Previous Events

Friday, 20 October 2023, 16:00-17:30 JST

Over the past 15 years, a massive transformation of the international tax framework has occurred. Traditional instruments have been modified and completed by new rules aiming to better fight tax evasion and tax avoidance. These changes have also fostered tax cooperation between authorities. What will happen to this reform in a context of geopolitical fragmentation and crisis of global governance?

Tuesday, 3 October 2023, 16:30-18:00 JST

Artificial intelligence already has the potential to revolutionize healthcare in the near-future. This talk introduces Prof. Hosio’s work on digital health, highlighting the convergence of different digital technologies, some ongoing case studies on mental health, and crowdsourced, massively scalable online experiments exploring the cross-cultural differences and human factors.

Thursday, 21 September 2023, 15:00 - 16:30 JST

Mobility—the ability to move people, goods and information—is fundamental for all of humanity. Woven by Toyota's purpose is to deliver safe, intelligent, human-centered mobility to the world. We will discuss the variety of software-intensive systems that power this mobility, supported by an advanced, state-of-the-art vehicle software-platform.

Wednesday, 13 September 2023 15:30-17:00 JST

With the increasing public concerns on climate change and environmental sustainability, in the next decades “fossil fuel energy” will be transformed into “electron energy” with renewable electricity. This lecture will focus on three ways of addressing some of the challenges that arise with renewable energy such as its storage and irregular production. These include non-equilibrium energy and chemical conversion, materials manufacturing, and upcycling. The benefits of these processes will also be discussed relative to decarbonization and sustainability.

Tuesday, 22 August 2023, 16:00-17:30 JST

The Japanese economy faces various challenges, including stagnation, inflation, aging population, and unsustainable fiscal policy and environment. This talk will discuss how to assign effective macroeconomic policies to meet these issues.

Tuesday, 25 July 2023, 1:00-2:30pm (12:30pm Doors Open)

“Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow,” Prime Minister Kishida has warned. But how to prevent this? America’s allies, including Japan and the Philippines, are seeking to build a network of deterrence. How can this be combined with diplomacy? Could deterrence become provocation? This lecture will explain and explore these dilemmas.

Thursday, 20 July 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm

In this online launch of “Plural Entanglements: Philippine Studies,” anthropologist Dr. Dada DOCOT discusses the ethic of scholarly generosity, plurality, and diversity that frames this newly edited volume, and Dr. Grace BARRETTO-TESORO introduces their chapter that uses Indigenous perspectives to rebuild a chronology that advances a decolonial approach in the study of Asia.

Tuesday, 18 July 2023, 17:00-18:30 JST

In this workshop, we discuss approaches to national, ethnic and personal identities in psychology and behavioral sciences. This workshop aims to present an up-to-date picture of the theory and practice of psychology in the context of relations between language and identity.

Tuesday, 18 July 2023, 16:00-17:00 JST

In this talk, Prof. IMAI Mutsumi discusses how language, culture, perception, and cognition interact with one another across different domains, speculating how cultural identity might emerge though this process.

Tuesday, 11 July 2023, 15:00-16:30 JST

That we face a massive environmental crisis is widely accepted, but most people will agree that little has been done to avert it. To the extent that a solution is mooted, it is almost always techno-scientific in nature. In this lecture I suggest limitations of techno-scientific knowledge: first, in offering a belated understanding of the crisis; and, second, in vitiating non-scientific discussions and solutions.

Monday, 3 July 2023, 3:00-4:30 pm

Songbirds use learned vocal signals to communicate information about their species, their identity, and even their emotional state. We study how the songbird brain decodes this information to allow songbirds to use song for recognition, mate selection, and forming long-lasting social bonds. By doing so, we gain broad insight into the neural basis of vocal communication across animal species, including in humans.

Thursday, 29 June 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm

The world is on the brink of genuinely fundamental reform of the century-old arrangements for taxing multinationals. The aims are to reduce the scope for tax avoidance by companies and put a brake on international tax competition between governments. But what exactly will change? And will the proposed reforms achieve their objectives?

Wednesday, 21 June 2023, 9:00 am - 10:00 am (JST)

By framing the Economic Partnership Agreement as a form of language policy, Dr. OTOMO Ruriko demonstrates that the trade policy represents contemporary language issues that have important consequences for language (education) policies and for discourses about the state, language, migration, and healthcare.

