IAFOR > The Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities (ACAH) > ACAH2023

ACAH2023

May 26–29, 2023 | Held in Tokyo, Japan and Online

From May 26-29, 2023, scholars and professionals convened at the Toshi Center Hotel in Tokyo for The 14th Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities (ACAH2023) and The 14th Asian Conference on the Social Sciences (ACSS2023). These tandem conferences emphasised the intrinsic links between the disciplines of Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences, offering a rigorous academic platform to explore, critique, and understand the complexities of human societies and their cultural narratives.

This joint event with the IAFOR Research Centre at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, exemplifies IAFOR’s internationalising mission, bringing together more than 240 delegates from 35 countries.

Virtual Presentations
Download ACAH2023 Conference Programme
Conference Proceedings
Conference Report

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Speakers

  • Jun Arima
    Jun Arima
    University of Tokyo, Japan
  • William Baber
    William Baber
    Kyoto University Graduate School of Management, Japan
  • Joseph Coleman
    Joseph Coleman
    Indiana University, United States
  • Alfonso J. García Osuna
    Alfonso J. García Osuna
    Hofstra University, United States
  • Kanji Kitamura
    Kanji Kitamura
    Loyola University, United States and Hawaii Pacific University, United States
  • Anshuman Khare
    Anshuman Khare
    Athabasca University, Canada
  • Yuko Onozaka
    Yuko Onozaka
    University of Stavanger, Norway

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Programme

  • Fusuma: The Art of Japanese Sliding Doors
    Fusuma: The Art of Japanese Sliding Doors
    Cultural Presentation: Todai Fusuma Club, University of Tokyo
  • Inaugural Address from the President of IAFOR: Climate Change Challenges and International, Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
    Inaugural Address from the President of IAFOR: Climate Change Challenges and International, Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
    Keynote Presentation: Jun Arima
  • Demographic and Societal Change through the Japanese Lens
    Demographic and Societal Change through the Japanese Lens
    Featured Interview: Joseph Coleman & Joseph Haldane
  • Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations
    Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations
    Featured Panel Presentation: William Baber, Anshuman Khare, Kanji Kitamura, Yuko Onozawa
  • Publishing in the Humanities
    Publishing in the Humanities
    Featured Presentation: Alfonso J. García Osuna

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Jun Arima
University of Tokyo, Japan

Biography

Professor Jun Arima is the President of IAFOR, and the senior academic officer of the organisation. In this role, Professor Arima is the Honorary Chair of the International Academic Advisory Board, as well as both the Academic Governing Board and its Executive Committee. He also sits on the IAFOR Board of Directors.

Jun Arima was formerly Director General of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), UK from 2011 to 2015 and Special Advisor on Global Environmental Affairs for the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan, from 2011 to 2015. He has previously held various international energy/environment-related positions, including: Head of Division, Country Studies, International Energy Agency (IEA); Director, International Affairs Division, Agency of Natural Resources and Energy, METI; and Deputy Director General for Environmental Affairs at METI’s Industrial Science and Technology Policy and Environment Bureau. In the COP (UN Convention on Climate Change) 14, 15 and 16, he was Japanese Chief Negotiator for AWG-KP.

Since 2015 Jun Arima has been a Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he teaches Energy Security, International Energy Governance, and Environmental Policies in the Graduate School of Public Policy. (GraSPP). He is also currently a Consulting Fellow at the Japanese Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI). He is also Executive Senior Fellow at the 21st Century Public Policy Institute, Principal Researcher at the International Environmental and Economic Institute (IEEI), Distinguished Senior Policy Fellow, at the Asia Pacific Institute of Research (APIR), Senior Policy Fellow on Energy and Environment, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), and was the Lead Author, the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC).

Panel Presentation (2025) | Peace Education in Times of Conflict

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2022) | Climate Change, Energy Security and the Ukraine War
William Baber
Kyoto University Graduate School of Management, Japan

Biography

William W. Baber has combined education with business throughout his career. His professional experience has included economic development in the State of Maryland, language services in the Washington, DC area, supporting business starters in Japan, and teaching business students in Japan, Europe, and Canada. He taught English in the Economics and Business Administration Departments of Ritsumeikan University (Japan) before joining the Graduate School of Management at Kyoto University where he is Associate Professor in addition to holding courses at the University of Vienna and University of Jyväskylä. His courses include Business Negotiation, Cross Cultural Management, and Management Communication. He is lead author of the 2015 textbook Practical Business Negotiation and conducts research in the areas of negotiation, acculturation, and business models, especially in relation to Japan. He completed his PhD on intercultural adjustment of expatriate workers in Japan in 2016 at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In 2004 he earned a Masters of Education from the University of Maryland (USA) in Instructional Systems Design.

