What are the latest developments and challenges that overshadow the Tokyo Olympics? Join DIJ deputy director Barbara Holthus, Olympic expert Vanessa Åsell Tsuruga, and  special advisor to former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Tomohiko Taniguchi, for an online discussion of the risks and opportunities ahead and their impact on Tokyo and Japan. The event ‘Tokyo Olympics: An Uphill Battle’ is hosted by the Japan Center at the Institute for Security & Development Policy (ISDP), a Stockholm-based non-profit and non-partisan research and policy organization. The webinar will be moderated by Jon Thunqvist, Senior Research Fellow at the ISDP, and takes place on Monday, 31 May, 10.00-11.00 (CEST) / 17.00-18.00 (JST). Registration is required via the ISDP.

The diversification in and of urban spaces through rising mobility is inevitable, yet the actual capturing of socio-spatial urban transformation is still methodologically underexplored. Based on the analytical framework of Löw (2001), Sakura Yamamura employed the novel methodological tool of mental maps in her research on global and local mobility patterns. She combined it with 45 interviews with transnational migrant professionals in Tokyo, ethnographic site surveys and geographical mapping. The mental maps were drawn by transnational professional migrants in order to capture the extent and locations of urban transformations. In this presentation, she will introduce the method of mental mapping and discuss how it can be connected to spatial theory to capture socio-spatial transformations and mobility patterns in Tokyo and beyond. This lecture opens the new ‘DIJ Method Talks’ lecture series. Details and registration here

Speaker:
Sakura Yamamura, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

This talk will explore the political stakes of modes of seeing and remembering through the lenses of proximity and transparency, while proposing a possible reevaluation of these concepts in the light of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Radiation upsets spatial hierarchies and visual regimes by posing its own questions on positionality and representation. A tentative answer to such queries might come from a careful consideration of recent directions in scholarship in new materialism and ecocriticism, and in the form of a kind of ‘radioactive aesthetic’. Thanks to its poetics of avisuality and distance, radioactive aesthetic often attracts into its orbit literary works apparently removed from the catastrophe, thus proposing a corrective to the criteria of authority and proximity implicit in the process of canonization of works of ‘post-Fukushima literature’ and of disaster literature in general. Details and registration here

Speaker:
Chiara Pavone, University of California, Los Angeles

There are many innovation efforts in the field of mobility such as autonomous driving or ‘mobility as a service’ in Japan today. Expectations and visions play a significant role for the direction of innovations: future-oriented narratives and imaginaries mobilize interests and financial resources, stimulate agenda setting, and facilitate actor coordination. In the process of being shared by different actors, expectations can transform into binding requirements, or into self-evident assumptions providing orientation for future actions. This presentation explores the substance of governmental visions and expectations of autonomous driving in Japan by examining government policy documents and archival records. These visions include the performance of envisioned technologies that have yet to be realized and wider socio-technical transitions. However, such visions also entail the risk of policy makers becoming locked in a single pattern while overlooking alternative solutions. Details and registration here

Speaker:
Yukari Yamasaki, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology