no 2022-1
April 2022

Newsletter
Established in 2009 within the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS),
the Fondation France-Japon has developed public and private partnerships to promote scholarly exchange
in social sciences and humanities between Europe and Asia for more than ten years.

NEWS
FFJ 2021 activity report
Like every year, FFJ published its annual activity
report in February. The report details all ongoingprojects and lists all the activities that were carried out
for each theme: events, publications, invited scholars,
media appearances, etc. The aim is to provide youwith a complete overview of what we do and how
we contribute to the humanities and social sciences
through our international partnership research.

Condorcet workshop
on Islamic economics
Following their first three sessions in April, June andOctober 2021, FFJ's Islamic Economics ResearchGroup is resuming its webinar series. Led incollaboration with CNRS and Kyoto University, thesewebinars aim to study the role of Islamic religiosity
in the creation of an alternative economy and, more
specifically, to examine how Islamic norms, embodied
by Sharia law, are used to regulate economic
activities. The webinar programme will be announced
very soon, and will be concluded with a Workshop
financed and hosted by Campus Condorcet, which
will take place in October 2022.

New project with Valeo
Partners since 2016, FFJ and Valeo are launching a
new research project entitled ‘Transportation policies
and urban governance challenged by advanced
technologies: a comparative study of European andAsian metropolitan regions’ (TPUG) for 2022-2026.
Led by an international team of both young andleading researchers from the University of Tokyo,
Mines ParisTech and EHESS, this project aims to
explore the possibilities and challenges of transport
policy in different metropolitan regions in a near
future when new advanced transport technologies
will be available.

Winners of the 2022
FFJ/Christian Polak prize
The seventh year of the FFJ/Christian Polak Prize
for the best master’s thesis on Japan marks a record
number of applications received since its launch in2016. Thus, the jury, in agreement with Christian
Polak, patron of the prize, has decided to award
three prizes instead of one from this year onwards.
In first place, Sania Carbone (INALCO) for her
dissertation “L’urbanisation autour des complexes
monastiques à l’époque médiévale”, in second
place, Lise Bénézet (Université Paris Cité) for her
dissertation “Les « Cinquante poèmes » d’Izumi
Shikibu : L’absence comme matière poétique”,
and finally, Françoise Hallez (Université Libre deBruxelles) for her dissertation “La place de l’escalier
au Japon. Analyse de cas publics et privés”. FFJ
warmly congratulates these three winners and wishes
them all the best in their future studies.

Call for application
Shibusawa Claudel Prize 2022
The Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS and the
Maison franco-japonaise are pleased to announce thelaunch of the call for applications for the 2022 editionof the French section of the Shibusawa Claudel Prize.
This prize is awarded each year for a high-level text
(book or thesis in social sciences or exact sciences,or translation of a book) written in French and dealing
with Japan. All the application procedures can befound on the FFJ website.
Deadline: 31 May 2022 at midnight (French time)

INSIDE THIS ISSUENews• FFJ 2021 activity report• Condorcet workshop on
Islamic economics• New project with Valeo• Winners of the 2022 FFJ/
Christian Polak prize• Call for application
Shibusawa Claudel Prize
2022
Focus
• Health and Innovation
Testimonial• Masae Sugawara - Japan
Science and Technology
AgencyCercle de la FFJ• Pauline Debanes• James Wright
A look back at• Le Cercle de la FFJ

FOCUS
Health and Innovation
For two years now, the COVID-19 crisis has intensified the need to reflect
on current health issues, related to the humanities and social sciences,by providing a unique context to study these questions and compare
each country’s response. One example that comes to mind is the loss ofautonomy and the isolation of the elderly, who were particularly affectedby both the disease and the restrictions and lockdowns. Technologicalsolutions which are intended to protect (tests, vaccines, medicines,etc.) as well astracing and personal medical data management, with thehealth and vaccination pass, are also important issues. For example,
there is a clear difference in Asia and Europe in terms of the concern
about the dissemination and protection of data. Finally, the pandemic
had a significant impact on other sectors (culture, economy, education,etc.), and revealed how intertwined and interdependent certain sectors(health, economy, etc.) actually are: mask shortages, offshoring production(masks, medicines). This is a multi-faceted crisis that needs to be studiedsociologically.

