This issue features the following topics:

International conference at the DIJ: Work-Related Diversity
On November 30th and December 1st 2017, the DIJ hosted the conference “From Flexible Rigidities to Embracing Diversity? – Work-Related Diversity and Its Implications for Japan and Beyond”

Local Anti-Nuclear Movements in Japan
The construction of a nuclear power plant is always a fiercely contested issue, especially for the affected local communities.

Japan’s rural areas – challenges and policies
Many municipalities outside of Japan’s larger agglomeration are exposed to severe demographic change.

Do labour market inequalities erode support for democracy?
In October 2017, a workshop examined links between labour market inequalities and politics in France, Germany and Japan.

Non-Japanese employees in Japan
Since the global financial crisis the number of Non-Japanese employees working in Japan is rising again.

The DIJ Newsletter is available in German and English, for download and in print.

This virtual special issue is dedicated to contemporary studies exploring a Japan beyond the country’s metropolitan areas. Over the past decades, rural Japan nearly vanished from the Western research agenda, as urban Japan had come to dominate the attention of most social scientists studying contemporary Japan. Particularly the cityscape of Tokyo, the epitome of the Asian mega-city, has shaped the popular cultural imagination of Japan from abroad to an extent that the countryside, if seen at all, acquires all qualities of a museum or cultural repository of the past. Yet it should not be forgotten that millions of Japanese continue to live in quite different social spaces, such as hamlets, villages, or rural towns in mountainous and coastal areas. Even though urbanization, consumption and media usage have left their imprint on everyday life, social values and behavior rules in even the most remote part of the country, there is ample reason to take the urban-rural divide as a meaningful line of distinction between the two structurally different and inherently distinct spheres of city and countryside.

This virtual special issue has been compiled as a reminder of the significance that life and living in regional Japan is having for an adequate understanding of contemporary Japan, the changing faces of the “rural imaginary” (Schnell 2005) and the plurality of lifeways in late-modern society.

Career concerns of managers function as an important control mechanism in the context of corporate governance. They bear important motivating and disciplining effects. In Japan, where – in the absence of a well-functioning external market – management careers have been generally restricted to in-house promotions, career concerns also result in efforts by middle management to exert control over and influence top management decisions as they impact their career perspectives.

Takaaki Eguchi’s paper explains the background and implications of such internal control mechanisms in Japan and points to their limitations in recent years given the increasing need for a stronger top management function. Reviewing relevant empirical research, Franz Waldenberger shows that managerial careers in Germany have long been embedded in an external market.

Die Themen der aktuellen Ausgabe beinhalten unter anderem einen ausführlichen Bericht über das Deutsch-Japanische Symposium zu Klimaschutz und regionaler Entwicklung, welches in Zusammenarbeit mit der Deutschen Botschaft Tokyo und der School of International Liberal Studies (SILS) der Waseda University veranstaltet wurde.

Darüber hinaus berichten wir aber natürlich auch über weitere DIJ-Veranstaltungen aus jüngster Vergangenheit, stellen Ihnen unsere neusten Publikationen vor und begrüßen einen neuen Mitarbeiter.

Der DIJ Newsletter ist wie immer verfügbar in einer PDF- und Print-Variante.

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.