Date:February 9(Tues.) , 2010 15:00- 17:30
Venue:Meeting Room I (Room No. 330), Inamori Foundation Memorial Building
Speaker: Dr. Mochtoar Pabottingi, Visiting Researcher, CSEAS
Title: “The Interplay of Nationhood and Democracy in Contemporary Japan: Reading out of Japan’s Agriculture, Education, and Environment.”
Abstract:
It has virtually been an enduring hypothesis for many years that democracy and nationhood converge positively. That is to say democracy thrives best on the soil of good nationhood and the fabrics of a nation are strengthened under good democracy. Unprecedentedly, Pabottingi ventures an attempt at reading the future prospects of Japan as a polity through this hypothesis, fully aware all along not only of the endless contestability of notions of both nation and democracy, but also of the confrontation between particular notions of nationhood and democracy –facts, if unearthed, capable of falsifying the hypothesis. Matters in Japan’s agriculture, education, and environment are here taken up as testing grounds for either the convergence or the divergence of nationhood and democracy in contemporary Japan. Whichever way the discussion leads to, it has something to tell about the future of Japan’s politics.
Dr. Pabottingi would be leaving CSEAS on February 28, 2010
after working here since March 1, 2009 as a visiting
researcher on a one-year fellowship from The Japan Foundation
under affiliation with CSEAS Director, Professor Kosuke Mizuno.