̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Japan

Samurai, Darwin, the Poet Laureate and some very Curious Cures

zs332 — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 15:56:54 +0000

A year of wonder in store at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library during 2022.

What next for Japan's women?

ta385 — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Japan's women are experimenting with new femininities in challenging times, a new book reveals

How Japan’s ‘salaryman’ is becoming cool

sjr81 — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 13:50:30 +0000

Read more about the new research into 'Cool Japanese men.

Japanese men are becoming cool. ̽��ֱ��suit-and-tie salaryman remodels himself with beauty treatments and 'cool biz' fashion. Loyal company soldiers are reborn as cool, attentive fathers. Hip-hop dance is as manly as martial arts. Could it even be cool for middle-aged men to idolise teenage girl popstars?

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Earliest-known children’s adaptation of Japanese literary classic discovered in British Library

sjr81 — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 09:38:47 +0000

Dr Laura Moretti, from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge, came across an unknown children’s picture-book, dating from 1766, under the title of Ise fūryū: Utagaruta no hajimari ( ̽��ֱ��Fashionable Ise: ̽��ֱ��Origins of Utagaruta) while on a study trip with her students.

̽��ֱ��British Library copy, part of the collection belonging to Sir Ernest Satow, a 19th century British scholar and diplomat, is a picture-book adaptation of Ise Monogatari. Translated into English as ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise, it is one of the most important works in Japanese literature and was originally composed probably in the late 9th century following the protagonist, Ariwara no Narihira, through his many romances, friendships and travels.

̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise has since been adapted and reinterpreted continually down the centuries as part of the canon of Japanese literature.

“If we were to hazard a comparison, ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise could be seen as the equivalent of the works of Shakespeare in terms of canonical status in Japan but I had never heard of or seen a children’s adaptation before – no-one knew of this book,” said Moretti. “This is a missing piece of the jigsaw. No one ever knew if it had been rewritten for children – but now we know. And it was sitting in the British Library all along.”

Dr Moretti’s new book, Recasting the Past (Brill, 2016), presents a full-colour reproduction of the 18th century edition, alongside a transcription in modern Japanese, an English translation, and textual analysis. ̽��ֱ��publication of the 1766 adaptation of the Tales of Ise fills a gap in scholars’ understanding of the work’s history. Although much scholarship has taken place on the reception of Tales of Ise and its target audiences in different epochs, no one has previously explored the age of its readership.

̽��ֱ��1766 introduction by the publisher shows that the book was intended to be read by children and there are various clues to support this view. ̽��ֱ��main character Narihira first appears as a young boy at school, a portrayal which encourages young people to identify with him. ̽��ֱ��whole text is also written using mainly the phonetic syllabary which could be understood by readers with only two years of schooling. ̽��ֱ��story was also abbreviated to include only 13 of the original 125 episodes – making it easily accessible to a broad readership and was useful for introducing those with basic literacy to Japan’s cultural heritage. ̽��ֱ��book would have educated children in the narrative of ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise as well as the aesthetic quality of the poetry.

Moretti, though, counters the notion that only children would have read Utagaruta no hajimari, and argues that the text could also work as a substitute of the ̽��ֱ��Tales of Ise for those adults with limited linguistic and cultural literacy.

Now, after several years of negotiating the necessary permissions to use the two complete extant copies (one held at the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the other at the Gotoh Museum, both in Tokyo; alas the British Library copy has only one volume of three) and to finish the transcription, translation and textual analysis, Utagaruta is available again for readers to enjoy – more than 250 years after it was first printed.

While graphic novels and comic books such as manga remain hugely popular in Japan and across the world today, instances of books where images and text are interdependent abound in pre-modern and early-modern Japanese literature. In this specific case, Moretti shows that the primary function of images was to complement the prose by filling in the gaps left by the narrative. Images set the scene for the story and helped to characterize the protagonists by depicting their dress and physical appearance.

Moretti believes that studying this children’s adaptation can give a contribution to the study of children’s literature in general, discovering aspects that might not be apparent in other cultures.

