This article by Kiyoteru Tsutsui was originally published by Nikkei Asia.
This was supposed to be the year that Japan would show the world that it is back.
The last few decades have seen Japan lose its prominence on the world stage, losing the lion's share of international attention to China. With the 2020 Summer Olympics as the focal point, however, Japan had planned on showcasing its technological advances, cultural assets, economic affluence, and social stability and efficiency, to dispel the notion that it has faded as an international power.
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COVID-19 changed everything. The outbreak in the Diamond Princess cruise ship in early February alerted the Japanese public to the power of the virus, and then the death of the famous comedian Ken Shimura in late March brought home its lethal impact. The early COVID domino saw K-12 schools closing on Feb. 27 and the Olympics postponed on Mar. 24. Quickly, tourism declined and the economy slumped as supply chains and production lines were disrupted and consumers mostly stayed home following emergency declarations.
Somewhat surprisingly, the number of cases did not grow exponentially in Japan as it did in the U.S. and Europe. Initially, a conspiracy theory was floated that the government was manipulating the numbers to leave open the possibility for the Olympics to take place, and soon the dominant narrative was that long-standing hygiene practices in Japan of wearing face masks and washing hands were the main reasons for the low number of cases. Despite the recent surge, the number of new cases in Japan has remained two digits below that in the U.S., and the country has avoided the worst of the virus's impact.
Yet, the public gave the government little credit for Japan's relative success. While the legislative measures and guidelines likely helped contain the spread of the virus, some missteps in the distribution of face masks and the economic stimulus package -- confounded by public relations miscalculations -- shaped the public perception that the government does not get what needs to be done.
This, combined with political scandals involving infractions of rules around political funds and elections, put then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on shaky ground by the summer. But it was the recurrence of the same health concern that ended the first Abe administration that forced him to step down again.
After Abe announced his resignation on Aug. 28, jockeying for his successor ensued, and quickly Yoshihide Suga, Abe's right-hand man as Chief Cabinet Secretary, emerged as a near consensus candidate, earning the support of most of the Liberal Democratic Party's major factions. On Sept. 16, Suga succeeded Abe.
Seen as a scrappy, self-made man belonging to no faction and who cares about regular folk, Suga started off with one of the highest approval ratings for any new prime minister. The air was filled with talk of a snap election, with the LDP poised to win big. In the face of continuing corona concerns, Suga decided against it, giving up his best chance of securing his position beyond next fall when he will face an LDP presidential ballot and a parliamentary Lower House election.
In the few months since, Suga has faced some criticisms: his rejection of the appointment of six scholars to the Science Council of Japan -- seen as retaliation for their earlier criticisms of the Abe administration -- drew the ire of the intellectual community, mostly on the left ideologically, and his foreign policy team appeared soft on China, raising concerns among the right-leaning public. Suga's popularity took a major hit in December when, in response to a surge in COVID cases, he was too slow to cancel his signature Go To Travel campaign that was intended to stimulate the economy by encouraging tourism. His approval ratings collapsed, and all of a sudden Suga finds himself fighting for survival.
While these have been the major events that the Japanese public will remember about 2020, what are the three most consequential events that will have a lasting impact on Japan in 2021 and beyond?
First, the end of the Abe era. Becoming the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history is a major accomplishment in itself, but Abe was a transformative leader beyond his longevity. In foreign affairs, Abe strengthened the U.S.-Japan alliance, passing significant laws that enabled Japan to play a greater role and managing his relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump better than any major political leaders.
Furthermore, Abe formulated the concept of the free and open Indo-Pacific and developed the Quad, a quadrilateral grouping involving Japan, the U.S., Australia, and India, in the security realm, and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership trade agreements, all as a way to counter China's expansionist ambitions.
Seen at first as an anti-China hawk, Abe soon mended fences politically and established good economic relationships with Beijing, working to develop multilateral frameworks to manage China's peaceful rise. These efforts constituted the first time in its post-World War II history that Japan led the world with a vision to build a world order governed by the rule of law, freedom, and democracy, an important legacy that should live on in the post-Abe era.
In domestic politics, Abe completed the process started by the government formed by the Democratic Party of Japan from 2009 to 2012 to strengthen cabinet's power to execute policies. The era of bureaucrats shaping much of Japan's future has ended, and politicians now pursue their own policies with electoral successes as their mandate. The personnel decision-making capacity was the critical component, and Suga, who was the main architect of the new system, will likely entrench politician-led policymaking.
