational environment, which can lead to better academic and personal development. However, previous research has not fully elucidated the actual consequences of attending private schools. Using the Japanese Longitudinal Study of Children and Parents, this study examines the effects of private junior high schools on students’ academic and social outcomes. The findings indicate that students in private schools experience a more academically challenging environment and improved satisfaction with lessons and schools in the initial year after enrollment. However, there were no notable differences in social interaction with friends, self-esteem, and non-cognitive skills compared to public schools. These results suggest that although socioeconomic differences may exist in access to private schools, there may not be significant differences in student outcomes during the junior high school years.

Izumi Mori is currently a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Sophia University. After receiving a Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Policy at Pennsylvania State University, she taught Sociology at Rikkyo University as an Assistant Professor and worked as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo. Her current research aims to understand Japanese education from a cross-national perspective, focusing on issues such as equality and equity in Japanese public education, the effects of attending private junior high schools, and the involvement of the education business sector in educational policy.

• Yu Uchikura DLX Design Lab, Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo

• Kentaro Honma Associate Professor, Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo

Over the past six years, DLX Design Lab at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science has conducted more than 30 design projects in collaboration with research labs in various fields. In addition to the design projects, DLX Design Lab is also working on systematising the methodology – “Treasure Hunting” to enable designers and scientists, who work in different languages and with different methods, to work more tightly together.
In this talk, I would like to introduce a couple of the latest projects together with our design approach and discuss what kind of values the collaboration between science and design can bring and will achieve in the future.

Yu UCHIKURA

Yu Uchikura is a Japan-based designer/researcher.
Yu had been educated in architecture design in Japan and the US. After having several internship experiences, he decided to expand his scope of design to a more holistic level. From 2019, he joined DLX Design Lab with a mission to turn science into a deployable innovation through the actionable design approach.
As a project researcher at DLX Design Lab, Yu has been leading several DLX Treasure Hunting projects both in collaboration with IIS research labs and/or consortium companies.

• Ou Guangfeng Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo

• Yuya Sakai Associate Professor, Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo

It includes an introduction to the topic and its importance, followed by sections on the need for low-carbon concrete, strategies for crack prevention and control, and innovative technologies and materials for low-carbon and crack-resistant concrete. The outline also features case studies and examples of sustainable and resilient concrete structures, as well as a conclusion that emphasizes the need for continued research and development. Finally, there is a Q&A session for the audience to ask questions and share their thoughts.

OU Guangfeng
-2012.Sep-2016.Sep: Bachelor, Shenzhen University, China -2016.Sep-2017.Sep: Master, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong -2017.Sep-2018.Sep: Engineer, Nano and Advanced Materials Institute, Hong Kong -2018.Sep-2021.Sep: Doctor, The University of Tokyo, Japan -2021.Dec.-2022.Jun: Technical Consultant at Huijiang Concrete Company, China and Overseas Research Assistant at The University of Tokyo -2022.Jun-Now: Assistant Professor at The University of Tokyo

• Jin Hamamura Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

• Rieko Kage Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

Global Nuclear Order is in dire straits. Many nuclear-armed states are expanding their arsenal. Prospects of arms control between the United States and Russia is grim. Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), the cornerstone of international security architecture in the nuclear field, is resented in some quarters for perpetuating a supposedly temporal inequality between five privileged nuclear weapon states and numerous non-nuclear weapon states, some of whom opted to establish Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Ukraine, a state who once inherited Soviet-era nuclear weapons on its soil but chose to become a non-nuclear weapon state under the NPT, is brutally invaded by Russia, a nuclear weapon state who threatens nuclear strikes against outside intervention in support of Ukraine, apparently attacks nuclear power plants there, and falsefully accuses Ukraine of trying to develop nuclear weapons. How does Japan find itself in this environment? We will explore this question.

Jin Hamamura is a Project Researcher at Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in the field of International Relations from the university in 2022. His research interests include international normative order, hierarchy in the international society, nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, and dual use technology management. He received Nanzan Award for Outstanding Research by Young Scholars in Social Ethics in 2017 for a peer-reviewed article in Kokusai Seiji as well as having contributed chapters to two edited books and received research grants from several foundations.

• Junichi Shibano School of Contemporary Sociology, Chukyo University

• Misako Nukaga Professor, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo

In recent years, as Japanese emigration has become more diversified, the number of Japanese youths born and raised abroad has increased. They are called the shin-nisei (new second-generation Japanese immigrants), and many of them have never lived in Japan. This presentation focuses on the phenomenon of these shin-nisei returning to Japan. Based on long-term ethnographic research of shin-nisei youths raised in Guam, this study explores why and how this population is returning to Japan and what problems they face in the processes of return. The main findings are threefold. First, influenced by their highly transnationalized experiences since childhood, the shin-nisei in this study attempted to return to Japan as their “roots” as students or workers. Second, however, different routes of return migration have led to different levels of inclusion or exclusion in Japan. Finally, the differences in return experiences among these shin-nisei were derived from structural and institutional constraints in both Guam and Japan.

Junichi Shibano is an Associate Professor at Chukyo University. His research interest lies in the relationship between transnational mobility and career choice of the post war new second-generation Japanese immigrants known as shin-nisei. He has been engaged in ethnographic research in both Guam and Japan with shin-nisei raised in Guam. He received his Ph.D. in Human Sciences from Osaka University in 2017. He published a book based on his dissertation entitled An Ethnography of Japanese Raised in Guam: The Life Course of Shin-Nisei with Japan (written in Japanese) by Nakanishiya Publisher in 2022.

• Robert Fahey Waseda Institute of Advanced Studies, Waseda University

• Kenneth Mori McElwain Institute of Social Science, and TCJS Board Member, The University of Tokyo

Conspiracy theories have existed since the earliest recorded history, but events in recent years such as the US Capitol riot in 2021 and the refusal of COVID-19 vaccines by citizens in many countries have reinforced the dangers that belief in these theories can pose to societies. While Japan has thus far avoided the worst excesses of conspiracy belief seen in other developed countries, many Japanese citizens do hold conspiracy beliefs – some of them shared with conspiracy believers overseas, and some unique to the Japanese context. My research project aims to clarify the nature of conspiracy belief among Japanese citizens and how it differs from other countries, and this presentation will focus primarily on the spread of conspiracy theories online in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of former prime minister Abe Shinzō and the nature of the communities in which those theories were fostered and disseminated.

Rob Fahey is an assistant professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS) at Waseda University, and a visiting professor at the University of Milan. He received his PhD in Political Science from Waseda University in 2021. His research focuses on the interactions between populism, polarisation and conspiracy theory belief, alongside a parallel focus on contemporary Japanese politics, and he is especially interested in using social media data to measure and observe socio-political behaviours.

• Peng Lu Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo

Have you ever thought why we must keep eating food? The food we eat can have both good and bad effects on our bodies. For the good ones, the most basic merit for food is to provide energy and biological substances to maintain our life. The second level is to provide deliciousness for comfort. The third level is to provide functions that improve our health and prevent our body from disease (e.g. cancer, metabolic disorders, age-related diseases, infectious diseases, and psychiatric disorders). This brings us the conception of functional foods. There is the oriental philosophy that “medicine and food have a common origin”, which indicates that what we eat defines our lifespan. In this lecture, we will go through the history of food and nutritional sciences, introduce the development and the future of functional foods in Japan.

