Japan’s Soma City One Year after the Disaster (Video Interview with Dr. David W. Edgington)
Memo #138 – Dr. David Edgington has conducted research on Soma City, Japan, since last year’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. Soma City, one of many devastated communities, is a remote agriculture and fishing village along the coast and is a part of the Fukushima prefecture.
Social Networks and Japan’s 3/11 Disaster
Memo #137 – Social networks matter. They help us find jobs. They influence whether or not we vote and if we gain weight or get buff. Long before last year’s nuclear disaster in Japan, electric power utilities worked with the central government to place atomic power plants in villages along the coast with weaker social networks.
Comparing Chinese and Indian Media Industries (Video Interview with Hugh Stephens) (Part 1/2)
Memo #136 – Hugh Stephens, Executive-in-Residence at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, has over 35 years of government and business experience in the Asia region. In this interview, he compares the Chinese and Indian media industries.
Why do Chinese Migrants Have to Pay so Much to Work Overseas?
Memo #135 – Unskilled workers from China have to pay exorbitant costs to work abroad in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, their top three choices. Fees, averaging 8,000 USD, are not charged by human smugglers but licensed employment intermediaries. In fact, transnational labour migration through legal channels costs significantly more than illegal migration. This is not unique to China. Across Asia, the percentage of legal migrants is increasing – more than 800,000 Chinese by the end of 2011 compared to less than 60,000 in 1990. Why is the cost increasing? Because Asian states rely on intermediaries.
为什么中国人出国打工费用这么高?
Memo #135 – 日本,新加坡和韩国是目前接纳中国非技术劳工最多的三个国家;中国人去这三个国家打工,要付8,000美元的中介费。这些钱不是给人贩子,而是给有正规执照的中介机构。事实上,通过合法途径出国打工的成本要明显高于非法迁移。这并不是中国特有的现象。在亚太地区,合法移民的比例在增加——2011年底有80多万中国人在境外就业,大大高于1990年的6万人——但是成本也大幅度增加了。其原因就在于,亚太国家依赖于中介机构管理跨国劳动力流动。
Filipina Immigrant Girls’ Lived Experience in Japan
Memo #134 – Filipina women, who entered Japan as “entertainers” or as the spouses of Japanese men, sometimes left children behind to be raised by relatives in the Philippines while they built economically viable lives in Japan. More and more, the teenage children of these migrant women are entering Japan, entering Japanese schools, and entering society as an important and recent immigrant youth population. These youth are being reunited with their mothers, beginning lives with unknown step-families, and struggling to learn Japanese – which is often their third or fourth language. Most scholars focus on how immigrant youth are victimized by an assimilationist-oriented education system, with its Japanese-only language policies and hyper-competitive high school entrance exams. But this focus allows only a small glimpse of their lived experience.
Becoming a Commercial Marriage Broker in Malaysia
Memo #133 – In the last two decades, East Asian countries have experienced a dramatic rise in international marriages. Much of it is between men in the wealthier countries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and women from poorer countries in the region. Among Chinese Malaysians, the number of marriages between the men and Vietnamese women increased from 28 in 2001 to 1,185 in 2005. To explain this increase, the media began to cover the proliferation of commercial matchmaking agencies in the early 2000s. But the role that Vietnamese wives play in the matchmaking business has attracted little attention.
How Finnish, not East Asian Education Became a Global Reference
Memo #132 – Finnish education has become the global symbol of educational excellence since its success in the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) implemented triennially since 2000. Every year, a few thousand international visitors, including many from East Asian nations, flock to the small Nordic nation to discover “how Finland gets it right.”
「フィンランド教育ブーム」再考
Memo #132 – 2000年以来、3年毎に実施されているOECDの国際的な学習到達度調査(以下PISA)において好成績を収めたフィンランドは、優れた教育改革のモデルとして世界中の教育関係者の注目を集めている。毎年数千人もの海外教育関係者がこの北欧の小国を訪れており、東アジアからも多くの人々がそのPISA成功の「秘訣」を探りに、「フィンランド詣で」を敢行している。
Beyond Censorship in China’s Media and Cyberspace
Memo #131 – On January 9, 2012, the People’s Daily led with a glowing feature celebrating Chongqing’s attempts to achieve “common prosperity.” 30 years of market-driven reform, “letting some people get rich first,” has created one of the most unequal societies in the world. Chongqing’s innovative strategies have deep implications for China’s future, and an intense debate is currently playing out in Chinese media, old and new.