“Utagaruta no hajimari, for example, is trying to draw children into the world of the adult, rather than shield them from it by introducing children to sex and appropriate romantic behaviour,” she said.

“A vast number of early-modern Japanese picture-books that adapt canonical literature awaits to be studied. This research is the first step in the foundation of this field of study. If appropriately developed, it has the potential to shed light onto new sides of children’s literature as well as to advance in the understanding of how early-modern Japanese graphic prose functioned.”

A chance discovery in the British Library has led to the discovery and reproduction of the earliest-known children’s adaptation of one of Japan’s greatest works of literature.

This is a missing piece of the jigsaw. And it was sitting in the British Library all along.

Laura Moretti

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Opinion: As ARM enjoys a Japanese embrace, the lessons it can teach UK tech firms

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:24:16 +0000

When the 12 founding engineers of chip designer ARM Holdings met in a 14th century barn near Cambridge in 1991 to welcome their new CEO, (now Sir) Robin Saxby, he asked them a brutal question: “Should we strike out for something, or just be in the hand-to-mouth chip design consulting business?”

With Saxby’s enthusiasm and the founding engineers’ belief in their technology, the team decided they would aim to become a global standard. They set a target to embed ARM designs into 100m chips by the year 2000. It was an ambitious goal for a tiny company with only £1.32m of investment from its then-struggling backers Acorn, Apple, and VSLI. At the time, many said it was no more than a pipe dream.

But this week, ARM agreed a US$32 billion sale to Japan’s Softbank. ARM’s chip designs are embedded in more than 95% of the world’s mobile phones, as well as tablets, servers, and many other types of smart devices. Last year, ARM’s designs went into some 15 billion semi-conductor chips. An incredible feat from an inauspicious start. So what lessons does ARM’s success have for other budding British technology companies?

̽��ֱ��first is: don’t try to do everything yourself. Instead, specialise in the activities where you have a distinctive advantage. In ARM’s case, that was designing capable, reliable chips that used little power and could be manufactured efficiently in volume at low cost.

Workhorses

Then, catalyse the development of a network of partners around you who will fill in the gaps and make you successful as they strive to grow their own businesses. ARM broke the mould at the time, abandoning the conventional wisdom that to succeed in semiconductors you had to be a vertically integrated company which made huge investments in wafer fabrication such as Intel, or remain as a small band of design consultants.

Instead, it decided to become a “chip-less, fab-less chip company”. It would specialise in designs for Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) chips – the workhorses that control all the background activities users aren’t even aware of. But instead of being a small, specialist provider of designs for RISC processors, ARM was able to turn itself into the pivot of a huge ecosystem, becoming the “glue” that bound a network of hundreds of partners together as well as a magnet for knowledge fragmented between different players.

These include phone and tablet makers, chip fabricators, tool developers, software providers, and makers of complementary chips. Lesson one, therefore, is focus on your core and harness the power of ecosystem partners to do the rest.

Focus. niXerKG/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Growing the market

That leads on to the second lesson: concentrate what you can do to make the overall ecosystem “pie” bigger, rather than worrying about maximising your share of that pie. Given the difficulties of scaling up a technology company from a UK base, ARM shows the benefits of letting your ecosystem partners drive global scale for you, propelling your product into billions of devices and accumulating a small royalty from each to create a massive flow of cash.

̽��ֱ��third lesson is to think global from day one. ARM grew with hardly a single customer in the UK. It realised that the volume, and the lead customers driving the direction of its industry, were scattered around the world. So, from the outset, it’s early customers and partners were in the US, Japan and Korea including Texas Instruments, Sony and Samsung. Later, a few were added in Europe, such as ST Microelectronics and Nokia. ARM had to be global almost from birth. Now clients include leading Chinese players such as Huawei and ZTE.

̽��ֱ��SoftBank takeover is certainly not evidence that life will be rosy if and when the UK leaves the European Union. In fact, the deal probably has more to do with the decline in sterling relative to the yen and the dollar, which has made ARM shares cheaper for foreign buyers. Add the fact that ARM has hardly any customers in the UK and few in Europe; most of its sales are in Asia and the US. As a result, it’s pretty well insulated from a downturn in the UK economy.