Innovation beyond Technology

FFJ’s study of health and innovation, as part of its Theme 3, dates backto 2015 with the ‘Innovation beyond technology’ research programme,
which was based on the following convictions: innovation is not limited
to technological innovation; the contribution of the humanities and social
sciences is crucial to studying its different aspects; an interdisciplinary
approach both within the humanities and social sciences and with thenatural sciences is necessary for a clear understanding of the subject;
and, finally, the complementary approaches of their respective scientificcommunities means a collaboration between France and Japan will
be beneficial. The programme resulted in the publication of Innovation
Beyond Technology. Science for Society and Interdisciplinary Approaches(Springer, 2019), edited by Sébastien Lechevalier, and also in the creationof another research programme, entitled ‘Capitalisms, Technology,
Society and Health’ (CTSH) and launched in 2021. Funded by EHESS
as a Triennial International Team (EIT), the Eurasian research group’s
overall objective is to revisit the relationship between technology andsociety, focusing specifically on health. The aim is to approach healthissues in a new way that goes beyond the traditional segmentationof disciplines, namely health economics, health sociology, healthanthropology, medicine,and health history.

Elderly care in France and Japan

Ageing populations are a visible trend in the modern world. This is a
new social challenge for Europe, not just in France, but in Germany
and Italy also, and Asia, in Japan and South Korea. In Japan, thepopulation is also decreasing at the same time, which creates newchallenges. It would be useful for other countries to identify how Japan
responds to this new situation due to these two concurrent demographic
trends – the fundamental difficulty of having more people needing carebut fewer people to provide it – and to describe this response in detail.
Interestingly, in Japan, innovation and technology have been pushed
as possible strategies for addressing this challenge. It is not clear how
innovation and technology change care practices for vulnerable elderly
people. Firstly, it is necessary to identify and understand what kind ofcare is needed by elderly people facing a loss autonomy. Secondly,
we need to understand how the role of carer iscurrently shifting fromfamilies to institutions, and identify the impact of this transition. Only
then can we identify the technologies used in care and how they change
the context of care.

First annual forum of the INNOVCARE project, organised at INED © FFJ, 2021

The research programme entitled ‘Care-led Innovation: The Case of
Elderly Care in France and Japan’ (INNOVCARE), which was launchedin 2021,addresses these research questions. This programme also
focuses on the challenges faced by carers and elderly people with lossof autonomy in the very specific context of COVID-19. These scientificquestions have the potential to explore not only the impact of innovation
on care for vulnerable elderly people, but also how care practices caninfluence innovation. They are therefore an important step towards
understanding the mutual dynamics of care and innovation.

The implications of personalised medicine

As part of a new partnership with Air Liquide for 2022-2024, an internationalteam of researchers brought together by FFJ will work on the use of newtechnologies in health, with three core concerns: What are the limits ofcompulsory health insurance? How can personalised medicine contributeto public prevention policy? How do we reconcile the development of
personal medicine with the protection of personal data?
FFJ started to work on this research topic when addressing the issueof the use of artificial intelligence in health, and its social and ethicalimplications, which is directly linked to the issue of personalised medicine.
This issue has been the focus of a lot of the research within the frameworkof the FFJ/Michelin and FFJ/Air Liquide Fellowship Programmes, aswell as the second symposium of the Franco-German Dialogue on
Japan, organised with JDZB in September 2021, and will be one of thecomponents of the Summer School that will be run with JST and CNRS
in July 2022 on Condorcet Campus.
This report was written in collaboration with Yuko Tamaki-Welply (EHESS,
CNRS).

TESTIMONIAL
Masae Sugawara, Japan Science and Technology agency
Masae Sugawara is the director of the Paris office of the Japan Science and Technology agency (JST).
Since 2017 she has also been a member of the FFJ Management Board as a representative of JST.
The Japan Science and Technology Agency(JST) is an innovative, mission-oriented
public agency, connecting a wide range ofstakeholders and driving high-risk researchthat generates real value for society in Japanand across the global. JST has 4 foreign officesthat monitor the latest science and technology trends in their respective
regions, promote the global activities of JST and make use of global
networks to boostand internationalize Japan’s S&T. The Paris Office is
responsible for Europe and Africa, where scientific cooperation is often
multi-layered and complex. Our most important role is coordinatingwith our partner organizations by communicating JST’s activities withcomplementary information for better understanding.
Science has no borders and international cooperation is a key element
to improvingthe quality of research and innovation. We have a dedicatedscheme to this end, the Strategic International Collaborative Research
Program (SICORP), in which European and African cooperation iscentral. Since 2018, JST’s international strategy “100% Global” aims to
expand international openness to our national programs. Its champion
example is a collaboration between ANR and our domestic flagshipprogram called CREST. Every year since 2018, JST and ANR launcha joint call for proposals in research topics of mutual interest. Basedon this successful cooperation with ANR, we launched a trilateral joint
call on AI, inviting the German Research Foundation, DFG, as a thirdpartner for the call in 2019. Another national program, RISTEX, focusing
on S&T research for society, has called for research proposalson AI with
UKRI-ESRC, also in 2019.
Prior to these developments, in June 2015, JST and EHESS signed a
Memorandum of Cooperation to promote mutual knowledge of science
and/for society by bringing together Japanese and French perspectives.
The Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS (FFJ) plays a vital role inits implementation by hosting lively exchanges between Japaneseand French researchers: two joint workshops in Paris (2015) and inTokyo (2016) with CNRS as additional French partner, which led tothe publication of the book Innovation Beyond Technology in 2019; theJST-EHESS joint workshop at JST headquarters in 2018, where mutualinterest for future collaboration was discussed; and JST participationas panelists in various events organized by FFJ, such as the annual
meetings of Le Cercle de la FFJ.