Featured Panel Presentation (2023) | Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations
Joseph Coleman
Indiana University, United States

Biography

Joseph Coleman is the Roy W. Howard Professor of Practice in Journalism at Indiana University Bloomington's Media School, where he teaches newswriting, immigration reporting and foreign correspondence. Coleman, 59, has reported from some two dozen countries in a 30-year reporting career. He worked for United Press International in Panama City and Bogotá, Colombia in 1988-90, and reported for 18 years for the Associated Press in the United States, France and Japan, where he was Tokyo bureau chief from 2004 until he moved to IU in early 2009. His book, Unfinished Work: The Struggle to Building an Aging American Workforce, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Coleman is a 2022-23 Fulbright U.S. Scholar based in Japan, where he is researching immigrant communities in Tokyo. He lives in Bloomington with his wife, Kyoko Ichikawa.

Keynote Presentation (2023) | TBA
Alfonso J. García Osuna
Hofstra University, United States

Biography

Alfonso J. García-Osuna has taught at Hofstra University and at City University of NY-Kingsborough for over 35 years. He specialises in mediaeval and early modern literature, receiving his PhD (1989) from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He has completed postdoctoral work at the University of Valladolid, Spain, has published six books, and is a frequent contributor to specialised journals. Additionally, Dr García-Osuna is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities.

Alfonso received primary and secondary education in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, the place where his family originated and where he grew up. An avid cyclist, he has completed the Road to Santiago, an 867-kilometre route through northern Spain, eight times.

Featured Presentation (2023) | Publishing in the Humanities
Kanji Kitamura
Loyola University, United States and Hawaii Pacific University, United States

Biography

Kanji Kitamura is an adjunct faculty member at Hawaii Pacific University and Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses on international business and Japanese culture, literature, and language. He is also a PhD candidate at Monash University. With over 20 years of experience in corporate banking, Kanji worked as a bank manager for the former Mitsui Bank in Japan and MUFG Financial Group in the USA. His previous roles involved supervising a team of credit analysts that managed large credit portfolios exceeding $10 billion in assets, consisting of multinational corporations such as Toyota Motor North America, American Honda Motor, Nissan North America, Panasonic, and Sony Entertainment.

Kanji's academic interests revolve around comparative studies of Japan and related areas, including corporate finance within a real-world context, credit analysis primarily of multinational corporations, international business with an emphasis on cross-cultural studies, intercultural communication, and translation studies. He favours qualitative approaches to reveal the unknown, although he has had experience with number-crunching professional duties.

Featured Panel Presentation (2023) | Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations
Anshuman Khare
Athabasca University, Canada

Biography

Anshuman Khare is Professor in Operations Management at Athabasca University, Canada. He joined Athabasca University in January 2000. He is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and has completed two post-doctoral terms at The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He is also a former Monbusho Scholar, having completed a postdoctoral assignment at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. He has published a number of books and research papers on a wide range of topics. His research focuses on environmental regulation impacts on industry, just-in-time manufacturing, supply chain management, sustainability, cities & climate change, and online business education. He is passionate about online business education. Anshuman served as the Editor of the IAFOR Journal of Business and Management, and is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education published by Emerald and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Applied Management and Technology.

Featured Panel Presentation (2023) | Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations
Yuko Onozaka
University of Stavanger, Norway

Biography

Yuko Onozaka is a Professor of Market Analysis in the Department of Economics and Finance at the UiS Business School, University of Stavanger, Norway. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and worked at Colorado State University before joining the University of Stavanger in 2008. Her research covers a wide range of topics, including choice modelling, food and sustainability marketing, quantitative textual analysis, machine learning, and family and labour economics. Her work has been published in highly regarded international scholarly journals such as the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy, and Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. She also holds an adjunct professor position at Doshisha University in Japan from 2021.

Her multinational and multicultural experiences profoundly influenced her current research interests in the intersection of economics, gender, and organisation. Her research, investigating how social gender norms impact the household division of labour in Norway, has been published in Social Forces, and her work on how gender composition influences business committees in Human Relations.

In addition to her academic research, she actively disseminates her unique perspective on gender and Nordic culture to a broader Japanese audience, including popular media outlets such as Newsweek Japan and NewsPicks.