Peng Lu is an Assistant Professor in Laboratory of Food Biotechnology and Structural Biology at the University of Tokyo. His research is primarily concerned with the iron uptake transporter from bacteria and the characterization of bacteriostatic agents from food components to inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria by iron restriction. Furthermore, he has participated in a study on the identification of a citrus-derived polyphenols with potential anti-aging function.

• Tatyana Avilova Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo

• Kenneth Mori McElwain Professor, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo

Previous research has documented that as patient cost sharing – the proportion of health care expenses that individuals must pay out of pocket – decreases, patients’ demand for and spending on health care services increase. This includes demand for and spending on prescription drugs. However, there is limited evidence about whether changes in patient cost sharing have heterogeneous effects by patient sex and type of prescription drug treatment. I study this question in the context of the Japanese health care system, where universal access to most health care services at standardized prices and the age-dependent patient cost sharing scheme address the challenges of conducting this research in other countries. I find statistically significant differences in spending between women and men by type of treatment. Evidence further suggests that spending increases through either more patients beginning treatment or existing patients using more prescription drugs, but not through existing patients switching to more expensive medications.

Tatyana Avilova is a Research Associate at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo. Her research in health economics and economic education studies how institutional policies and interventions impact prescription drug use and students’ choice of college major. She has also studied women’s labor force participation as an intern at RIETI and the work-life balance of nurses in Ibaraki Prefecture as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tsukuba. She received her B.A. in Economics from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.

• Hannah Dahlberg-Dodd Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Language use in popular media is inherently “metadiscursive,” providing linguists with insights into the ideological and semiotic processes involved in structuring discourse for a given genre, context, and imagined audience. In other words, we can think of mediatized language as reflecting simultaneously the linguistic stereotypes held by the creators and what stereotypes those creators believe will be found acceptable by the intended audience. This presentation explores this relationship between language ideology and scripted language through the lens of “foreigner” characters in fictional settings. More specifically, I discuss how katakana’s long-time use as a way to represent linguistic disfluency has evolved as a means of designating a speaking character as “foreign,” both in everyday settings and beyond.

Hannah Dahlberg-Dodd is a Project Researcher in Tokyo College at the University of Tokyo. Her research is primarily concerned with language use in popular media and how that language relates to broader sociocultural ideologies. Some of her recent publications include “Katakana the Mediatized Other: Script Variation in Fantastical Narratives” (Japanese Studies, 2022), O-jōsama kotoba and a stylistics of same-sex desire in Japanese yuri narratives” (Mechademia, 2020), and “Voices of the Hero: Dominant masculine ideologies through the speech of Japanese shōnen protagonists” (Gender and Language, 2018).

• Hung Yin Tsai Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo

• Kenneth Mori McElwain Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

In this talk, I focus on how the Japanese colonial government dealt with pandemics, why local Taiwanese people resisted the public-health policy even though they knew the outbreak was real. I will also analyze how the official definition of medicine in Taiwan changed from a traditional conception to a modern one, and I will demonstrate how our current idea of having this one mainstream Western medicine vs alternative or complementary non-Western medicines can be traced back to colonization, especially in its 18th, 19th, and 20th-century forms. I will also explore the idea of anti-science and anti-vaccination from a historical perspective. This idea of anti-science or anti-vaccination is not just a modern problem. It happened in 19th-century Taiwan, too, ironically during a pandemic.

HungYin Tsai is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College in the University of Tokyo. Her research focuses on past and present cultural encounters in medicine, where global exchanges have re-defined our ideas of the body, diseases, treatments, and life. She is currently working on a comparative project to explore how nutraceuticals that are made from traditional herbs have changed our understanding of health. Through this project, she analyzes the dynamics of bioprospecting and human enhancements, as well as how the lines between medicines and supplements, between the traditional and modern, between nature and artifacts, are established.

• Hyewon Koo Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Since American scholars interpreted Ozu Yasujiro(1903~1963)’s aesthetics as Japanese traditional value in the 1970s, a number of studies about “Japaneseness” in his works have been conducted. However, those studies have not sufficiently examined discourses by Ozu’s contemporaries on the “Japaneseness” of his films. Ozu’s “Japaneseness” discussed from the late 1950s to the early 1960s was not just meant to characterize his films but rather to reflect the conflict between post-war generation directors and the masters in the world of Japanese cinema. Focusing on the critical discourses in his lifetime, this study aims to clarify how the aspects of their conflict intertwined with the meaning of Ozu’s “Japaneseness”. Consequently, it is revealed that Ozu’s Japaneseness had complex meanings even though it was primarily considered as a symbol of old tradition to be abandoned by young generations from the late 1950s.

Hyewon Koo is now working as a postdoctoral project researcher at Dongseo University in Korea. She received her Ph.D. in the field of aesthetics from the University of Tokyo in March 2022 and won a dean’s award for the outstanding doctoral thesis. Her main research interests include Ozu Yasujiro’s films and the history of Japanese cinema. Recently, she is preparing for publication of her doctoral thesis which focuses on the history of criticism of “Japaneseness” of Ozu Yasujiro’s films.

• Kaoru Takahashi Lecturer, Center for Promotion of Higher Education, Kogakuin University

• Misako Nukaga Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo

This study explores Japanese women migrants’ everyday experiences and cultural reproduction practices in southeast London. Drawing on an ethnographic study of their everyday life and social relationships, it asks how they make relational understanding of meaning and value of ‘Japaneseness’ to navigate their life as migrants in a middle-class neighborhood. With a conceptual framework of ‘translocalism’, this study illuminates the multi-layered identity formation of migrants, as well as their community-making practice in which the Japanese women creatively invent the meaning of their intersecting gender, ethnicity, and class identities to establish belonging to the locality. This disrupts the idea that migrant mothers with middling status are stable and worry-free subjects but rather they make ongoing negotiations to achieve a sense of belonging to the host society.

Kaoru Takahashi is a lecturer at Kogakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research focuses on the gendered life trajectories and everyday experiences of Japanese women in London by using an ethnographic approach. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Goldsmiths, the University of London in 2019.

• Akane Bessho Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

In recent years, community gardens and farms are implemented in cities as means for promoting education, social interaction, and employment for diverse community members, including various social minorities. In Canada, immigrants have been playing key roles in the community garden movement. In Japan, there has been a nationwide movement called noufuku-renkei, a program which aims to promote work inclusion of persons with disabilities in the agricultural sector. What characterizes these programs is that the social minorities, who are often stigmatized as “recipients” of welfare in the society, are presented as significant members who have capabilities to take active roles by demonstrating their aptitudes and skills needed to support agricultural production and businesses. By taking community-based agricultural organizations in Canada and Japan, this presentation explores key management characteristics of agricultural activities that promote social minorities’ “role quest” and discusses implications for realizing an inclusive society through the lens of “workplace-making.”