Since my arrival in Paris in 2017, I have cooperated with FFJ as both a
JST representative and a member of the FFJ Management Board. From
my point of view as a JST officer who started her career as a scientist,
FFJ adds value and openness to international collaboration in researchwhich is often conducted by academia. FFJ works as a framework forthe exchange of reflections through a variety of private chairs, often
funded by technological industries, which reflect investors’ vision of
their social mission and future activities. Foreign structures such as FFJ
can provide interesting insight for JST, which considers itself a futurelooking, innovation-generating and network-based research institute. I
am personally convinced that our successful cooperation will pioneer
a new angle of approach to the scenarios and values of future society.
Japan’s vision of future society, “Society 5.0”, was introduced in 2016,
with the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan. This is a concept of futuresociety as a sophisticated integration of cyber and physical space. Humanwell-being is at the center of this future society to reconcile economic
growth with theresolution of social issues. Its human-centered concept
is politically endorsed in Japan and beyond through various political anddiplomatic frameworks such as G7 (Ise-Shima 2016, Charlevoix 2018,
Biarritz 2019), G20 and OECD.
Having experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, the current Japanese
strategy, 6th Science, Technology and Innovation Basic Plan, implements acomprehensive approach by recognizing Social Sciences and Humanities
as vital elements for realizing “Society 5.0”. In this concept, one significant
technology is AI and its relationship with society. JST and FFJ havefostered a cutting-edge dialogue on AI and Society between researchers
from Japan and France, studying in a wide range of scientific disciplines.
Our initial timeline was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I am
thrilled to once again help organize our ambitious dialogues which
will take place in Paris this summer, July 2022, where Japanese key
players from CREST and Moonshot will meet with French researchers
from EHESS and CNRS.

Masae SUGAWARA
Japan Science and Technology Agency

CERCLE DE LA FFJ
Pauline Debanes

James WrightResearch Associate, Université Sorbonne
Paris Nord
Pauline Debanes is an economist and is currently a
research program manager for a monitoring firm in
the humanitarian sector. With FFJ, she participatedin the INCAS project from 2015 to 2019.

Research Associate, The Alan Turing InstituteJames Wright is a Research Associate at the Alan
Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data
science and AI, where he is working on a project
entitled “PATH-AI: Mapping an Intercultural Path toPrivacy, Agency, and Trust in Human-AI Ecosystems.”

Read the interview

Read the interview

A LOOK BACK AT
Le Cercle de la FFJ
At the end of last year, the Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS organised two events around Le Cercle de la FFJ,
the second meeting of Le Cercle de la FFJ, and the Shibusawa-Claudel Prize award ceremony.

