Faculty Members at Yale (Year 2009-2010)
Yasunari Takada
September 2009- August 2010
Nobuhiro Hiwatari
August 2009-February 2010
Professor in Transcultural Studies,
Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Research area
Classics and Modernity/Comparative Literature, Thought and Culture
Current research interests
• Comparative thought between US and Japan, mainly through six representative figures: Masao Maruryama, Toshihiko Izutsu, Shuichi Kato, Richard Rorty, Hayden White, and Edward Said.
•The Genealogy of De Officiis from Cicero to the 18th-century Europe.
Major Publications (in English)
Books
Transcendental Descent: Essays in Literature and Philosophy (Collection UTCP, 2007)
(Ed.) Surprised by Scenes：Essays in Honour of Professor Yasunari Takahashi (Tokyo:Kenkyusha,1994)
(Ed. with Kevin M. Doak) Overcoming Postmodernism: ‘Overcoming Modernity’ and Japan (Tokyo: Shubun-Kan, 2002)
Chapters in Books or Articles
1. “How to Do Things with ‘Fall-Out” Systems in Troilus and Cressida,” Shakespeare Studies,Vol.20,1984
2. “Hevene’ in Criseyde: Dnate’s Festa’ and Chauceｒ’s ‘Feste, in Philologia Anglica: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Y.Terasawa (Tokyo:Kenkyusya,1988)
3. “The Brooch of Thebes and the Girdle of Venus: Country Love in an Oppositional Perspective,” Poetica,29/39(1989)
4. “Vulcan Cuckolded by Mars: Archetypal Adultery and Its Subsequent Undercurrents,” Proceedings of the College of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo,38(1991)
5. “From The House of Fame to Politico-Cultural Histories,” in Chaucer to Shakespeare, eds. R. Beadle & T. Takamiya (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer,1992)
6. Against the Grain of Tragedy,” Proceedings of the College of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo, 39(1992)
7. “Chaucer’s Use of Neoplatonic Traditions,” in Platonism and the English Imagination, eds. S. Hatton & A. Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1994)
8. “An Augustan Representation of Cicero,” in Enlightened Groves: Essays in Honour of Professor Zenzo Suzuki (Tokyo:Shohakusha,1996 [in Japanese]
9. “Shakespeare’s Cicero,” in Shakespeare’s Plutarch: A Special Issue of Poetica 48 (1997).
10. “Common Profit and Libidinal Dissemination in Chaucer,” in The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (papers from J.A.W. Bennett Memorial Lectures), (D.S. Brewer, 1999）.
11. “The Illusions of the Modern and the Pleasures of the Pre-Modern,” Overcoming Postmodernism: “Overcoming Modernity” and Japan, (eds.) Kevin Doak & Y. Takada (Tokyo: Shubun-kan, 2002), 125-139.
12. “Leonardo Bruni’s Cicero Novus,” European Studies (DESK, the University of Tokyo, 2002), pp. 65-79.
13. ”Shakespeare as Shake-Scene,” Studies in World Literature and Translation (Beijing: Peking University, 2004), pp. 9-13..
14. “Postmodern Girl,” Cultural Studies in Asia, eds. S-K. Kim & A. Gordon (Seoul: Seoul National UP, 2004), 157-184. [Korean translation in 21st Century 17 (Seoul: ISU, 2002), pp. 19-34.]
15. “A Shakespearean Distance,” Shakespeare Studies, XLIII (2005-6), pp. 1-36.
16. “Translatio and Difference: Western Classics in Modern Japan,” in The Classics and National Cultures, eds P. Vasunia and S. Stephens (Oxford UP, 2010)
Longer Reviews
1. “Francis A Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Literature” (The English Literary Society of Japan), English Number 1982
2. “Helen Gardner, In Defense of Imagination,” Studies in English Literature (The English Literary Society of Japan), English Number 1984
3. “D.S. Brewer, Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer; English Gothic Literature,” Poetica 19 (1984)
4. “Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature：An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes,” Studies in English Literature (The English Literary Society of Japan), English Number 1985.
5. The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama, Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality, eds. M. Marrapodi, Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Vomparate (Firenze), vol. LIV (2001), pp. 108-110.
6. “On Overcoming Modernity, trans. & intro. by R. Calichman,” the Journal of Japanese Studies vol. 35, no. 2, (summer 2009), pp. 380-385.
Nobuhiro Hiwatari
(PhD, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley)
Professor of political economy,
Institute of Social Sciences
Research area
Political economy/International political economy
Current research interests
• Why Reform? Global recessions, high unemployment, and the adoption of structural reforms and budgetary restraint
• Economic Interdependence and Political Rivalry: Democracies, non-democracies, and stagnant regional arrangements in East Asia
What kind of creature is a political economist?
The term “political economy” is probably as old as the study of economics. That fact notwithstanding, what is currently known as positive political economy, which is my field of study, is a relatively new and emerging discipline. To the best of my knowledge, graduate courses in political economy and international political economy were not commonly taught at major universities when I started out as a student as they are of late. My impression is that the field developed by amalgamating works that branched out from three different research traditions: One is the empirical study of macroeconomics (including labor economics), within which a number of students started to examine political institutions in order to explain differences among countries in their macroeconomic policy and its effectiveness. The other is a group of scholars in comparative politics who turned to labor market organizations and the partisan characteristics of government to explain differences in economic performance and economic policy, sharing a similar interest with the economists. The third branch originate in international politics, from which researchers started to stress the importance of economic conflict and cooperation among states, as well as the role of international organizations, as an inherent part of international political activities. Although of several lineages, students working in the field of political economy/ international political economy have in common their emphasis of political variables as a key factor in explaining economic policies and economic outcomes.