Friday, 16 June 2023, 4:00 pm -5:30 pm

This lecture will present a neural model of two of humans’ most fundamental cognitive feats, i.e., the ability to interpret linguistic instructions in order to perform novel tasks with no training, and the ability to describe solutions to new tasks with full sentences.

Tuesday, 13 June 2023, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Climate change, industrial development, and population growth continuously increase the need for freshwater worldwide. Unconventional wastewater and saline sources must be tapped to reduce the stress on natural resources. However, producing freshwater from unconventional streams requires significantly more energy than traditional ways. While energy needs will always be high, innovative methods will rely on renewable energy, reduce the process complexity, and increase the socio-economic feasibility of desalination. This lecture discusses challenges and opportunities of these methods and the water-energy nexus.

Monday, 5 June 2023, 5:00 - 7:00pm JST

Plastic is essential for so many of the things we value in today’s world. But excessive and unplanned use of plastic worsens the conditions driving climate change and threatens the land, the seas and the lives of animals and humans.

Speakers on this panel will highlight issues including the chemical challenges plastic poses for the environment; the lives of waste-pickers who minimize the harm caused by discarded plastic; the science and economics confronting small-scale, local reuse of plastic; government mechanisms to coordinate the containment of plastic; and the dangers to animals and humans of micro-plastics in diverse forms.

Friday, 2 June 2023, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm JST

The Anthropocene—the geological era dominated by human activities—is often associated with the climate change, ecological crisis, the sixth extinction, etc., or in brief, with an apocalyptic end. The recent acceleration of digital technology added more strength to the eschatological imagination which underlines the philosophy of history in the past centuries. In this sense, the Anthropocene is posed as a problem of modernity and it consequently calls for a new movement of overcoming modernity, which we can identify with the recent efforts of anthropologists such as Philippe Descola, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Bruno Latour among others, who want to undo the modern concept of nature. This talk will address this impasse of modernity and introduce what I call technodiversity as a response.

Monday, 29 May 2023, 4:00-5:30PM

The use of language in public space is an important indicator of identity, which shows how languages are valued in a given community in both practical and symbolic manners. In this workshop, we will explore how identity is visually manifested in the physical and digital landscapes through the examination of the language of public signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, and so on.

Monday, 29 May 2023, 3:00 - 4:00 pm (JST)

This talk deals with two interrelated phenomena in Japanese writing practices: (1) the integration of loanwords and (2) the romanization of Japanese vocabulary. I will argue that the two phenomena are in fact complementary, resulting in a high degree of hybridity between what is native and what is foreign.

Thursday, 25 May 2023, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm JST

International human rights law guarantees a ‘right to participate in and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications’. The lecture will explain why the so-called ‘right to science’ has largely stayed inactive, and what its recently-rekindled participatory dimension implies for its right-holders and duty-bearers. It proposes to interpret the right to science as a public good to help revise the predominant approach to science as an individual, ahistorical and acultural enterprise, and reverse the trend towards its privatization and commodification.

Monday, 22 May 2023, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm JST

Professor Andrew Gordon is studying the public history of industrial heritage, beginning with the UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Sites of Japan’s industrial revolution. He is also interested in sites of industrial heritage which have not been (and probably will not be) nominated to UNESCO. His talk will focus on two such sites. One is old and famous: the Ashio Copper Mine and Refinery. Another is Japan’s newest “industrial heritage site”: the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Monday, 15 May 2023, 5:00-6:30 pm

The European Union is about to implement the world’s first carbon border adjustment mechanism: a charge on imports from countries with lower carbon prices. Advocates see this as a major advance in the fight against climate change. Opponents see it as opening the door to protectionism. What are the arguments and evidence? Should other countries do the same?

Tuesday, 25 April 2023 4:00-5:30 pm

Increases in computer power and computational tools have transformed economic research, as well as many other sciences. This talk will discuss the ways that growing computer power has changed economics and finance, and how recent developments such as deep learning, artificial intelligence and machine learning might transform it in the future.

Saturday, 22 April 2023, 4:00-5:30 pm (Doors open: 3:30 pm)

During the last 122 years, almost 1000 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. The Nobel Laureates and their great achievements are a tremendous source of inspiration, including for cancer research aiming at understanding why and how we get cancer, and how it can be treated, which is the theme of the presentation.