Being single is an increasingly common experience for Japanese adults. Not only has the average age at first marriage risen continuously over the last decades, so too has the rate of permanent singlehood. Research on the unmarried is therefore critical to an understanding of contemporary Japanese society. DIJ social scientist Nora Kottmann and Laura Dales (University of Western Australia) are currently conducting a survey that aims to better understand how the lives and relationship worlds of unmarried adults (‘singles’) have been affected by the ongoing COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic and how this might affect future practices and perceptions of the increasing numbers of ‘singles’ in Japan (and beyond). Both researchers introduce this survey in their recent co-authored blog posts ‘Solo-camping and solo-hotpots: Rethinking practices and perceptions of singlehood in Japan in COVID-time’ and ‘Looking to capture practices of intimacy in times of social distancing: Mixed-methods research on singles in Japan’. Updates will be published on the project’s webpage.

An article co-authored by DIJ director Franz Waldenberger was selected by Palgrave Macmillan and the editorial team of the Asian Business & Management journal as best content and can now be accessed for free. The original article “The distinctiveness and diversity of entrepreneurial ecosystems in China, Japan, and South Korea: an exploratory analysis” by DIJ alumni Martin Hemmert and Florian Kohlbacher, Adam R. Cross, Ying Cheng, Jae‑Jin Kim, Masahiro Kotosaka, Franz Waldenberger, and Leven J. Zheng studies five major ecosystems located in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Suzhou, and Chongqing. It focuses on the business conditions for information technology (IT) start-ups and reveals that these entrepreneurial ecosystems differ in various important aspects from leading Western counterparts, including in the growth and internationalization. It concludes that public policy should focus on supporting high-potential start-ups and strengthening the ecosystems’ global outreach. The article is an outcome of the DIJ research project Start-ups in Asia – the role of agglomerations and international linkages and can be accessed here.

A new working paper, co-authored by Senior Research Fellow Markus Heckel and Kiyohiko G. Nishimura (Graduate Institute for Policy Studies GRIPS/Center for Advanced Research in Finance CARF, University of Tokyo) examines the unconventional monetary policies of the Bank of Japan from 2002 to 2019 with a focus on open market operations. The CARF working paper Unconventional Monetary Policy through Open Market Operations: A Principal Component Analysis applies a principal component analysis to investigate the complexity of the operations. The authors find that four principal components (PCs) explain most of the variance of the Bank of Japan’s operations of various facilities and measures. They also observe that open market operations of the Shirakawa era (2008-2013) were the most complex, resulting in an increased number of PCs. In contrast, the corresponding number in the other eras has been at most two (Fukui, 2003-2008) and four (Kuroda, 2013-present). This paper is a result of Markus’ research project Economic Discourses of Monetary Policy – The Case of the Bank of Japan.

Max Weber’s popularity in Japan remains unbroken. To mark the 100th anniversary of his death, the prestigious intellectual journal Gendai Shisō (現代思想) has published a special issue (12/2020) dedicated to his works and intellectual influence. Leading Japanese intellectuals and Weber scholars have contributed 24 essays to this issue, including Mishima Ken’ichi (“Disenchantment Reconsidered”), Suzuki Masahiro (“Weber in Contemporary Chinese Thought”), and Konno Hajime (“Imagining Max Weber as a Prophet”). For the Max Weber Foundation’s blog “Max Weber in der Welt”, our Senior Research Fellow and historian Yufei Zhou has written a detailed review of this special issue which introduces the individual contributions.