Akane Bessho is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. Her research interests include landscape planning, particularly in the field of urban agriculture, inclusive cities, and non-profit organization management that connects the two. She received a Master’s in sustainability science from the Graduate Program in Sustainability Science – Global Leadership Initiative (GPSS-GLI), Environmental Studies Graduate School of Frontier Sciences in 2018, and a Ph.D in Engineering from the Department of Urban Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo in 2022.

• Miku Matsunaga Postdoctoral Project Researcher, Graduate School of Economics, Center for Research and Education in Program Evaluation (CREPE), The University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Do political parties update their welfare policy positions to address voters’ economic needs in times of financial crisis? While existing research on the political consequences of the 2008 Great Recession has shed light on governmental monetary policies and the resulting impact on voter turnout, there is insufficient evidence of party-level analysis on welfare policy transformation. This article shows that political parties put more weight on inclusive welfare economic policy immediately after the Lehman Shock. We drew on the quasi-experimental regression discontinuity in Time (RDiT) approach to test the argument. By looking at 2,608 parliamentary elections and 957 parties from 53 countries between 1990 and 2018, our study shows that left-wing parties were more supportive of welfare policy after the recession. The finding enhances our understanding of the party’s responsiveness to voters’ economic demands. Furthermore, it would contribute to broad political behavior and welfare economics research.

Miku Matsunaga is a postdoctoral project researcher at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Economics and Center for Research and Education in Program Evaluation (CREPE). Her main research interest include election violence, (radical) populist parties, Political Economy, and International Relations. After having received LL.B of International legal studies, she earned MPP from the University of Tokyo, MA of Politics from New York University, and Ph.D. from University of Essex.

• Nagafumi Nakamura Project Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo

• Rieko Kage Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo

Why do intervening states find it difficult to make the decision to withdraw from armed peace operations? According to previous studies that focus on the withdrawal of the operation leading country (e.g., U.S.), this is because ambiguous intervention objectives (e.g., preventing hotbeds of terrorism) are accompanied by complex criteria with which to evaluate whether those objectives have been achieved. Given this ambiguity, the operation leading country has to persuade those who emphasize the most demanding criteria for achievement of the objective (e.g., the elimination of all terrorists in the intervened states). On the other hand, this study insists that ambiguous objectives may justify the withdrawal of countries that contribute troops (e.g., Japan). Given this ambiguity, their operation participating countries can emphasize the least demanding criteria (e.g., protecting civilians until intervened states’ security forces are prepared to protect them). This study tests this hypothesis through the case studies of Japanese withdrawal from Iraq and South Sudan.

Nagafumi Nakamura is a Project Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. His research focus is International Relations, specifically international security from the end of the cold war, humanitarian intervention, the war on terror, and peace operations. He has published 6 peer-reviewed articles including “Conditions of Exit from New Wars,” Nenpo Seijigaku (2021); “The Dilemma of Exit Strategy,” Heiwa Kenkyu vol. 48 (2018); and “Considering the Exit Strategy in Peace Operations from a Historical Perspective,” Kokuren Kenkyu vol. 19 (2018). He has also contributed to 6 specialized academic books and textbooks.

• Yuko Nakata Project Research Associate of Transnational Law, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo

• Masayuki Tamaruya Professor, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo

This research analyzes legal issues that have contributed to the growing number of unoccupied properties in Japan and proposes how the Japanese government should manage them with trust. Unoccupied houses have become an important concern in the aging society of Japan. It is said that unoccupied properties adversely affect the community environment. They are at a high risk of collapsing and could be hotbeds of crimes. The existence of unoccupied properties also reduces the value of surrounding areas. Local governments and the Land Bank of the Public-Private Partnership have tried to take measures to this problem, but they are not effective because of the lack of enforcement. It has been believed that local governments cannot address the problem and exercise coercive power on owners of unoccupied properties under the current legal system. However, this research argues that, even within their limited authority, local governments could take effective measures by utilizing trust.

Yuko Nakata is a program-specific assistant professor of Transnational Law at the University of Tokyo Graduate Schools for Law and Politics. Her academic interests include the enforceable rights of the mortgagee (the secured creditor) and the effectiveness of foreclosure procedures in mortgage laws. Her current research focuses on the legal issues of unoccupied houses after the foreclosure procedure. She obtains a B.A. at Doshisha University, a Master in Laws at the University of Tokyo, and an LL.M. at the University of London Queen Mary.

• Yuya Shibuya Project Research Associate, The Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, the University of Tokyo

• Kenneth Mori MCELWAIN Professor, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo

Social media is everywhere. Their ubiquity and pervasiveness in today’s society have awakened interest across research fields. My project approaches social media-related phenomena in Japan through an interdisciplinary lens. In particular, we examine how economic, political, and social situations in the real world relate to and impact people’s communication in the digital world and vice versa. In this talk, I look at this dynamic relationship through various cases, including COVID-19 and the 2020 Olympics. Specifically, I will discuss communication strategies, economic incentives, people’s narratives and discourses, and policy implications in the current information age.

Yuya Shibuya is a research associate at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, at The University of Tokyo. She received her Ph.D. in Socio-information and Communication Studies from The University of Tokyo in 2019.

• Dea Bankova Graphics Journalist, Reuters News & Media

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

In my work, I use data visualization and data art, combined with analysis and machine learning as a means to facilitate an exchange of information, ideas, and even emotions with the audience. Between 2020 and 2021, I worked at the Watanave Lab on several projects that explore topics unique to Japan, and in this talk, I will showcase a few, as well as discuss the creation process (analysis, design decisions, and story). Specifically, I will discuss a project with Watanave Lab and Iwate Nippo to create a digital archive of thoughts and experiences of survivors of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and a separate visualization of the biggest earthquakes in recent Japanese history. I will also present a personal data art project that explores Japanese anime over the past 50 years from the point of view of international fans. Time permitting, I will demo other creative visualization work.

Dea Bankova is currently a Graphics Journalist at Reuters on the EMEA desk in London, UK. Previously, she worked as Project Researcher at the Watanave Hidenori lab at the University of Tokyo, as well as an independent data visualization consultant. Her interests are in interactive and creative visualization. She also has experience working in machine learning in the UK at Microsoft and a data science start-up company. She obtained her Master’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oxford in 2015. Dea is originally from Bulgaria and the UK. She has been interested in Japan for many years and lived in Tokyo from 2019-2021.

• Yuki Asahina Assistant Professor, Graduate School of International and Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Similar levels of inequality may be coded as acceptable or unacceptable in different places. To account for misrecognition of inequality, the existing studies highlight the roles of ideological legitimation and situated comparison through which individuals read inequality around them, but these accounts can be further elaborated upon. This paper argues that it is neither the belief in ideology nor social comparison alone but rather the relationship between the two which shapes particular ways in which inequality is experienced. The dominant collective narratives rooted in macro-level contexts and individuals’ situated comparisons shape perceptions of the contradiction (or lack thereof) between how people think things should be and how things are in three specific ways. The proposed framework is put to use with interviews with 98 millennials in Japan and South Korea.

Yuki Asahina is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He specializes in inequality, globalization, and right-wing groups in East Asia. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript analyzing precarious youth in Korea and Japan.