The recent investigations into Abe-era political scandals, for which Abe himself had to respond to prosecutors, demonstrate the downside of concentration of power in the Prime Minister's office. Yet, his legacies will live on in the institutional frameworks his administration developed.
The second consequential event was COVID, not just for the obvious health and economic impact, but also for the unexpected ways in which it expedited a much needed social transformation in Japan. With the stay-at-home order, many Japanese workers experienced for the first time an extended period of telework and realized that it can be even more effective to work remotely from home.
Most employers also realized that telework is a viable option, especially in utilizing the hidden talents, particularly among women and the elderly, who cannot work regular hours but have much to contribute to the economy. Given the widespread concerns about Japan's work-life balance prompted by major instances of death by overwork, this offers an opportunity for the nation to achieve what the government's work-style reform policies had sought to accomplish.
The changes that COVID-19 has forced on Japan will likely expedite Japan's digital transformation too. Suga's administration has promoted digital transformation to cut meaningless red tape -- symbolized by the requirement for hanko, a personal seal, for official documents -- and to bring a more productive and efficient social system that can handle Japan's inevitable population decline.
This new system will offer customized support for citizens, depending on their personal situations, not just on their standardized demographic backgrounds. For example, elderly citizens can now receive different kinds of care and work opportunities depending on their health and career backgrounds, while children's school records can be used to identify areas of concern such as bullying or domestic abuse. With fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless networks becoming accessible to many, Japan is poised to achieve these social transformations and offer a model to the world.
Third-most consequential, but still underrated, was the decision to postpone the Olympics by a year. Until it was announced on Mar. 20, various possibilities surfaced from simple cancellation to postponement for two years. Considering that there was no precedent for postponement, this was uncharted territory.
In the end, the 12-month postponement may have been the best-case scenario. It was a gamble, however, since there were serious concerns about the possibility of the world not being ready by the summer of 2021. Now that COVID vaccines have begun to be distributed, things are looking quite promising for the Olympics to take place next year in Tokyo.
Beyond the actual staging of the games and all that will bring to Japan, the Olympics are important for their long term economic and social impact. Recent studies about the impact of the Olympics on a host country document positive economic impacts that can last as long as 20 years after the actual event, especially in tourism.
Japan had already started betting on international tourism as a major national economic focus and succeeded in increasing tourists dramatically until COVID struck. The infrastructure development required for increased tourism has largely been accomplished and had the Olympics been canceled, much of that investment would have been for naught. The economic impact would have been devastating. With the Olympics likely to be held next summer, Japan can still hope to show the world that it is back after all, just as it hoped to do in 2020.
Abe's resignation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and delaying the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic games have disrupted Japan's efforts to re-establish itself as a strong leader, both domestically and internationally, but it still has a chance to launch a comeback moment.
Join the REDI Task Force for the next event in the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series featuring a conversation about how race and racism effects Asian and Asian-American studies.
This event will examine how race has historically been an important organizing principle in understanding Asia, with critical reflections on how racism has permeated research and teaching on Asia. The panelists will engage in a dialogue between ethnic studies and area studies to learn insights from Asian American studies in enriching Asian studies.
About the Speakers
Gi-Wook Shin is the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea; the founding director of the Korea Program; a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and a professor of sociology, all at Stanford University. As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, and international relations.
Gordon Chang is Olive Palmer Professor of Humanities, Professor of History, and the founding director of Stanford's Asian American Studies Program. He is the former director of the Center of East Asian Studies. He is interested in several different areas of history, including the historical connections between race and ethnicity in America, on the one hand, and foreign relations, on the other, and trans-Pacific relations in their diplomatic as well as their cultural and social dimensions. He has written and continues to publish in the areas of U.S. diplomacy, America-China relations, the Chinese diaspora, Asian American history, and global history. His most recent books have examined the history of Chinese railroad workers in America in the 19th century.
Sharika Thiranagama is Associate Professor of Anthropology and President of the American Institude of Sri Lankan Studies. Her research explores the intersection of political mobilization and domestic life. Her work focuses on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization, attempting to understand (rather than romanticize) patterns of sociality and how people actually live together, often in highly fractious and unequal ways, and, to situate these processes in specific historical formations of “privates” and “publics” in South Asia.
