CJSC: research
The Cardiff Japanese Studies Centre's mission is to be recognised as a leading centre for research about contemporary Japan, which is used to raise the quality of the teaching within the Centre. The centre is dedicated to: researching and developing a greater understanding of significant areas of Japanese society, politics and business; informing thinking and behaviour through high profile outputs; and developing knowledge through academic and practitioner communications.
Christopher Hood’s first book, Japanese Education Reform: Nakasone’s Legacy, included one of the first major studies in English of Prime Minister Nakasone, arguably one of the most influential Japanese Prime Ministers in the post war period. At the same time, the study also clearly revealed that, contrary to popular belief amongst Western academics, major reforms are possible in Japan, and that a full understanding of the education system and what Nakasone was aiming to achieve through the reforms is necessary if we are to understand the ideology and workings of future Japanese people and society.
His second book, Shinkansen – From Bullet Train to Symbol of Japan, is a comprehensive account of the history of the shinkansen, from its planning during the Pacific War, to its launch in 1964 and subsequent development. It goes on to analyse the reasons behind its success, and demonstrates how it went from being simply a high-speed rail network to attaining the status of iconic national symbol. It considers the shinkansen’s relationship with national and regional politics and economic development, its financial viability, the environmental challenges it must cope with, and the ways in which it reflects and influences important aspects of Japanese society. It concludes by considering whether the bullet train can be successful in other countries developing high-speed railways.
He is currently conducting research about the Japan Airlines flight JL123 crash in August 1985. The research will cover not only the crash itself, but also the aftermath of the disaster and the way in which it impacted the lives of so many people around the world. The study uses the crash as a means to study various aspects of not just Japanese but also global society and looks at why the crash, which remains the largest single plane crash in the world in terms of fatalities, is of such interest over 20 years on. A book on the subject, Dealing with Disaster in Japan: Japanese and Global Responses to the Flight JL123 Crash, will be published by Routledge in English in 2011.
He has also been working on a number of other projects. These have included
two translations; the first being Japan – A State Strategy for the
Twenty-First Century by Prime Minister Nakasone and translated with Dr
Lesley Connors (SOAS, London) and Prof Toshiyuki Nishikawa (Surugadai University);
the second, Japanese National Railways: Its Break-up and Privatization
by Yoshiyuki Kasai (President of Central Japan Railway Company) and translated
with Nozomu Nakaoka (formerly a journalist at the Tÿyÿ Keizai).
Dr Hood was also co-editor, with Prof. Geoffrey Bownas and David Powers,
of the 2003 book, Doing Business with the Japanese. He was also editor
of a four volume collection on Japanese politics, The Politics of Modern
Japan, published in 2008.
The unifying theme of David Williams’ lifetime of reflection and
scholarship has been the intellectual clash between the East and West.
His first two books - Japan: Beyond the End of History (nominated for the
John Whitney Hall Prize in Japanese history) and Japan and the Enemies
of Open Political Science (short listed for the first Kiriyama Pacific
Rim Prize) focus on the creative contest between the ‘mind of Europe’ (TS
Eliot) and the Japanese experience of modernity, particularly the struggle
between Anglo-American political economy and Japanese economic policy and
business practice. More recently, he has begun examining the lessons of
the Japanese model for the rise of the Chinese and Indian economies, and
the challenge Asia's new giants pose to the canonic ideas of Adam Smith,
Max Weber and Maynard Keynes.
Business and economics do not exhaust his interests. Quite the contrary, the violent events of 9/11 and the damaging quarrel between Japan and China over the facts and interpretations of the Second World War have encouraged him to address the challenge of America’s global hegemony as a historical revisionist. In Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power, he boldly dissected Pacific War orthodoxy in an attempt to revolutionize the West’s understanding of the wartime Kyoto School of philosophy and the fate of America’s ‘White Republic’. In The Left and the Shaping of Japanese Democracy (edited with Rikki Kersten), he seeks to radicalize Japanese studies with an uncompromising assault on American empire and the illusions of Japanese pacifism.
As a new phase of his long career, he has returned to what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger described as the fateful ‘encounter of the Eastasian with the European world’ by focusing on one of the most creative dialogues between two literate cultures in the history of modern civilisation: the interwar collision between the Kyoto School and Heidegger’s Weimar Germany. The result is three books all currently underway: a translation with commentary of The Standpoint of World History and Japan by Keiji Nishitani, Masaaki Kosaka, Iwao Koyama and Shigeru Suzuki; a full-length monograph titled Defying Tojo: The Kyoto School and Intellectual Dissent in Wartime Japan; and, Heidegger or Hitler, a new translation, with detailed commentary, of Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität of 1933.
Maki Umemura's first article was ‘The Interplay between Entrepreneurial
Initiative and Government Policy: The Shaping of the Japanese Pharmaceutical
Industry since 1945’, in Business and Economic History On-Line. She
has also contributed to several entries in Encyclopedia of Business in
Today's World (Sage, forthcoming). Ms Umemura is currently turning her
PhD thesis into a book entitled Unrealised Potential: Japan's Post-war
Pharmaceutical Industry, 1945-2005. She is interested in the impact of
state-industry relations, industrial structure, and culture in Japanese
business history. Her current research is on the business of traditional
medicines in contemporary Japan.