• Eunmi Mun Assistant Professor, School of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Daiji Kawaguchi Professor, Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo

It is widely believed that meritocratic employment practices reduce gender inequality by limiting managers’ reliance on non-merit factors, such as biases. An emerging stream of research, however, questions the belief, arguing that meritocratic practices often fail to reduce inequality and may paradoxically increase it. Despite these opposing predictions, we still lack convincing empirical findings to adjudicate between them. Typically relying on data from a single organization or industry, most previous studies suffer from limited generalizability and cannot properly account for the large variation in the implementation of merit-based reward systems across organizations, let alone identify the origins of the variation. We attempt to overcome the limitations by constructing large-scale linked employer-employee

Eunmi Mun is an assistant professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research investigates organizational responses to social demands for gender equality and the effectiveness of organizational practices to address gender equality. She has published papers on corporate responses to the Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law, the impact of corporate social responsibility on gender diversity in Japanese firms, and parental leave policies in Japan. She is currently working on a comparative project to document firm-level gender inequality profiles across countries.

• Tomoko Matsumoto Junior Associate Professor, the Tokyo University of Science

• Kenneth Mori MCELWAIN Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

How does a regime change influence elite mobility? Our study provides new evidence that the impact of a regime change on elite mobility is not linear but different by phases of a regime change, collecting elite data after the Meiji Restoration in Japan (1868). We analyze the impact of the regime change from the two aspects: (1) composition of elites or the elite membership and (2) the internal hierarchy within them. Regarding the elite membership, the regime change surely opened an opportunity for commoners to join the elite group. The share of the elites whose fathers were commoners increased. On the other hand, although the commoners’ disadvantages in achieving higher ranks within the elite group was insignificant after the regime change but this did not last long. After the new regime established, the internal elite hierarchy again started to reflect the social stratum of the former regime and weaken meritocracy.

Dr. Tomoko Matsumoto is a Junior associate professor at the Tokyo University of Science. She is interested in the relationship between ordinary people and democracy. Her research is published in Electoral Studies and Journal of Japanese Political Science.

• Tomoyuki Narisawa Chief, Saitama Industrial Technology Center, Northern Laboratory

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Improving food self-sufficiency ratio is a big issue in Japan, and increasing the use of domestic wheats is one of the effective means. Our laboratory has conducted studies to increase the use of domestic wheats for Udon noodles. “Norin61” (N61), a domestic wheat that was once popular in Japan, remains a perennial favorite because of its excellent sensory characteristics including the unique taste/flavor compared with Australian Standard White (ASW) wheat. Currently, N61 has been replaced by “Satonosora”, which is one of the successors of N61. Satonosora has desirable properties for agricultural producer such as disease resistance and crop yields like ASW, but it is inferior in Udon making because of a less unique flavor compared with N61. Through the chemical analysis to clarify the formation mechanism of the Udon flavor, I established a technique for flavor enrichment in the noodle-making process. The technique has been recently applied to the development of new value-added noodle products by various companies.

Tomoyuki Narisawa is a chief at Saitama Industrial Technology Center Northern Laboratory. He obtained a Bachelor in Science from Josai University in 2008, a Master of Arts and Sciences from the University of Tokyo in 2010, and a Ph.D. in Agriculture from the University of Tokyo in 2019. For a year in FY2013, he was seconded as a technology liaison fellow to a division of university corporate relations, the University of Tokyo. His research interests are food science and food analysis in local foods, especially wheat

• Eureka Foong Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo College (Visiting Researcher in the CoEx Lab at Carnegie Mellon University) , The University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

The online gig economy has the potential to mitigate gender inequities in the workplace by providing flexible, remote, short-term opportunities to find paid work. However, prior work suggests women ask for lower hourly pay rates than men in online freelance marketplaces. Several factors could explain these gaps, such as gender “likability” biases that penalize women for more assertive behaviors, like negotiation, and differences in how men and women evaluate their worth. In this talk, I will discuss results from a design-based research study to understand challenges female freelancers perceive in rate-setting and negotiation online. My team completed 19 participatory design workshops with online female freelancers from 13 countries. I highlight opportunities to design tools that promote gender equity in online negotiation and rate-setting by mitigating fears over global competition, ambiguity in negotiation norms, and challenges building trustworthy client relationships at distance.

Eureka Foong, PhD, is a computer scientist and design researcher of equity and online work. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College in the University of Tokyo and a Visiting Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, she has been awarded numerous international grants from the Segal Design Institute and Adobe Research to conduct research on remote work and the online gig economy. Eureka has extensive experience leading socially impactful user experience (UX) projects with industry teams at Facebook and Piktochart. www.eurekafoong.com

• Isami Sawai JSPS Cross-border Postodctoral Research Felllow, Hosei University

• Masayuki Tamaruya Professor, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo

Oka Yoshisato (1921-1999), a professor of political science at the UTokyo Faculty of Law, is famous for his book Politics Seiji in Japan, which showed his original and systematic insights on politics in general. However, presumably since the number of his works is very limited and that his writing style is difficult to understand, few researchers have investigated Oka’s study of political science. By relying on a variety of sources including transcripts of his lectures as well as his book collections, this presentation examines the development, transformation, and challenge of Oka’s study of political science, particularly emphasizing the impact of historical and intellectual backgrounds of the 1960s. Furthermore, this presentation argues that the re-evaluation of Oka’s study would lead to revealing the ‘Japanese’ features of political science in the post-war period, which still have some impacts on contemporary political studies in Japan.

Isami Sawai is a JSPS Cross-border Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He received LL.B. (2013) and M.Phil. in Political Science (2015) from UTokyo, and has recently defended his Ph.D. thesis that was submitted to the Department of International History, London School of Economics (2021). Before the appointment to the postdoctoral position, he had worked as a research associate (2015-16, 2019-21) and as a project lecturer at UTokyo Graduate Schools for Law and Politics (2021). His research interests lie in the political history of modern Japan and the international history of East Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries.

• Jordan Hamzawi Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

• Kenneth Mori MCELWAIN Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

I discuss how party policy and valence shape Japanese politics. Drawing from the literature valence, which highlights the significance of things like competence and capability on voter choice, I provide evidence that the LDP lost in 2009 due to poor policy positioning while facing the DPJ, a party with comparable valence. However, after the DPJ split apart, the LDP was able to dominate a fragmented opposition once more through its relatively superior valence. I conclude that opposition parties in Japan are either poorly positioned on policy relative to voter preferences or do not have the necessary valence to compete with the LDP even when better positioned on politics

Jordan Hamzawi began studying Japanese politics as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University where he double majored in International Relations and Japanese. He continued his studies at the University of Michigan where he received a Master’s in Area Studies: Japan and then went on to complete his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Davis. He is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, researching Japanese electoral politics and drafting a manuscript for a book on LDP dominance.