Eiichiro Azuma is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at University of Pennsylvania. He is author of award-winning Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford 2005), and coeditor, with Gordon Chang, of Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Stanford 2006) and, with David Yoo, of the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (Oxford 2016). The first two books have been translated into Japanese. His latest monograph, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (California, 2019), received the 2020 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association. Azuma served as the director of Penn’s Asian American Studies Program from 2013 through 2018.
There will be time for a Q&A. This event will be recorded and uploaded to the REDI website.
Register here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJclc--sqjkuHdcf85To1OhVqW1if…
Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in the Department of Sociology, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the founding director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) since 2001, all at Stanford University. In May 2024, Shin also launched the Taiwan Program at APARC. He served as director of APARC for two decades (2005-2025). As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, democracy, migration, and international relations.
In Summer 2023, Shin launched the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), which is a new research initiative committed to addressing emergent social, cultural, economic, and political challenges in Asia. Across four research themes– “Talent Flows and Development,” “Nationalism and Racism,” “U.S.-Asia Relations,” and “Democratic Crisis and Reform”–the lab brings scholars and students to produce interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, policy-relevant, and comparative studies and publications. Shin’s latest book, The Four Talent Giants, a comparative study of talent strategies of Japan, Australia, China, and India to be published by Stanford University Press in the summer of 2025, is an outcome of SNAPL.
Shin is also the author/editor of twenty-six books and numerous articles. His books include Korean Democracy in Crisis: The Threat of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization (2022); The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security (2021); Superficial Korea (2017); Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War (2016); Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea (2015); Criminality, Collaboration, and Reconciliation: Europe and Asia Confronts the Memory of World War II (2014); New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan (2014); History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (2011); South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (2011); One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era (2010); Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia (2007); and Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (2006). Due to the wide popularity of his publications, many have been translated and distributed to Korean audiences. His articles have appeared in academic and policy journals, including American Journal of Sociology, World Development, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Education, International Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Affairs.
Shin is not only the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, but also continues to actively raise funds for Korean/Asian studies at Stanford. He gives frequent lectures and seminars on topics ranging from Korean nationalism and politics to Korea's foreign relations, historical reconciliation in Northeast Asia, and talent strategies. He serves on councils and advisory boards in the United States and South Korea and promotes policy dialogue between the two allies. He regularly writes op-eds and gives interviews to the media in both Korean and English.
Before joining Stanford in 2001, Shin taught at the University of Iowa (1991-94) and the University of California, Los Angeles (1994-2001). After receiving his BA from Yonsei University in Korea, he was awarded his MA and PhD from the University of Washington in 1991.
Join the REDI Task Force for the next event the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series featuring keynote speaker Dr. Nita Mosby Tyler.
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This presentation is part of the French Culture Workshop Series
Co-sponsored by:
The Department of French and Italian, The Europe Center, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Department of History
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The Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force (REDI) invites you to the third event in the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series. This panel will examine the relationship of policing and racism in liberal democracies and interrogate how police brutality erodes democracy and rule of law. The panel presentation will be followed by a Q&A.
About the Speakers
Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and a Senior Research Scholar at FSI.
Beatriz Magaloni is Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, where she directs the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab.
Vesla Weaver is Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University, and a scholar of policing, surveillance, and racial inequality.
Yanilda Gonzalez is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; she works on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes.
Please register in advance here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMkd-yvrjsiH9VmeXKmg9-JSxq6k…
Online, via Zoom: Registration Required
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.
She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
The Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force invites you to the second event in the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series. This panel discussion and Q&A will explore the resonance of Black internationalist research, past and present, to offer new insights on the Black Lives Matter movement .
Please register in advance here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ld-upqD4pGNIpEJJMBq-D2JQO_7J1GC62
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About the Event: The Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force invites you to the first event in the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series focused on international research and racism. This conversation is an open dialogue featuring Dr. Christian Davenport, author of one of the pre-selected articles:
About the Speaker: Christian Davenport is a Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and Elected Fellow at the American Association for the Arts and Sciences. Primary research interests include political conflict, measurement, racism and popular culture. He is the author of seven books and author of numerous articles appearing in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science and the Annual Review of Political Science (among others). He is the recipient of numerous grants (e.g., 12 from the National Science Foundation) and awards.
