Japan – Shook, but Still a Priority Market

DFAIT in collaboration with MOFA and JETRO held a series of seminars across five Canadian cities from June 17 to 24, 2011, to declare that, notwithstanding the human and social costs of the March 11 triple disaster, Japan is recovering and is open for business.

The heavy task of national reconstruction is coupled with burdensome fiscal challenges. The gravity of the recent disaster cannot be understated, however radiation levels are low, and sustained infrastructural damage was localized in Iwate, Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures[1]. With this notion in mind, the Japanese and Canadian government collaboratively explained that the recent disasters have not shaken Japan’s value as a world business hub[2].

Japan is still the world’s third largest economy. Its corporate sector is home to 71 of the Fortune Global 500 companies and ranks third-highest among OECD countries in government and business domestic investment on R&D. Japan’s top five trading houses alone estimated to reserve a respective ¥3 trillion (CDN$36 billion). Finally, the country is rich in human, infrastructure and social capital.

Japan is Canada’s largest bilateral FDI partner in Asia, taking in $13.1 billion in 2009 coming from more than 550 Japanese subsidiaries and affiliate companies employing tens of thousands of Canadians. In 2010 Imports from Japan were valued at 13,449,917,049[3]. In the same year Canada’s exports to Japan exceeded $8 billion; a figure considerably larger than the $4 billion total for NAFTA partner Mexico ranking Japan as Canada’s fourth largest export destination and import source[4].

Canada and Japan’s bilateral diplomatic relations, established in 1928, have proven to be of immense benefit for the respective parties. As Japan continues down recovery following the March 2011 triple disaster, Canada is doing more than maintaining the status-quo concerning its mutually beneficial bilateral relations.  A responsive attitude towards the needs of the Japanese Government and direct investment into reconstruction of infrastructure will prove to further enhance Canada and Japan’s ties as global partners.

Countries at a Glance

Regional information

Invest Canada-Japan

Opening a business

Japanese Market Opportunities (DFAIT Trade Comissioner Service)

Currency

  • 1 Canadian dollar = 78.00 Japanese Yen (August 9, 2011)


A Holistic Approach to Teaching and Learning

Have you ever felt the things you learned in school weren’t actually all that applicable? Sure, it’s for knowledge’s sake itself. But after learning about a plethora of policy theories for the umpteenth time, I am craving a lesson on how these policies might actually play out. My frustrations with classes started years ago when I noticed a disconnect between what I was learning in the classroom and “the real world”. What I mean by this is that I wasn’t being given any indication of what I could do with this knowledge once I graduated. Fast forward to graduate school at UBC, where the first week of classes I posed the question to our MAAPPS advisor, “Can we take the course outside of the classroom…maybe to Japan?” The answer was “why not?” So thereout began our journey to take the learning outside of the classroom and into the actual policy realm.

The last ten months have been spent developing the course, and what a task that has been! A strong, motivated team of 10 MAAPPS students have been holding regular meetings to delegate tasks ranging from proposal-writing, fundraising, curriculum development, logistics planning to securing meetings with diplomats and foreign officials from Canada and Japan. This has probably been some of the most challenging months of our lives, however perhaps some of the most rewarding too.

*A word to professors who want to whip their students in shape for a life of academia: make them plan a course.

While the course development work is nearly over, the actual simulation is about to begin. Stay tuned to hear more about our daily rigorous activities, site visits, and our meetings with embassy officials and our Japanese counterparts.

From Policy Projects to Collaborative Learning

As the MAAPPS program has evolved over the past decade, we have been shaping it more and more toward applied learning and professional development – largely in response to student requests along these lines.

The first step in this direction was the experimental offering of Asia Pacific Policy Projects that would challenge participants to address a single, tightly circumscribed policy challenge in the course of a term. Past projects have focused on mining regulation in Mongolia, history education in Cambodia and selective adaption of international norms in trade regimes.

Some courses have also adopted more interactive formats for course discussions, such as staged debates, scenario discussions, case studies.

The present plans for our two-week collaboration with Hitotsubashi University takes this notion one step further by

  1. selecting a topic that is current, pressing and accessible to students: trade negotiations between Canada and Japan
  2. transplanting the course to the locus of policy-making: in this case, Tokyo,
  3. collaborating with a local institution to benefit from a multi-perspective approach to a given policy challenge,
  4. relying on the academic literature and experts on trade agreements in the preparation for discussions,
  5. involving students deeply in the planning of the course,
  6. adding as many meetings with stakeholders in this policy issue to the learning activity: the Canadian and Japanese governments, businesses, etc., and
  7. introducing a formal simulation of trade negotiations into the activities (largely at the initiative of the participants)

Collaborative Learning Across the Pacific

As I write, 10 students in our Master of Arts Asia Pacific Policy Studies (MAAPPS) program are in Japan already or traveling there to spend August 15-26 in an intensive collaborative learning activity with students from Hitotsubashi University.

This will be the first time that the MAAPPS program is reaching out directly to a partner across the Pacific and looks to be a win-win-win situation where the collaboration will add up to much more than the sum of its parts.

In a graduate program devoted to the understanding of policy in the Asia Pacific region, we are acutely aware of the differing perspectives that geography will give on policy; understanding a particular policy decision may involve very different questions and approaches whether the analyst is in North American or in Asia. It is an exchange between these perspectives and cross-fertilization in policy approaches that we are hoping for in engaging with Hitotsubashi in our first active collaboration.