• Travis Seifman Postdoctoral Researcher, Historiographical Institute (Shiryōhensanjo), the University of Tokyo

• Yoko Matsui Professor, Historiographical Institute, the University of Tokyo

Over the course of the 17th-19th centuries, seventeen formal embassies from the Okinawan kingdom of Lūchū (Ryūkyū) journeyed to Edo to engage in ceremonies ritually reaffirming the kingdom’s relationship to the Tokugawa shogunate. In numerous locations along their round-trip journey, the embassies were put on public display in grand processions, flying banners, wearing costumes, and playing music while escorted by a mass of Kagoshima domain samurai warriors. These processions, and illustrations of them, played a central role in informing popular conceptions among early modern Japanese of Lūchū’s cultural character and political status. Drawing upon a number of visual and textual sources, this paper examines the political significance and impact of visual, material, and performative aspects of these processional displays, with a particular eye to analyzing procession as a distinctive form of ritual performance.

Travis Seifman is a postdoctoral Project Researcher at the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute (Shiryōhensanjo). He holds a PhD in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MA in Art History from the University of Hawaiʻi. His PhD dissertation and current book project explore ritual performance in embassies dispatched to Edo by the Okinawan kingdom of Lūchū (Ryūkyū) in the 17th to 19th centuries. He is also interested in 20th-21st century reenactments of Lūchūan royal ritual culture, and the role of Shurijo Castle Park in the revival and continuation of Okinawan performing and visual arts traditions.

• Taro Tsuda Assistant Professor, College of Foreign Studies, Kansai Gaidai University

• Kenneth Mori MCELWAIN Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

The election of the Liberal Democratic Party’s top leader (sōsai or president) is one of the most important rituals in contemporary Japanese politics. Since its founding in 1955, the LDP has been Japan’s dominant political party and under the country’s parliamentary system, the head of the majority party in the National Diet almost inevitably doubles as the prime minister. In characterizing LDP leadership elections, analysts have often focused on the role of money, factions, and backroom deals in what are essentially elite intraparty contests. Policy goals or ideological affirmations expressed during these events tend to be seen as lip service done to give candidacies a veneer of higher public purpose. To what extent is this true? In this paper he reassesses LDP leadership elections, focusing on the election of 1964. This case involved standard machinations by party bosses and their factions but was also heralded by some as centered on policies and programs to an unprecedented level. After analyzing how this contest was evaluated by prominent political participants and observers, he will examine the media coverage at the time and available information about public opinion. This study will carefully consider the conventions and rituals of such party leadership elections, also aiming to draw connections to contemporary Japanese politics, in which the LDP remains very much in charge.

Taro Tsuda is an assistant professor in the College of Foreign Studies at Kansai Gaidai University, where he teaches courses on international relations, international history, and Asian studies. His research focuses on contemporary Japanese political history. Currently he is working on a book project examining the life and career of prime minister Sato Eisaku and his role in contributing to the Liberal Democratic Party’s long-term rule. Taro received a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages in 2019 in Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

• Chigusa Okamoto Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economics, Chuo University

• Daiji Kawaguchi Professor, Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo

We quantify the externality of redevelopment program of urban shopping center on its neighborhood, exploiting the urban redevelopment program in the central shopping district in Tokyo as a natural experiment. The demolish of 77-years old apartment unit and a construction of shopping complex generated immediate hike in the neighborhood land price and long-term increase of the aggregate sales of neighborhood clothing stores. The redevelopment program did not change the land use of neighborhood because of the tight regulation of land use; the resulting inelastic supply of land induced substantial land price hike.

Chigusa Okamoto is an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Economics, Chuo University. She is also a project researcher at Center for Research and Education in Program Evaluation (CREPE), the University of Tokyo. She took her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Tokyo. Her main research areas are Urban Economics, Spatial Economics and Applied Microeconometrics.

• Shohei Okamoto JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Team for Social Participation and Community Health, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Even though the degree and duration of vaccines’ efficacies remain unconfirmed, widespread vaccination, by establishing herd immunity against the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), is a demanded step to the pandemic end. However, vaccine hesitancy, defined as ‘delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite availability of vaccine services’, can hinder achieving herd immunity. In this study, we investigated determinants and reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, utilising a sample of Japanese adults aged between 20 and 74, collected through an online survey in July 2021. Furthermore, we conducted a conjoint experiment to evaluate if relaxing social distancing policies can increase vaccination intentions.

Shohei Okamoto is a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at the Research Team for Social Participation and Community Health of Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, whose expertise lies in social epidemiology.

Prior to the present position, he was engaged in research at the Leading Graduate School program of Keio University, at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine of King’s College London, and at the Research Center for Financial Gerontology of Keio University.

He received his BA & MA in Economics, MS in Epidemiology, and PhD in Economics from Keio University, Tokyo, Japan.

• Adrienne Sala Visiting Scholar, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

• KAGE Rieko Professor , Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

We analyze the articulation of administrative, legislative and political temporalities with the temporality of collective action and legal mobilization organized by the anti-karôshi movement since the 1960s. The back-and-forth movement between legal mobilization and collective action can be understood in relation to the three temporalities that characterized the movement three main objectives: recognition as a professional disease (administrative and judiciary temporalities), enactment of karôshi prevention law (legislative temporality) and reform of the working time regulation (public action temporality). Articulation of these different temporalities is pivotal to the judicialization of occupational health political process.

Adrienne Sala is social science researcher at the French Institute of Research on Japan, at the Maison franco-japonaise in Tokyo (UMIFRE 19, CNRS, MEAE), visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, Institute of Social Science and associate researcher at the Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS. Her main research interests include political sociology and political economy of institutional change, legal mobilizations and legal professionals role in the Japanese society.

• Masako Tanaka Project Research Associate, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo

• Kenneth Mori McElwain Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

Tax reform is rare because it is hard. To cope with tax protest movement, government officials tend to establish tax commission, consisting of experts, academics, and business people. In this presentation, she compares Japan and NZ to examine how experts play a role in tax reform. Experts of both countries review the problem of current taxation system and make proposals or recommendations to the Minister. Some proposals are accepted, but others are not. Focusing on the institutionalization of economic knowledge within the state, she explores what determine the difference.

• Masaki Takahashi Specially Appointed Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University

• Daiji Kawaguchi Professor, Graduate School of Public Policy, The University of Tokyo

This paper investigates the economic consequences of manipulation of social insurance benefits in the context of public long-term care insurance (LTCI) in Japan. We first document novel discontinuity and bunching in the distribution of health scores that determine benefit levels for LTCI. The observed distribution suggests that LTCI recipients tend to receive more generous benefits than they should because medical examiners manipulate recipients’ health score. To quantify the impact of manipulation on long-term care (LTC) expenditures, we develop partial identification and nonparametric estimation methods that allow for flexible restrictions on counterfactual distribution. Our baseline estimation indicates that the manipulation increases monthly LTC expenditures per recipient by 60.2-227.9 USD (3.7-15.5%). We also find that the lower bound on manipulation effects is robust to various restrictions.

Masaki Takahashi is a postdoctoral researcher at Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Studies (HIAS). His academic interests are health economics, public economics, and behavioral economics. He obtained a BA in Economics from Keio University, an MA in Economics from University at Albany, State University of New York, an MA in Economics from the University of Tokyo and a Ph. D. in Economics from the University of Tokyo.