Please register in advance here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUlcumpqDksHtTZFndLWMnSN5YUUKRcJxyv
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Film Studies major Dexter Sterling Simpson, ’21, dreams of entering the documentary industry after graduation. To test the waters, he moved to New York City for two quarters last year to pursue an internship with a professional documentary house. One recent highlight of his documentary experience, though, occurred while working as a research assistant with Stanford sociologist and the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea Gi-Wook Shin.
The research assistant job, available through the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), which Shin directs, provided Simpson with the opportunity to produce a film that documents how high-skilled migrants to the United States, including several Stanford scholars, continue to make significant contributions to their home countries and create mutually beneficial ties — or “brain linkages” — between the United States and their home countries. The documentary, called Brain Bridges and now available on APARC’s YouTube channel, showcases research that is part of Shin’s multiyear project studying global talent flows, brain hubs, and socioeconomic development in Asia.
“I started working on the project last summer and then continued remotely from New York before remote work became the new norm in the time of COVID-19,” says Simpson. “Surprisingly enough, the pandemic seemed to speed things up for us rather than slow them down. I would meet regularly with Professor Shin and the research team via Zoom to exchange updates and notes on my work. Several weeks ago, we held an outdoor, socially distanced interview shoot to close the film. It has been a unique challenge to work around the abrupt life changes caused by the pandemic, but it is deeply rewarding to emerge with a finished product that, I hope, is inspiring and informative.”
The film traces the stories of several Stanford scholars and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who demonstrate that the migration of high-skilled professionals is not a zero-sum game in which the host country (in this case, the United States) receives a net inflow of human capital from the home country. “Rather than simply enhancing the competitiveness of the host country at the home country’s expense — a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘brain drain’ for the home country and ‘brain gain’ for the host country — what we find is that brain drain offers opportunities for brain circulation and brain linkage, that is, home-host interactions that create a win-win, positive-sum situation for both sides,” explains Shin.
The story of Indo-American entrepreneur and venture investor Kanwal Rekhi is a case in point. When Rekhi came to the United States from India for graduate studies, he encountered prejudice in American society and criticism of his “unpatriotic” move in his home country. Undaunted, he advanced through the engineering ranks in several technology companies and in 1982, cofounded the computer networking company Excelan in Silicon Valley. Five years later, he became the first Indo-American entrepreneur to list a venture-backed company on the NASDAQ.
From a human capital perspective, Rekhi’s journey is a case of brain drain for India. Following his success, however, he became an advocate for border-bridging entrepreneurs, pushed Indian legislators to reform venture regulations, and cofounded The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE), a nonprofit with a mission to foster entrepreneurship globally. His efforts in Silicon Valley and India helped create a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and a tangible impact on the economies in both countries.
“In considering brain linkage, we must shift from a view that regards labor primarily as human capital to a new model of labor as social capital,” notes Shin. “When educated professionals permanently leave their home countries, it is true that those countries lose the totality of education, skills, and experience embodied by these individuals. But when they stay engaged with the home countries, both home and host countries gain from the productive capacity embodied in the ties and networks linking many individuals and organizations.”
Simpson’s documentary film follows the transnational brain bridging stories of several other accomplished academics and industry leaders in Silicon Valley, including Hongbin Li, the James Liang Director of the China Program at the Stanford King Center on Global Development and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; Kyle Loh, assistant professor of developmental biology who heads the Loh laboratory at the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine; Arogyaswami Paulraj, professor emeritus at Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering; Sievlan Len, Stanford graduate student in international policy studies; Gen Isayama, general partner and CEO at venture capital fund World Innovation Lab; Asha Jadeja, an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist; Young Song, CEO of desktop virtualization company NComputing; Mariko Yang, cofounder of STEAM education organization SKY Labo; and Eugene Zhang, a founding partner of early-stage venture capital fund TSVC.
The documentary film brings to life the powerful lesson from the research by Shin and his colleagues: that transnational social capital and ties spanning geographic and cultural distance remain vital to today’s global market economy, even more so in a time of political tensions at home and abroad.
‘Brain Bridges,’ a documentary produced by senior Dexter Sterling Simpson, illustrates the positive gains of global talent flows.