Le Cercle de la FFJ’s second meeting

Le Cercle de la FFJ was inaugurated in 2020, and is chaired by Yuko
Harayama (Professor Emeritus at Tohoku University) and Bernard
Delmas (Independent outside director of Nissan Motors). Le Cercle brings
together past and present visiting researchers, FFJ Prize winners, andFFJ’s closest academic and institutional collaborators.
This second meeting was held on 17 November 2021 both onsite at
the French Embassy in Japan and via videoconference. Despite theongoing health crisis, a number of members of the Cercle and ourpartners were present onsite and on Zoom. This meeting consisted of
two round tables. The first round table, entitled ‘Artificial intelligence andthe future of work’, aimed to look at how the increasing use of AI in theeconomy and in everyday life affects the organisation and nature of work
now and in the future. Isamu Yamamoto, professor at Keio University,
reminded us that: “As the use of new technologies increases, we see
positive effects on job satisfaction and negative effects on stress”. In
his presentation, Yann Ferguson, researcher at ICAM Toulouse, raised
several points to explain the relationship between employment and AI:
are some jobs being replaced; will employment be dominated by AI; isAI leading to the disappearance of middle-class jobs; will the influenceof AI allow employment to be re-humanised? Yuko Harayama presented
the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), her study groupon the future of work. The GPAI was launched by the Canadian andFrench presidencies in 2020 at the G7 summit with 15 partner countries.
The issue of happiness and productivity was addressed by Kazuo Yano,
researcher at Hitachi Ltd. and CEO of Happiness Planet Ltd. His casestudy analyses how the use of big data and AI improves happiness atwork as well as the company’s results. This first round table, which ended
with a question and answer session, illustrated the wealth of researchon the relationship between AI, work, and everyday life.
The meeting’s second round table gave members of Le Cercle de la FFJ andpartners of FFJ the opportunity to present ongoing projects, publications,and recent activities. Bernard Delmas opened this session with a brief
overview of FFJ’s history to reaffirm its cross-sectoral collaborative
dimension, which made developing the networks now represented by
Le Cercle de la FFJ possible. Kazutoshi Iida, Representative Directorat Air Liquide Laboratories, presented the activities of the Air Liquide
laboratories, which focus on energy and climate transition, health, digitaltechnology, and technology. These topics are also in line with FFJ’s
Theme 3, “Thinking about Innovation through the Interactions between
Science, Culture and Society”. Sébastien Lechevalier’s presentationof the ‘Care-led Innovation’ project drew the audience’s attention. This
project, led by a team of French and Japanese researchers, seeks todevelop an alternative concept of innovation, driven by care, to understandthe structural problem tied to the partial disconnect between social
needs and technological solutions. Adrienne Sala, researcher at IFRJMFJ, presented her project on judicialization, which examines judicial
responses in France and Japan to social and environmental issues.
Willem Thorbecke, Senior Fellow at RIETI, presented the results of his
research following his project carried out in the framework of the 2020

FFJ/Banque de France Fellowship. His project analysed how companies
in France and Germany compete or cooperate with those in Japan andSouth Korea. In his group project, Kostiantyn Ovsiannikov, post-doctoral
fellow at Kochi University of Technology and was the winner of the FFJ/
SASE Best Asia Paper Award 2018, examines willingness to continue
working from home, individual performance, and team creativity from agender perspective. The keynote address was given by Norbert Leuret,
President of LVMH Japan KK. COVID-19 has forced the company toinnovate by relying more on technologies such as the now ubiquitous
Zoom video conferencing application, but it has also deepened its humanrelations for communication via Zoom with customers and designers
alike. The second meeting of the Cercle was followed by a cocktail at
the residence of the French Ambassador to Japan in the presence ofNicolas Thiriet, chargé d’affaires a.i. at the French Embassy in Japan.
After Mr. Thiriet’s warm opening speech, Sébastien Lechevalier thanked
everyone for their participation and support and celebrated this highlightof the FFJ’s year that brought together members of Le Cercle de la
FFJ and representatives of its partner institutions. Yoichiro Matsumoto,
Science and Technology Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs inJapan, kindly agreed to give a toast.

The Shibusawa-Claudel Prize award ceremony

The Shibusawa-Claudel Prize, created in 1984, is awarded each year toa work on Japan published in France and a work on France publishedin Japan. FFJ has helped with the organisation of the French section ofthis Prize since 2021. Exceptionally for the 2021 edition, the jury of theFrench section awarded the Prize to two winners for the high scientificquality of their work: César Castellvi, for his thesis “Le journaliste et son
entreprise au Japon : étude sociologique du travail et des carrières dans unmodèle professionnel en mutation” (“Journalists and journalism in Japan:
a sociological study of the work and career in a changing profession”); andEdouard L’Hérisson, for his thesis on “Trajectoires shintō et construction
de la Mandchourie japonaise : spatialisation religieuse, expansion del’empire et structuration du shintō moderne” (“The journey of shintō
and the construction of Japanese Manchuria: Religious spatialisation,
expansion of empire and structuring modern shintō”).
The award ceremony was held on 3 December 2021 at the Maison dela culture du Japon à Paris, in the presence of the President of MCJP,
Hitoshi Suzuki, the Ambassador of Japan to France, H.E. Mr. Junichi
Ihara, the President of the Jury, Christian Sautter, the Acting Presidentof FFJ, Éloi Ficquet as well as the Minister and Director of the Cultural
Service of the Japanese Embassy in France, the members of the jury,
the thesis directors, former winners, and many other guests. The prize
money will finance a trip to Japan for both winners, during which they
will hold a conference to present their work in the auditorium of the
Maison franco-japonaise.
FFJ would like to thank all the candidates who expressed their interestin this Prize and warmly congratulate them for the quality of the work
they presented to the jury.

Editorial board: Céline Caliaro, Jodie Cazau, Yukiko Itoh, Sébastien Lechevalier, Fabien Michel
Translation: Aurélia Martin
Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS
Campus Condorcet | 2, cours des Humanités 93300 Aubervilliers - ffj@ehess.fr - ffj.ehess.fr
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