The current issue features a comprehensive report about the German-Japanese Symposium on climate change mitigation and regional development („Deutsch-Japanisches Symposium zu Klimaschutz und regionaler Entwicklung“) which was hosted in cooperation with the Embassy of Germany in Tokyo and the School of International Liberal Studies (SILS) at Waseda University.

In addition to that we also report on some of DIJ’s other events from the recent past, present our latest publications and introduce one of our new employees.

As always, the DIJ Newsletter is available as PDF file and in print.

Wie kaum ein japanischer Premierminister vor ihm scheint der seit 2012 wieder amtierende Shinzō Abe die Politik seines Landes grundlegend zu verändern. Als Spross einer Politikerdynastie eigentlich ein typischer Vertreter des politischen Establishments, verspricht er in allen zentralen Politikfeldern – von der Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, über die Wirtschafts- und Arbeitsmarktpolitik, bis hin zur Energiepolitik –, alte Gewissheiten und Strukturen in Frage zu stellen. Dazu kommt, dass es Abe gelungen ist, im notorisch instabilen Regierungssystem Japans eine ungewöhnlich populäre und scheinbar fest im Sattel sitzende Regierung zu formen. Doch gleichzeitig regt sich Widerstand vor allem bei der japanischen Jugend, die mit Großdemonstrationen und neuen Formen des Protests auf sich aufmerksam macht.

Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge beleuchten diese und weitere Trends der Ära Abe.

The paper argues that Japan’s legislators should use this window of opportunity to introduce 100% de jure reserve requirements for transfer deposits.

Such a move would not only take advantage of the benefits propagated by supporters of a reserve-backed regime. The implied BoJ’s balance sheet expansion would allow the Bank to further purchase JGBs. As the expansion would be permanent, the regime shift would not only stabilize the government’s fiscal condition, the BoJ, too, would no longer have to worry about exiting its policy of quantitative easing. Both the government and the central bank could focus on their primary policy goals.

Contemporary Japan is an international peer-reviewed journal edited by the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo (DIJ) and published biannually by de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.

Contemporary Japan publishes in-depth, original work from all disciplines as they relate to present-day Japan or its recent historical development.

Start-up ecosystems within regional agglomerations have been intensively studied in Western countries, but much less in East Asia. Therefore, little is known about the specific features of East Asian start-up ecosystems.

We study the high-tech start-up ecosystems within four leading East Asian agglomerations: Tokyo, Seoul, Suzhou and Chongqing.

The Newsletter, which since June 1997 appears two times a year in German and English, contains information about DIJ research projects, events and publications.

Das im Frühjahr 2016 erschienene Bulletin informiert ausführlich über die Aktivitäten des Deutschen Instituts für Japanstudien im vergangenen Jahr (2015).

Diese auf deutsch herausgegebene Publikation kann direkt beim DIJ in Tokyo bezogen werden.

In this issue, contributors consider feelings, perceptions, and narratives of hope and hopelessness in Japan: tracing, as it were, the work of hope.

Hope (kibō) in this context can be understood as at once a disposition, a tool, and a collective resource. People may actively seek out or attempt to foster hope; but hope is also, at times, felt as external: bestowed upon some and not others. That is to say, hope can be situational. Both fostered hope and situational hope can have an impact on people’s actions, but it is the latter that highlights the significance of the “independent action of hope in the world” (Reed 2011: 533). The contributions to this issue, in this sense, enlarge our understanding of what hope does.