« [SSJ: 7842] 17 DEC [Temple ICAS Event] Regis Arnaud: The US Antitrust Authorities vs. Japan Inc. | Main | [SSJ: 7844] Politics Quiz #3 »

November 20, 2012

[SSJ: 7843] Shaken Workshop on Nov. 29--China policy and four prime ministers

From: John Campbell
Date: 2012/11/20

The next session of the Todai Institute of Social Science dissertation workshop will be on Nov. 29.* Presenting will be Giulio Pugliese. He is an Italian scholar who is working on a PhD in Asian Studies at Cambridge, and is currently at GRIPS. His interests are whether and how political leadership and prime ministerial stances translate into effective foreign policymaking, particularly with regard to Sino-Japanese relations.

Giulio's approach is innovative, or at least I haven't run into anything like it. He is working on four comparable case studies of four successive hereditary
PMs: Abe Shinzō, Fukuda Yasuo, Asō Tarō, and Hatoyama Yukio. He sees their shared interest in foreign and security policy as fleshing out the Japan-China “strategic mutually beneficial relation”
framework (inaugurated in late 2006 by Abe). The
four prime ministers took different stances vis-à-vis China, from engagement (cooperative) to balancing (power politics), with mixed results. Giulio is examining how prime ministerial preferences fit into a decision-making process that involves under-analyzed domestic and international actors that have been key to successful leadership (or lack thereof).

I'd appreciate it if you let me know if you are coming, though it isn't necessary.

John Campbell

*Meetings of the Shaken Social Science Dissertation Workshop start at 12 pm on Thursdays and go to 1:30 and sometimes beyond. The Institute of Social Science provides coffee and tea and you are welcome to bring lunch. The location is a seminar room on the 5th floor in the Akamon General Research (Sougou Kenkyuu) Building. The building is down a little passage to the right after you come through Akamon, or you can go through the grounds of Ito Hall off Hongou Douri. It is Bldg 38 on this map:

http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/about/documents/Hongo_CampusMap_E.pdf

Approved by ssjmod at 10:56 AM