Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2013

Public Safety, Security and Surveillance in the Global
City: Views from Tokyo
(http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2013-2014/1403
17_Murakami-Woods.pdf)

David Murakami Wood, Queen's University, Ontario

March 17, 2014
18:30-20:00
10-301, Building 10, Yotsuya Campus, Sophia University

For all the concentration on the possibility of large-scale, spectacular terrorist threats to the world's political and economic centres, most of what happens in urban security is more mundane and small-scale. This talk reflects on several years of work on security and public safety in Tokyo, the world's biggest metropolis, and one of the 'big three'
global cities along with London and New York. In common with most major cities, Tokyo has seen an increase in high-tech surveillance and a reorganization of security in the wake of terrorist attacks, but at street-level, there is still a huge variety of different security practices in different parts of the city, from the most digital to others which would not have been out of place in the nineteenth century and which can seem more like exercises in nostalgia. Underlying this, I argue, is not the fear of global terrorist, but a more pervasive anxiety over socio-economic transformation and the opening of Japan to other kinds of global
flows: trade, migrants and culture, even in this most apparently fast-moving and twenty-first century of Asian cities.

David Murakami Wood is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen's University and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Surveillance Studies. He is also currently a JSPS Invitation Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University and a Visiting Professor in the Center for Business Information Ethics, Meiji University. His research examines the globalization of surveillance, and focuses on several different global cities, in particular Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and London. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Surveillance and Society, the international journal of surveillance studies, and a founder of the Surveillance Studies Network.

Lecture in English / No registration required