DIJ director Franz Waldenberger and DIJ alumnus Martin Hemmert (Korea University) are authors of a new open access article that systemically reviews studies on new venture entrepreneurship in East Asia. “New venture entrepreneurship and context in East Asia: a systematic literature review” (Asian Business & Management, online first), jointly researched and written with Adam R. Cross, Ying Cheng, Jae‑Jin Kim, Masahiro Kotosaka, and Leven J. Zheng, examines articles published in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)-listed journals between 2000 and 2020. It finds that the research body is highly unbalanced: most articles are single-country studies focused on China, apply a quantitative methodology, and concentrate on topics such as entrepreneurial strategies and new venture entrepreneurs’ personal attributes and networks. More contextualized research on countries such as Japan and South Korea and on less studied themes such as culture, entrepreneurial financing and teams, new venture internationalization and entrepreneurial intention is desirable. The article is an outcome of the DIJ research project Start-ups in Asia – the role of agglomerations and international linkages.

What does it mean when we say “local” and what does “local” mean in the Japanese context? Rethinking Locality in Japan, edited by DIJ researcher Sonja Ganseforth and DIJ alumnus Hanno Jentzsch (Vienna), examines broader political and socio-economic shifts in Japan through the window of locality. It covers demographic change, electoral and administrative reform, rural decline and revitalization, welfare reform, and the growing rift in energy and food production. Chapters discuss the different ways in which locality in Japan has been reconstituted, from historical and contemporary instances of administrative restructuring to more subtle social processes of making and unmaking local places. Contributors include the co-editors Sonja Ganseforth (“Territorialized yet Fluid Locality: Reform, Consolidation, and the More-than-Human in Japanese Fishery Cooperatives”) and Hanno Jentzsch (“San’ya – The Making and Unmaking of a Welfare Quarter”) as well as DIJ researchers Barbara Holthus (“The Meaning of Place for Selfhood and Well-being in Rural Japan”, with Wolfram Manzenreiter) and Isaac Gagné (“Mapping the Local Economy of Care: Social Welfare and Volunteerism in Local Communities”). The volume is an outcome of the DIJ’s research focus The Future of Local Communities in Japan.

Citizen science, in which citizens and scientists collaborate to generate and utilize data and knowledge, is an important approach to co-creating society. While citizen science in the natural sciences is well established, it is still in its infancy in the humanities and social sciences. To use the citizens’ knowledge to solve social problems it is necessary to design protocols for citizen participation, to involve universities in supporting citizen science, and to build data provision and management systems that take into account data ownership and privacy protection. At a conference co-organized by the NIRA Research Institute, the DWIH Tokyo, and the DIJ, researchers from Japan and abroad discussed the possibilities of citizen science to contribute to the development of research in the humanities and social sciences. DIJ director Franz Waldenberger contributed the closing comments. The opinion paper ‘Citizen Science in the Digital Age’ based on this conference has now been published (in Japanese). A PDF version is available for download here

A new journal article by DIJ researcher Barbara Geilhorn studies two post-Fukushima plays by Setoyama Misaki to examine the potential of theatre to shape cultural memory and raise critical awareness. Among the various art works addressing the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Setoyama’s plays are rare in exposing how intricately the roles of victim and perpetrator are entangled. Relating Fukushima to the atomic bombings and the Chernobyl disaster, Setoyama opposes national discourses of a spatially and temporally limited disaster to construct 3.11 as a disaster on a global scale. Setoyama’s plays go far beyond the criticism of nuclear power and touch upon essential problems in Japanese society, such as the lack of an open culture of discussion and the strong suppression of dissenting voices, as the analysis shows. The article is an outcome of Barbara’s research project Local Issues Take Stage – Culture and Community Revitalization. It was published in Japan Forum, online first, and can be accessed here.