Featured Panel Presentation (2023) | Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organizations
Fusuma: The Art of Japanese Sliding Doors
Cultural Presentation: Todai Fusuma Club, University of Tokyo

The Todai Fusuma Club is a student organisation based at the University of Tokyo, also known as Todai, in Japan. The club is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of traditional Japanese art, specifically the art of fusuma, which are sliding panels used to divide rooms in Japanese architecture. The club members learn how to repair and decorate fusuma using traditional techniques, such as painting with mineral pigments and gold leaf. The Todai Fusuma Club provides a space for students to connect with Japanese culture and history through hands-on practice and artistic expression.

Inaugural Address from the President of IAFOR: Climate Change Challenges and International, Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Keynote Presentation: Jun Arima

Climate change is one of the most difficult negative externalities at a global scale. While the benefits of climate mitigation are globally shared, mitigation costs need to be borne in each country, leading to the "free rider" problem.

Developed countries are pushing for increasingly ambitious mitigation targets, while developing countries demand more financial assistance. Developed countries give the highest priority to climate action; developing countries prioritise zero poverty, zero hunger, good health, education, and decent jobs as more urgent issues.

In addition to the inherent rift between the global north and south, the "new Cold War" emerging from the Ukraine War is pushing the world back to multi-polar power politics.

We need to examine climate change from the perspective of broader sustainable development. This calls for an interdisciplinary approach, addressing climate change not only from energy and climate perspectives but also many other aspects such as legal, social, and historical.

The purpose of this conference is to bring nations, cultures, disciplines, ideas, and people together, which is also relevant to global climate issues since mutual understanding and respect for different cultural, social, and national circumstances are prerequisites for finding solutions.

Read presenter's biography
Demographic and Societal Change through the Japanese Lens
Featured Interview: Joseph Coleman & Joseph Haldane

Japan is an interesting case study for ageing because it is one of the most rapidly ageing societies in the world. The proportion of people aged 65 years or older is currently around 28%, which is the highest among all major developed countries. The number of centenarians in Japan is also the highest in the world, with over 80,000 people aged 100 or older, as of 2021.

Since 2011, the Japanese population has also been declining. This demographic trend in Japan is due to a combination of factors, including a low fertility rate, a long life expectancy, and a lack of immigration at the levels seen in North America or Europe. These factors have important implications for various aspects of Japanese society, such as healthcare, social welfare, the labour market, and economic growth. Furthermore, Japan has implemented various policies and programs to address the challenges posed by its ageing population, such as promoting active ageing, increasing the availability of nursing care services, and encouraging immigration. These policies have important implications for other countries that are also facing ageing populations.

This interview will look at how these trends have affected Japan and Japanese society, and draw on comparative and contrastive cases from other countries as it is often seen as a canary in the coal mine. Japan might be in front, but it is certainly not alone, and there are many parts of the world with similar demographic trends looking closely at Japan as a model and anti-model, in particular looking at issues relating to an ageing workforce in both the US and China.

Read presenter's biography
Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese Business Organisations
Featured Panel Presentation: William Baber, Anshuman Khare, Kanji Kitamura, Yuko Onozawa

This presentation will discuss Digital Transformation (DX) in Japanese business organisations, with a focus on the following areas:

  • How the technical skills of business leaders are hindering the implementation of DX in Japan.
  • How organisations in Japan are handling the challenge of insufficient IT skills among workers.
  • The potential impact of initiatives from Japan's Digital Agency and other government entities on business organisations.
  • How domestic and overseas partners motivate Japanese businesses to adopt DX.
  • Recommendations for business managers on their next steps.

    • Read presenters' biographies
    Publishing in the Humanities
    Featured Presentation: Alfonso J. García Osuna

    Publication is the unavoidable avenue for scholarly and academic interaction as well as for making one's way up the ladder in today's very competitive academic environment. The quality of a scholar's publications is a critical measure of the relative merit of not only the individual scholar, but of the institution where they work. A significant collection of publications not only gains respect among colleagues and students, but also paves the way for appointments, reappointments, grants, and promotions.

    However, publishing one's work is not as simple as just coming up with a great idea or theory, then articulating and submitting it. Many authors with whom I work as editor of the IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities, make similar disqualifying mistakes and work under the same misconceptions regarding the publication of their manuscripts. Consequently, we will be detailing the differences between successful and unsuccessful submissions in terms of academic language, urbane expression, and scope of analysis in order to maximise the manuscript's chances of acceptance. There is a widespread and evident deficiency in authors' understanding of the process and of how to participate in it to their advantage, so this conversation is an effort to correct mistakes in the process of submitting manuscripts through clear, practical, logical advice from a seasoned editor. The work of experts in publishing practice will be referenced to expand the scope of our discussion.

    Read presenter's biography