̽��ֱ��genuine threat from Brexit would come from any future restrictions on migration; ARM has a very multi-national army of engineers and faces an extreme shortage of suitably trained developers in Britain. Any problems here, and SoftBank’s soothing words about maintaining and growing ARM’s presence in the UK might fade into history.

But ARM is also attractive to the Japanese firm because it has the potential to become a major player in the “Internet of Things” – the emerging world where smart machines, sensors, and devices talk to each other. It is another lesson for UK tech firms to keep moving into new spaces.

ARM is particularly well placed to benefit from this emerging network, not only because of the strength of its technology and development capacity, but also because its ecosystem approach is a perfect fit for a market that requires a multitude of specialist companies, institutions and governments to work together. Even at a 40% premium over ARM’s share price before the deal was announced, Softbank’s acquisition looks like a smart move.

Peter Williamson, Honorary Professor of International Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Peter Williamson (Cambridge Judge Business School) discusses the sale of Cambridge-based technology firm ARM Holdings to Japan's Softbank for £24 billion.

Shinichiro Hamazaki

Sumo Wrestlers Wrestling on the Ring 1

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Opinion: Five years after Fukushima, there are big lessons for nuclear disaster liability

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 16:25:32 +0000

As four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant suffered catastrophic cooling failures and exploded in March 2011, the world watched in disbelief. For Japan, this was not just the greatest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It was “the most severe crisis … since World War II.”

Five years on, the nation continues to struggle with the effects. Towns up to 40km from the plant remain a dead-zone: desolate and uninhabited. As many as 100,000 people still remain displaced, unable to return to their homes. Workers at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)still don claustrophobic masks and rubber suits to venture into the Fukushima facility. Their job is to decommission the plant safely, a task that plant manager Akira Ono recently said was “about 10% complete”.

̽��ֱ��task is beset with setbacks and spiralling costs. In December 2011 the government estimated that managing Fukushima would cost US$50 billion. By 2014 this had nearly doubled to include US$19 billion to decommission the Fukushima plant; US$22 billion to decontaminate the surrounding area; US$9 billion to build temporary storage facilities for nuclear waste; and US$43 billion to compensate the victims. Today even this looks hopelessly optimistic.

Compensation

Julius Weitzörfer, a fellow of Law at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, reports that Fukushima is now the biggest civil liability case in history. More than two million people have sued TEPCO and US$50 billion has already been paid out. This is roughly equivalent to 49 Exxon Valdez oil spill settlements, and experts predict the total cost of compensation could rise to US$120 billion.

One notable subplot has been compensation for cases of suicide. A court’s landmark decision that TEPCO pay US$470,000 to the heirs of a 58-year-old farmer’s wife named Hamako Watanabe could prove much more costly. ̽��ֱ��Watanabe family were evacuated from the village of Yamakiya in April 2011, losing their farm and leaving them with a US$140,000 mortgage on their now uninhabitable home. Watanabe became severely depressed and during an authorised one-night visit to their home in June the same year, she burned herself to death.

Other bereaved families have also come forward. Two similar cases are now underway, and the Japanese government anticipates that as many as 56 suicides could be tied to the disaster. And this looks conservative: the NHK broadcasting service has put the number at 130. What is certain is that the number is rising. A further 19 evacuees took their lives in 2015 and there is no reason to believe 2016 will be any different.

Who pays

Officially the buck for everything stops with TEPCO. Under Japanese nuclear-liability law, the nuclear operator is responsible for the full cost of an accident, even if it is not proven to be negligent.

In practice, the Japanese taxpayer is bearing a significant share of the burden. Speakers at “Fukushima Five Years On” - an expert workshop recently hosted by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� - emphasised that whilst TEPCO’s liability is unlimited, its assets are not. Despite the country’s seismic history, TEPCO’s private insurance policy did not cover earthquakes or tsunamis. And in accordance with regulations introduced in 2009, TEPCO was insured –through both private policies and state indemnities- for up to just US$1.1 billion: about a fiftieth of the damages paid out so far.