• Subodhana Wijeyeratne Associate Professor, Tokyo Woman's Christian University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Aeronautical engineer Itokawa Hideo (1912–1999) has long been regarded as the ‘father’ of Japanese rocketry. He was important enough that when naming the asteroid visited by their trailblazing Hayabusa mission in 2003, the Japanese Space Exploration Agency settled on the name ‘Itokawa.’ This apotheosis occurred in the context of Itokawa’s elevation into the ‘father figure’ of the Japanese space program – a position akin to that held by Konstantin Tsiolovski and Wernher von Braun in the United States and Soviet Union space efforts. The manner in which these figures are remembered and presented publicly reveals details about how modern societies engage with not only individuals, but notions of progress and technological modernity they represent. Itokawa’s career shows us that the authority and public personae of father figures are intimately tied up with notions of masculinity and authority that are prevalent in their social milieux. In the case of Itokawa, his career encompassed both attempts are reclaiming the masculine status denied to him and his colleagues by Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, while at the same time exploring idiosyncratic modes of ‘scientific’ renovation for elements of masculinity he thought were no longer relevant to the modern world. At the same time, Itokawa – particularly in his later career – proposed alterations to conventional Japanese gender relations in which ‘science’ and ‘objectivity’ were used to alter social expectations of both men and women. This presentation will explore Itokawa’s writings and opinions on both men and women to explore how he extended his patriarchal authority well beyond the remit of engineering.

Subodhana Wijeyeratne is associate professor in the English Department at Tokyo Women’s Christian University. He completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2020, focusing on the history of the Japanese space program. His interests include the history of science in Asia, the history of technology, and the social and cultural impact of technological change. He is also a published author, with over twenty short stories in print. His first collection of short stories, ‘Tales from the Stone Lotus,’ and novel, ‘The Slixes’, are currently in print.

• Naoki Iguchi Lecturer, Department of Social Information, Faculty of Studies on Contemporary Society, Mejiro University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Selection by a person’s non-cognitive features is common in companies’ hiring process. There have been criticism that it leads to the applicants’ self-blame, or that it plays a role in the reproduction of inequality. However, these critique have not always led to change in the selection process. This presentation aims to describe the lived experiences of youth in such circumstances. Also it aims to clarify the effects that critique can have in such difficult circumstances. This presentation focuses on the critique of the job searchers themselves by drawing on interview data. He will show the types of critique, the difficulties they experienced on making an acceptable public claim, and how they responded privately, through the selection of companies.

• Kaori Sato Associate Professor, Faculty of Business, Kokushikan University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Although the prior literature has examined the relationship between work schedule characteristics and worker mental health, establishing the causal effect of work schedule characteristics is challenging because of endogeneity issues. This paper investigates how various work schedule characteristics affect workers’ mental health using employee surveys and actual working hours recorded over seventeen months in a Japanese manufacturing company. Our sample includes 1334 white-collar workers and 786 blue-collar workers observed from 2015 to 2016. Our major findings are as follows: long working hours cause the mental health of white-collar workers to deteriorate even after controlling for individual fixed effects. Furthermore, working on weekends is associated with mental ill health—the negative effect of an hour increase in weekend work is one and a half to two times larger than that of weekday overtime work for white-collar workers. On the other hand, short rest periods are not associated with mental health for them. Our results indicate that taking a relatively long rest period on weekends is more important for keeping white-collar workers healthy than ensuring a sufficient daily rest period.Regarding blue-collar workers, our analysis reveals that working after midnight is associated with mental ill health, whereas short rest periods are not associated with their mental health. This suggests that the strain of night work is a more important determinant of mental health for blue-collar workers. The differences in the relationship between work schedule characteristics and workers’ mental health for white-collar and blue-collar workers can be explained in terms of different work styles, different expectations, and different degrees of selection. We conclude that working for long hours or irregular hours deteriorates the mental health of workers but its impact is likely to differ significantly across job types.

• Paula Curtis Postdoctral Associate, Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University

• Shirahase Sawako TCJS Director

The image of medieval Japan is often that of the warrior, with little attention paid to the producers, traders, and other humdrum individuals that provisioned people of all statuses, from agricultural laborers to emperors and their contemporaries. This talk brings into focus the activities of lower court nobility and metal casting artisan organizations, those who negotiated and supplied the crucial resources that kept elite events and everyday life functioning in premodern society. Focusing on the imperial court reveals how Matsugi Hisanao, a low-ranking courtier, reestablished lapsed patronage relationships with metal casters in the later sixteenth century. His pursuit of transregional business relations with casters and their provincial overlords was built upon a long legacy of economic and social privileges enjoyed by casters as purveyors of goods and services to the elite. And yet, much more than simple laborers, a close examination of caster prerogatives and modes of identification in text about them and metal objects by them reveals the permeability and fluidity of social status in medieval Japanese society, as well as how the labor of some of its least visible figures in and beyond the court were critical to the longevity of its most iconic institutions of authority.

Dr. Paula R. Curtis is a historian of medieval Japan. She is presently a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in History at Yale University with the Council on East Asian Studies. Her current book project focuses on metal caster organizations from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and their relationships with elite institutions. She also works on the history of documentary forgery in premodern Japan.

• Toshiaki Shoji Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economics, Seikei University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

This paper uses credit card transaction data and examines the impact of Japan’s point reward program for cashless payments. The main findings are as follows. First, the program increased the payment amount by 48-64 percent and the number of card users by 16-18 percent. Second, these impacts persisted even during the COVID-19 outbreak in April and May 2020 and after the program (in July 2020). Third, the program had larger impacts on firms that introduced payment machines after the program started than those already had payment machines.

• Ryota Mugiyama Associate Professor, Department of Political Studies, Gakushuin University

• Shirahase Sawako TCJS Director

Marriage timing has been delayed in parallel with the rise in non-regular employment in developed countries. However, little is known about why non-regular work is associated with delayed marriage. In addition, how the influence of non-regular work matters across different relationship status is still unclear. Using nationally representative panel survey data from Japan, we test two explanations––lack of economic independence and bad nonpecuniary job qualities––for why non-regular work is associated with delayed marriage across different relationship status. Considering differential expectation on breadwinner role, analyses are separately conducted by men and women. The results show that the association between non-regular work and delayed marriage is partly explained by lower income rather than worse job qualities. For men, lower income explains both the delayed formation of romantic relationship and the transition from romantic relationship to first marriage. For women, lower income has opposite mediating effect by different relationship status: the lower income delayed non-regular workers’ formation of romantic relationship but prompt their transition from romantic relationship to first marriage. Although worse job qualities are significantly associated with the transition to marriage, they do not explain the effect of non-regular work for either men or women.

Ryota Mugiyama is Associate Professor at Department of Political Studies, Gakushuin University, Japan. He has received his doctoral degree (sociology) in 2019 at the University of Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on labor market inequality and life course. His other recent work includes intragenerational mobility, gender inequality, and employment trajectories around childbirth.