The advent of political economy/international political economy in the social sciences seems to owe a lot to the rapid development of events in the real world since the 1970s. To my mind, it is difficult to explain the development of the field without citing the outburst of stagflation immediately after the Oil Crises of the late 1970s and the transition of developed countries to low-growth post-industrial societies, which necessitated a recalibration of the welfare state and the implementation of structural reforms, on the one hand. On the other hand, the spread of market economic activities across the Globe, including developing nations and former Communist nations, and the emerging dominance of economic issues among states can be regarded as the other development that spurred the study of political economy and international political economy. Against this historical backdrop, current students of the field tend to have a positivist bent, meaning a strong emphasis on empirical work that explains why certain choices were made and certain outcomes occurred post facto. However, the reason for the research is hardly to shed a new light on past history but to make policy recommendations for the future, even if they are based on retrospective empirical foundations rather than prospective extrapolation. As such, political economists dwell beyond the ivory towers of the academe and a can be found in international organizations, such as the OECD, the IMF, or the World Bank, and in government organizations, such as the central bank and treasury, as well as think tanks of various sorts. The broad participation of academics based at governmental and international organizations has been a critical factor in the amassing of new and improved data on the economy and polity of nations, fueling the rapid development of the field.
As a political economist, I place Japan as the source of my research puzzles and try to answer them by mobilizing new theories in political economy and international political economy. More concretely, my current work consists of, on the one hand, a comparative analysis of OECD countries in the way they respond to economic crisis. Here, my puzzle is why some governments undertake structural reforms and maintain budgetary constraint even during the thick of a global recession at the cost of aggravating unemployment, while others, such as Japan, resort to spending-based stimulus packages. On the other hand, my other research is about cooperative institution building, or rather the lack thereof, in East Asia in spite of strong and expanding economic ties. My hypothesis here is that the variation in the degree of democratic governance, meaning the existence of democracies as well as non-democracies in the region, makes it difficult for governments to engage in enduring, contractual agreements. This idea is based on robust empirical findings that similar political regimes—democracies and democracies, non-democracies and non-democracies—are more likely to cooperate with each other than a pair of un-similar political regimes.
The first of my two research interests will be part of a joint research undertaken under the aegis of the TYI, which will host two conferences in April and August 2010 titled “Fiscal Adjustment, Structural Reform, and Government Change.” My other interest is what I plan to pursue during my stay by utilizing the rich and unique resources available at Yale.
My Plans at Yale
My main purpose at Yale is to set up an enduring arrangement that enables the two universities to organize political scientists and economists at both sides of the Pacific and collaborate in joint research projects that analyzes ongoing developments in the Japanese political economy and publishes the results in a periodical manner. Naturally, I hope to undertake research that contributes to such efforts. For this purpose, I am currently working on the following:
(1) Academic Collaboration under the Aegis of TYI
As mentioned above, in collaboration with Professor Jun Saito of the political science department and the support of Yale’s East Asia Council and the Todai Horiba International Conference Fund, we plan to hold two international conferences in April at Yale and in August at Tokyo that will put together papers addressing the question of whether structural reforms and fiscal adjustment by the Liberal Democratic government in the 2000s have led to its downfall and/or the rise of the Democratic Party of Japan, which was swept into power by a landslide this fall.
We hope to publish the papers in English and Japanese. However, beyond that we hope to develop this into a prototype case of collaborate research that will be followed by joint research organized by Yale and Todai scholars on contemporary Japanese political economy and international political economy.
(2) Research at Yale
I am also conducting individual research on the international and especially domestic political factors that explain variations among OECD countries in the foreign aid and defense efforts. I hope this research will lead to another joint research project Professor Saito and I are planning under the aegis of TYI, tentatively titled “Government Change and Foreign Policy: A comparison of Japanese and Korean responses to U.S. initiatives.” We plan to adopt a structured research design in which we compare U.S. foreign policy initiatives that affected both Japan and Korea in a very similar way, and examine whether government change has affected the responses of both countries as well as whether differences in the political systems—Japan being a cabinet system and Korea being a presidential one—has any effect on each countries responses. We hope this project will serve as a successor to the ongoing joint research described above.
Major Publications (in English)
1. “The Problem of Macroeconomic Policy Crossroads: Explaining the economic policy paradox of Switzerland and Japan in the 1990s,” The Swiss Political Science Review, 10-3 (2004), 137-178.
2. “Embedded Policy Preferences and the Formation of International Arrangement after the Asian Financial Crisis,” The Pacific Review, 16-3 (2003), pp.331-359.
3.“Disinflationary Adjustment: The link between economic globalization and challenges to Postwar social contracts,” in Olivier Zunz, Leonard Schoppa, and Nobuhiro Hiwatari (eds.), Social Contracts Under Stress: The Middle Classes of America, Europe, and Japan at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), pp. 281-318.
4.“The Reorganization of Japan's Financial Bureaucracy: The politics of bureaucratic structure and blame avoidance,” in Takeo Hoshi & Hugh Patrick (eds.), Crisis and Change in the Japanese Financial System (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 109-136
5. “Japanese Corporate Governance Reexamined,” in Margaret Blair & Mark Roe (eds.), Employees and Corporate Governance (Washington D.C., Brookings Institution, 1999), pp. 275-313
6. “Adjustment to Stagflation and Neoliberal Reform in Japan, the UK, and the US,” Comparative Political Studies, 31-5 (1998), pp. 602-632.
7. “Explaining the End of the Postwar Party System,” in Junji Banno (ed.), The Political Economy of Japanese Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