̽��ֱ��government has been forced to prevent TEPCO’s bankruptcy – over and above all of its other Fukushima-related outgoings. It has bought a majority share and has continued to finance compensation payments through a series of indemnity agreements and loans in the form of government compensation bonds. ̽��ֱ��state has also taken the extreme measure of enacting retroactive legal guidelines that obligate other power companies and financial institutions to contribute to the compensation effort.

One has to ask whether the concept of unlimited liability has any real meaning when the operator’s capacity to pay is so limited. It also raises questions for other parts of the world. In the UK, for example, nuclear liability is capped at a mere US$220m, less than two hundredths of what TEPCO has already paid in compensation claims. Japan is evidently not the only country that should be taking lessons from Fukushima.

̽��ֱ��article originally said that the TEPCO payouts to date are 400 times that of Exxon Valdez, as opposed to 49. It also said that the dead zone around the plant was 10km, but now says 40km.

Makoto Takahashi, Pre-doctoral researcher, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Makoto Takahashi (Department of Geography) discusses the impact of the Fukushima disaster and Japan's nuclear-liability laws.

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̽��ֱ��Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami

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̽��ֱ��speech that never was – Thatcher papers for 1984 open to the public

sjr81 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 16:32:52 +0000

Draft pages of her intended speech – grabbed from the wreckage of the Grand Hotel following the attack on the Prime Minister on October 12, 1984 – detail how Thatcher planned to warn the country from the podium of the Conservative Party Conference that Britain faced ‘an insurrection’.

̽��ֱ��‘speech that never was’ went on to suggest that the Labour Party was the ‘natural home’ of forces whose ambition was to tear the country apart ‘by an extension of the calculated chaos planned for the mining industry by a handful of trained Marxists and their fellow travellers’.

Her own handwritten notes for the speech, released today by the Churchill Archives Centre (www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives) and online at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website (www.margaretthatcher.org ), suggest plans to link what she regarded as militant mining communities to General Galtieri – the Argentinian dictator defeated during the Falklands War of 1982. ̽��ֱ��note, released for the first time, reads: “Since Office. Enemy without – beaten him & resolute strong in defence. Enemy within – Miners’ leaders…Liverpool and some local authorities – just as dangerous…in a way more difficult to fight…just as dangerous to liberty.”

Chris Collins from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the only historian to date to have had unrestricted access to the papers, said: “It was a speech which would have been remembered as controversial and would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech (delivered in private to the backbench 1922 Committee) Indeed it was intended to do that.

“There’s a certain irony that an act of great violence actually softened this speech. In the end, the original speech was torn up and later taped back together, probably by Thatcher herself, who was a dab hand with Sellotape.”

Among the other 40,000 papers being released online and at Churchill College, are documents which reveal the Prime Minister’s deep sense of foreboding about her fate at the hands of the Conservative Party she ruled, prophesising events of seven years later when she would be forced to resign as PM.

She told her secretary John Coles that: “My party won’t want me to lead them into the next election – and I don’t blame them.” Collins said he was amazed to find Mrs Thatcher imagining her own downfall just days after the 1983 General Election victory. ̽��ֱ��account, written when Coles left Number 10 in June 1984, also reveals that Thatcher’s doubts ran in parallel to a ‘decline in her energy’ after the election win.

More light-hearted pages from the 1984 archive reveal the prickly saga of a rose called Margaret, detailing – in a scene that could have been lifted straight from the scripts of Yes Prime Minister – how an innocent flower sparked a potential diplomatic incident between West Germany and Japan.

̽��ֱ��drama began in innocent enough fashion when a West German horticultural association asked for permission to name a rose after Margaret Thatcher, delighting officials in Whitehall wishing to perhaps promote a softer side to the ‘Iron Lady’.

However, the Prime Minister had forgotten an agreement of six years earlier, signed while Leader of the Opposition, that had given a Japanese firm license to grow the original ‘Margaret Thatcher Rose’.