• Yujin Woo Assistance Professor, Tohoku University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Is migration a plausible option in combating aging and shrinking population in countries with a strong emphasis on ethnic homogeneity? What kind of policies would be ideal to realize a multicultural society in such countries? To answer these questions, this presentation explores Japanese people’s views on citizenship (who qualifies as “Japanese?”) and migration (what kind of migrants are more favored?). Based on original survey results, it aims to provide evidence to influence policy discussions in regard to the recent debate over labor migrants in Japan. Specifically, it points out limitations with the current one-way assimilationist approaches pursued by the Japanese government and suggests a consolidation of social integration policies for both Japanese natives (i.e., recognizing and appreciating cultural diversities) and incoming migrants (i.e., understanding Japanese language and culture).

• Naoko Hosokawa Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

Is the Japanese language inundated by loanwords? Or is it enriching itself by absorbing foreign vocabulary? We often hear such discussions in contemporary Japan. But why does this topic attract so much interest? This presentation is about her examination of public discussions on lexical borrowing. Through an analysis of recurrent wordings in the debates, she will shed light on an implicit contrast between ‘national’ and ‘foreign’ hidden in the metalinguistic discourse.

Naoko Hosokawa is a postdoctoral fellow at Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo. She holds a D.Phil degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. Her fields of research include sociolinguistics and media textual analysis. She is interested in the question of language and identity with a particular focus on loanwords, metaphors, and language education.

• Hilary Holbrow Assistant Professor, Dept of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

Ostensibly, Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP) brings interns from developing countries to Japan to learn advanced skills in manufacturing, construction, and agricultural firms. In reality, interns work menial jobs and receive little transferable training. But although COVID has underscored and magnified the vulnerable position of program participants, even the global pandemic has not laid bare the broader societal costs of TITP, which ultimately countermand the aims of the program and its proponents.

Hilary J. Holbrow is Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society. A sociologist by training, her scholarship examines social and economic inequality, work and organizations, immigration, and the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. She is an International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo, an Associate in Research at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute, and a member of the US-Japan Network for the Future.

• Asako Takashima Project Researcher, Institute for Advanced Global Studies, The University of Tokyo

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

As the history problem became an issue for Japanese foreign policy since around 1990, the issue started to be targeted academically. Many studies have laid focus on the concept of apology. However, an apology which is accepted by an apologized country can be different according to situations. Thus, the question should not be which apology is accepted or not, but why an apologizing country would make an apology even when it may not be accepted. To answer these questions, this paper will shed light on how the Japanese government apologized to other countries from the viewpoint of political narrative. A detailed analysis of the Japanese Prime Ministers’ annual greetings on 15th August at the Memorial Ceremony of the War Dead and the Prime Ministers’ talks (Danwa) which are presented around 15th August regarding the anniversary of the end of the War will allow us to understand why an apology is made or not.

• Marcin Pawel Jarzebski Project Assistant Professor, Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

• Takeo Hoshi Professor, Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo

Currently many parts of the world, especially urbanized countries, experience a major demographic transition characterized by an ageing and declining population, and Japan is one of the most rapidly going through this process. The ageing and declining population bring tremendous challenges for societies but also it provides opportunities for a positive changed towards more sustainable societies. The purpose of this presentation is to rationalize this interface by (a) identifying the challenges and opportunities that ageing and declining urban populations will have for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and (b) identifying some emerging interventions to capitalize on the opportunities and reduce the challenges. Far from only posing only challenges, ageing and population shrinking can offer opportunities for many SDG targets. It is important to employ various technological, socioeconomic, institutional and governance interventions to leverage the opportunities and minimize the risks that the ageing and shrinking of urban populations will pose for long-term sustainability.

• Fukai Taiyo Economic and Social Research Institute & UTokyo Graduate School of Economics

• Daiji Kawaguchi Professor, Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo

Many countries are struggling to provide childcare services to help people balance work and family life, but the focus has tended to be on building new facilities rather than making more effective use of existing facilities. In this study, we estimated the critical structural parameters for the supply of childcare services and conducted policy simulations by scrutinizing the institutional design of public childcare services in Japan. Specifically, we focused on the amount of money each facility receives per child admitted, or the unit cost of childcare, which is funded by a combination of government subsidies and user fees. As this amount decreases discontinuously with the size of the facility, this creates an incentive for facilities to not increase their size any further, which causes facilities to bunch at a threshold. This degree of bunching has information that allows us to identify structural parameters that specify how elastic the supply of capacity is to the unit cost. Policy simulations using this model show that it is possible to expand the supply of childcare centers without increasing the burden on either government or users by eliminating these discontinuities. This result provides a new perspective on the usefulness of identifying key production parameters and optimizing the existing infrastructure, rather than only considering the construction of new facilities.

• Maria Telegina Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

My research is focused on the perception and expression of time and space concepts in contemporary Japanese. Through the frameworks of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics, it examines material obtained through a set of experiments with Japanese native speaking participants – a free word association experiment and spontaneous speech experiments on temporal and on spatial description strategies.
Network analysis of the materials obtained through the free word association experiment revealed that time and space concepts are most closely related to the concepts of emotional evaluation, family/human relations, and work.

Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the corpora based on the material of the spontaneous speech experiments allowed me to formulate typologies of temporal and spatial description strategies in Japanese.

The findings of my study demonstrate that some of the strategies of extended spatial and temporal description seen in Japanese native speakers have not been described in research conducted on more extensively investigated languages. In this presentation, I am going to further elaborate on typologies of description and features of temporal and spatial domains of the Japanese mental lexicon.

• Pan Mengfei Research Associate, Graduate School of International Management, Aoyama Gakuin

This presentation examines the relationship between art networks and geographic place from the perspective of art sociology. Through employing concepts such as “art network”, “cultural capital”, “social capital”, and “community of practice”, it investigates mainly the situation in modern Tokyo from the Meiji Period and analyzes the phenomenon of artist clusters, their motivations, actual benefits, and the impact on the places from the clusters. Drawing research from art history and urban studies, this presentation not only reveals the significance of place for the art networks but also argues for an expansion of research scope to envision the place as an agency to better understand the art collectivity in contemporary Japan.

• Takahashi Fumiko Project Lecturer, Komaba Organization for Educational Excellence, The University of Tokyo

• Misako Nukaga Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo

In this presentation, I will explore the transition from education to the labor market for second-generation immigrants and refugees in Japan – individuals who have one or both parents are migrated to Japan or who were born in Japan or migrated to Japan in their early teens -. The challenges that the second generation of immigrants experience at the transition from university/graduate school to the labor market in Japan seem to stem partly from insufficient recognition of their existence by companies, as well as structural factors. I will present the result of the case studies of the three people who have migrated to Japan as refugees and are now working in domestic companies and will discuss the factors behind the obstacles toward racial equity at the transition from education to the labor market.

• Ryo Morimoto Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University

• Takeo Hoshi Professor, Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo

In this talk, I examine the half-life politics of nuclear things by focusing on local residents’ uncanny encounters with wild boars in their abandoned homes. Lurking out of the deep woods, boars have conquered the evacuated land that the government has been using to store decontaminated waste. But local residents have come to identify these nemeses of civilization as surrogate bodies that are metaphorically linked with their own bodies, using the boars to imagine a potential life in their now-unfamiliar radioactive hometown. At the same time, as decontamination efforts progress, locals come to see the hunting down and disposal of boars—a process that transforms the boars from irradiated life to radioactive waste—as the contradictory emblem of recovery. Tracing the wild boars’ lives and deaths in relation to people’s shifting conceptualization of “nature,” “contamination” and “safety” illustrates local residents’ struggles to resist the banal physiological and psychological violence that low-dose radiation exposure has imposed on their sense of wellbeing, and their efforts to negotiate an alternative ecological future of the aftermath.

