The University of Sheffield

Faculty Member, School of East Asian Studies

About

Lecturer in Japanese Studies and Taught Postgraduate Tutor at the University of Sheffield's School of East Asian Studies. I am currently serving as Director of the White Rose East Asia Centre (WREAC) Research Cluster on Social Change and Transition in East Asia.

I completed my PhD in 2001 at the University of Sheffield with a dissertation on the work values and orientations of white collar male university graduate employees in large Japanese corporations. The research focused on the attitudes of 'salarymen' towards recruitment at or near graduation and their continuous employment at the same organization till their retirement, or 'lifetime employment'. I then converted the PhD into a book, 'Japanese Capitalism and Modernity in a Global Era'. The main finding from this research was that lifetime employment has a great degree of resilience in Japan, from both the company and employee perspectives, and despite tremendous pressures to converge on Anglo-American occupational labour markets, but that there are some indications of convergence towards more market-oriented models of personnel management and career formation.

Since that time I have developed my research on 'work' to include the education to work transition for university graduates in Japan and the UK; popular cultural representations of work and their relationship with the social construction of Japan's 'national capitalism'; and depopulation, employment and education in Japan's shrinking regions.

Along the way, I have co-edited with Wim Lunsing a volume on 'Perspectives on Work, Employment and Society in Japan' (PalgraveMacmillan, 2006), written a co-authored monograph on 'Japan's Shrinking Regions in the 21st century' (Cambria Press, 2011), co-edited a book with Timothy Iles on 'Researching Japan in the 21st Century' (Lexington Books, 2012), and produced various peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and reviews on the above subjects.

I have been fortunate to have received research funding from a number of organizations, including the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the GB Sasakawa Foundation, Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, the British Association for Japanese Studies, the University of Sheffield, and the White Rose East Asia Centre. This funding has been essential to carryong out the research and I am very grateful to these organisations for their generosity.

In the future I would like to extend the above to include research into similar phenomena in other countries in Asia and Western Europe. In particular I am interested in collaborating with other researchers in the following subjects:

- Shrinking populations and regions in Europe and East Asia.

- Work and its representation in popular culture.

- The theory and practice of permanent employment.

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