̽��ֱ��clearly wounded Japanese firm wrote to the PM’s office and the Whitehall machine acted swiftly to pour oil on troubled diplomatic waters. ̽��ֱ��incident provoked many pages of notes between Whitehall and Foreign Office officials. In the end, it took a letter from private secretary Charles Powell to draw matters to a close. His reassuring tones of diplomacy to the slighted Japanese company headed off any threats of legal action and potential embarrassment to the Thatcher office.

Andrew Riley, Archivist of the papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “This release of papers gives us a vivid insight into life at Downing Street and into Mrs Thatcher’s state of mind during a very difficult year, both personally and politically.

“ ̽��ֱ��papers provide fresh insights into the often bitter coal strike of 1984, as well as newly released materials on the impact and aftermath of the Brighton bomb.”

Papers opened to the public today reveal how the Brighton bombing stopped Margaret Thatcher from widening her infamous ‘enemy within’ rhetoric to include not only the striking miners but also the wider Labour movement and Party.

It was a speech which would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech.

Chris Collins

Churchill Archives Centre

A Sellotaped page from the speech that never was. Homepage image: Miner's strike, 1984 by Nick Sarebi (CC: Att)

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Chinese migrant workers in Japan: behind the headlines

mjg209 — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, “Place making” in Kawakami: aspirations and migrant realities of Chinese “technical interns”, was led by Gates Cambridge Scholar Meng Liang and was published in the peer reviewed journal Contemporary Japan.

̽��ֱ��paper examines Chinese agricultural labour migrants’ experiences in rural Japan. ̽��ֱ��research is based on multi-sited ethnography, mainly in Kawakami, a village located in central Japan, from July to November 2012.

Meng Liang says: "I go beyond the labelling of Chinese migrants as passive victims of difficult work conditions and exploitation, which pervades much of the literature on international migration, and argue that Chinese peasant workers possess an agency to negotiate, navigate, and survive in the village. ̽��ֱ��strategy they take is to contest over local institutions to build up their own 'places', where they can find provisional security, a sense of relief, and mutual support. These 'places' further facilitate the formation of social networks among the workers, although this is officially repressed by the dominant society. A functioning social network plays a significant role to help workers adapt, overcome difficulties, and exercise their agency in a more effective way."

Meng, who is doing a PhD in Asian & Middle East Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says the Japanese press have tended to focus on the negative and depicted the relationship as solely one of exploitation, but her research has found a much more complex and nuanced situation based on mutual dependency.

“China has a huge labour surplus and a huge population of peasants," she says. "It supplies the highest number of migrant workers to Japan. Working in Japan they earn more than in Chinese cities. They earn around £6 an hour. They may earn in one summer as much as they would earn in a year in China.”

There are problems, for instance, over communication, but her main concern is that immigration policy and Japanese and Chinese people's perceptions of each other need to be informed by what is actually going on the ground, not sensationalist media reports.

Meng's work focuses on a Japanese agricultural workers programme, the ‘Technical Internship Programme’, which worked through recruitment agencies in China to bring Chinese workers to Japan, and in particular on the Japanese village of Kawakami which accepts more than 600 Chinese workers per year (the local population is only around 4,000). Her fieldwork involved spending around 10 months in China and Japan. In China, she studied how workers were dispatched. Most came from rural areas of China.

Her research found a much more complicated relationship than is suggested by Japanese newspaper headlines with Japanese employers largely dependent on the Chinese workers because of Japan’s demographics. She noted no obvious discrimination, although there was not much communication because the Chinese workers only have basic Japanese despite some use of translators. She noted that lack of communication can cause confusion and tension.

Workers normally get an initial work visa to stay for seven months, from April to November. Most then return to China and cannot reapply. However, if they pass a test they can extend their visa for up to three years, depending on the area they are working in. If they stay longer, a strong relationship may be formed between worker and employer. Meng says some employers treat their workers like members of the family and, for instance, buy them laptops.

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Chinese migrant workers in Japan are more than passive victims of difficult work conditions and are able to use their own networks and provide mutual support, according to new research.

"I go beyond the labelling of Chinese migrants as passive victims of difficult work conditions and exploitation and argue that Chinese peasant workers possess an agency to negotiate, navigate, and survive in the village."

Meng Liang

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