• Zhang Weiyu Project Research Associate, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo

• Tamaruya Masayuki Professor, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo

The rules of privacy and personal data protection have experienced two major changes due to the epoch-making technologies: Internet and AI. Those changes bring two contradictions for personal data management: individual rights vs. weakness for them to control, and the huge demand for data vs. high cost and isolation phenomenon.
Realizing the above contradictions, this presentation will explore “social management” mechanism as supplement to the current personal data protection. By referring to “social management”, it propose to introduce social power independent from individuals and third party data users to protect and manage personal data. With its centralized management and professional knowledge, social management mechanism allows effective protection of personal data and reduces the cost of large-scale data collections.
Although this method has not been widely applied, many Asian jurisdictions have made relevant explorations like establishing specialized organizations to collect and manage data, or regulation systems targeted to data collectors and users. This presentation will introduce relevant practices in Japan, China, and India to explore the structure of social management mechanisms and key aspects of the implementation process.

• Subodhana Wijeyeratne Lecturer, Faculty of Business & Commerce, Keio University

• Shirahase Sawako TCJS Director

Despite its considerable independent accomplishments – such as the extraordinary Hayabusa probes – international links have been a core to the development of the Japanese space program. One of the crucial elements of this is story of its gradual alienation from the United States. From 1954 to the 1980s, Japan’s space aspirations were intimately connected to the assistance their former conquerors could provide. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, strategic and economic priorities led to the US limiting technology exports. The Japanese also began to experience major frustrations with American assistance – which, combined with recovering national confidence in the context of an economic boom, impelled them to branch out to other countries for space cooperation, while reducing their reliance on the USA. These tensions were made manifest in the American-led destruction of Japan’s indigenous satellite industry in the late 1980s, which served to alienate many within Japan’s space industry. As a result, in the 1990s and 2000s, Japan pursued relations with a variety of other partners, as a way of both securing markets and information they’d otherwise be denied, and in order to bolster their position as a major space power. The end result of these trends is the contemporary formation of the Japanese space program, as manifest in JAXA – an institution with intimate links with American space technology, that nonetheless pursues a variety of similar links with countries from Ghana to Germany.

• Kawaguchi Hirofumi Project Researcher, UTokyo Graduate Schools for Law & Politics

• Tamaruya Masayuki Professor, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo

Political scientists have analyzed how war contributes to state formation and development. In a defeated country, however, such a wartime legacy is difficult to inherit due to a postwar regime change. To understand how this difficulty is overcome, Japan after WWII, which experienced the drastic reform under the postwar occupation by the United States, is analyzed here. As an example of a wartime legacy that was not eliminated despite the postwar reform, this work focuses on farmers’ organization in 20th-century Japan. Beginning with the prewar era, I examine the government mobilization of farmers during WWII and its inheritance to Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA), which has been the most politically influential and widely organized farmers’ group in contemporary Japan. I also analyze its development in the 1950s and 60s. Delving into the wartime institution’s survival leads to finding that two factors had a positive influence. The first factor is the farmers’ group’s relationship with political actors outside the government, such as opposition parties and other farmers’ groups. The second factor is the efforts of the farmers’ group to achieve its member’s loyalty. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of a wartime legacy’s survival. It also has implications on studies in Japanese politics, reconsidering the literature’s assumption of JA’s close relationship with the Liberal Democratic Party and shedding light on hitherto neglected non-economic aspects of JA.

• Steven Braun Visiting Assistant Professor, College of Arts & Media Design, Northeastern University

In this presentation, I’ll discuss the relationship between data visualization and archives as “technologies of seeing”: both are technologies that make choices about what can or should be rendered visible in the eyes of others. In visualization, we make design choices about what data to collect, how to analyze them, and how to express them through visual encodings, and these choices determine whose voices or identities get privileged or displaced in public discourses. Likewise, in the creation of archives, choices must often be made about what to preserve, how to preserve, and how to make that which is preserved accessible over space and time. As such, both visualization and archives are practices of design that are tightly wrapped up in questions of seeing; each can offer lessons to one another about what it means to document and bear witness to the world around us, especially at a time when “crises of seeing” threaten our individual and collective well-being. This discussion will be explored through projects that interrogate the role of visualization and archives in the study of Japan, particularly as a country situated in a world in trauma, transition, and uncertainty.

• Michiko Suzuki Project Researcher, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

• Kenneth McElwain Professor, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

The history of the founding and the early years of the Japanese Red Cross Society (JRCS) revise the conventional and reductionist view of the Red Cross movement in Japan as simply a cultural import from the West and a top-down movement directed by the Meiji government.

This research argues that from the beginning, native Japanese traditions of humanitarianism expressed in the modern Japanese notion of humanitarianism (jindō: 人道), literally meaning ‘the way of humanity’ infused the ethos of the JRCS. It also argues that while at the national level the JRCS enjoyed the patronage of the Imperial Family, organizationally it developed into a strong grassroots movement that expanded its activities beyond the ICRC’s mission of providing medical aid to combatant in international conflicts. The rapid growth of the JRCS was made possible by the involvement of ordinary people in humanitarian activities in the form of self-reliant efforts to survive social uncertainties such as poverty, natural disasters, epidemic diseases, and civil wars brought about by the Meiji Restoration. By responding to local humanitarian crises as well as assisting the nation in Japan’s foreign wars, the JRCS tapped into ordinary Japanese people’s communitarianism and patriotism and the Society experienced a dramatic increase in the membership to more than 2 million members in 1920, emerging as by far the world’s largest National Red Cross Society.

• Muroga Kiho Associate Professor, Graduate School of Economics, Kyushu University

• Shirahase Sawako TCJS Director

This paper estimates the effects of internet penetration on labor force participation, hours worked, employment status and wage. We found that internet penetration increases the probability of labor force participation. Our estimates also show that internet penetration is associated with a substantial increase in wage, especially for males. In addition, non-college-graduated groups are highly affected by internet penetration for both men and women. Those results suggest that internet penetration helps encourage more labor force participation because of an increase in wages.

• Flora Weil Multidisciplinary Designer & Researcher, Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo

• Toya Riina Project Associate Professor, Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo

Multidisciplinary collaborations and design thinking are two methods that can help develop innovative ideas, especially when it comes to responding to complex topics such as sustainability. Two projects, Dust to Dust and Probes, developed as collaborations between DLX Design Lab and Sakai Lab and Yagi Lab respectively will be presented to exemplify this approach. These two projects were carried out as part of a series of UTokyo collaborations supported by Toyoshima, centred around the topic of sustainability.

• Mogi Ryohei Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics

• Shirahase Sawako TCJS Director

This talk will discuss how paths into first childbirth (i.e., the sequence of engagement, cohabitation, pregnancy and marriage) have become more diverse in Japan over the decades, as well as how these paths are influenced by socio-economic inequalities.