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

Please note: Panel 5 was moved to Friday, April 23, 11:30 a.m. JST / Warsaw 4:30 a.m. / Eugene, OR 7:30 p.m. (Thursday, April 22)

The DIJ will host the four-day online conference ‘Climate Change, Energy, and Sustainability in the Pacific Region Knowledge, Policies, and Transfers (1970s – Present)’ from April 19 to 23. It seeks to explore the historical development of attitudes towards climate change and environmental degradation within various Pacific Rim countries like China, the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Mexico. It will also address interactions between their climate, energy, and environmental policies and ask which national economic goals, geopolitical rivalries, social structures, and cultural preferences pose obstacles to the implementation of countermeasures to climate change and environmental degradation. The conference is part of the Max Weber Foundation’s collaborative research project “Knowledge Unbound” in the module “Interaction and Knowledge in the Pacific Region: Entanglements and Disentanglements”, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany). Details and registration here

未曾有の被害をもたらした東日本大震災から10年を迎えました。国際文化会館図書室、ドイツ日本研究所図書室、日仏会館図書室では、英語、ドイツ語、フランス語で書かれた東日本大震災関係の資料を展示いたします。本展は、2021年3月1日から3月31日まで開催しています。DIJでの展示のみ一か月延長し、4月30日まで開催します。展覧会の詳細や開館時間については、こちらのチラシをご覧ください。ドイツ日本研究所の図書室に展示されている著作の一覧はこちらからご覧いただけます。展示内容・入室等のお問い合わせは各図書室にお願いいたします。

DIJ social scientists Sonja Ganseforth and Nora Kottmann have presented papers on their current research projects at this year’s virtual AAS annual conference. Sonja’s paper “The Political Ecology of Japanese Coastal Fisheries Reform” draws on her research project Fishing communities between growth and demise and studies challenges faced by Japanese coastal fisheries after recent legal reforms. Nora gave her paper “Negotiating Belonging: German Expatriates in Southern Tokyo” in the panel ‘Managing Migration in Japan: Short-term Labour, Tourists, and International Students’. Her paper is based on ongoing fieldwork and analyzes different conceptions of belonging among privileged, highly mobile short-term migrants. DIJ alumna Gabriele Vogt served as discussant in this panel. The AAS presentations are available as on-demand videos. More information here.

The DIJ is cooperation partner of the 2021 Annual Conference of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan (VSJF), organized by DIJ alumni Anna Wiemann and Tobias Weiss together with Florentine Koppenborg. The one-day online conference ‘Continuity and Change 10 years after 3.11’ takes place on Friday, 19 March 17-25h (JST)/9-17h (CET). It features panels on ‘Change and Continuity in Energy Policy’, ‘Tōhoku – Life between Nuclear Radiation and Reconstruction’, and ‘Civil Society and the State since 3.11’. Participants include the DIJ’s director Franz Waldenberger, principal researcher Isaac Gagné, and DIJ alumna Phoebe Holdgrün. Isaac will present the paper “Haunting Memories of 3.11 and the Heaviness of Trauma in Post-Disaster Miyagi” which is part of his ongoing research project Listening to the Community: Grassroots Mental Healthcare in Local Communities. The conference is organized by the Japanese-German Center Berlin (JDZB) and the VSJF, in cooperation with the DIJ and supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and the Universität Zürich. Details, programme, and registration link here.