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Sylff News 2014

December 26, 2014

SYLFF ADMINISTRATORS MEETING 2014

Major topics discussed at this quadrennial meeting for Sylff administrators included a new financial scheme, current and future additional support programs for fellows, and emerging issues in higher education. There were also sessions devoted to dialogue on key global issues with Tokyo Foundation research fellows. Participants from over 60 member universities worldwide attended, including more than 15 Sylff fellows—some of whom have become members of their alma maters’ Sylff Steering Committees—who shared their experiences and insights. The meeting was a great opportunity to strengthen the Sylff network and explore ways to further enrich the Sylff program.

SYLFF SUPPORT PROGRAMS

Four fellows were selected as SLI recipients in 2014, and their reports can be read here. In addition, 30 Sylff Research Abroad grants were awarded. The reports of SRA awardees on the Sylff website are classified by fiscal year. We look forward to receiving many more applications in 2015! Also in 2015, a “Sylff Fellows Forum for Global Dialogue” will be held at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India. Please keep an eye on announcements from us for details.

SYLFF WORLDWIDE

We’re very happy to share news of outstanding achievements by Sylff fellows around the world.

February 3

Conductor and pianist Jimmy Chiang was appointed resident conductor of the famed Vienna Boys’ Choir. Chiang received a Sylff fellowship in 2005 while attending the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where he studied orchestral conducting, chorus conducting, and piano. From late April to mid-June, he was on an extensive tour of Japan, performing at many of the most prestigious concert halls in the country, including Suntory Hall and Tokyo Opera City.

February 14

“Sustaining Life during the Early Stages of Disaster Relief with a Frugal Information System: Learning from the Great East Japan Earthquake,” co-authored by Keio University Sylff fellow Mihoko Sakurai, was published in the January 2014 edition of IEEE Communications Magazine. The paper, based on field research into the ICT systems of local governments, points to the need for municipal governments to build disaster-resilient communication systems. Power outages and the resultant loss of communication and processing capability severely constrained recovery efforts in many municipalities in the wake of March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

February 20

Divna Trickovic, a 2002 fellow at the University of Belgrade, has published the first textbook on kanji (Sino-Japanese characters) ever written in Serbian. She is now an assistant professor in Japanese language and literature at her alma mater. The textbook, published in July 2013, introduces each character in innovative ways, analyzing kanji in ways that Serbians can easily visualize and remember. It has captured the hearts of Japanese learners in Serbia and is being adopted as an official textbook for high school students choosing to learn Japanese as an elective.

April 3

Masaaki Higashijima, a 2008 Sylff fellow at Waseda University, was the recipient of the 2014 Annual International IDEA/Electoral Integrity Project Award for Best Graduate Student Paper on Electoral Integrity. The award is sponsored by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and the Electoral Integrity Project of Harvard University and the University of Sydney. The winner was selected on the basis of potential significance to aspects of the election cycle.

June 18

The University of Latvia organized a conference featuring nine Sylff fellows on the topic of “World in Change: From Consumption to Sustainability, from Competition to Collaboration, from Hierarchy to Networks, from Being Good to Doing Good.” The university joined the Sylff community in 2002. The opening ceremony featured remarks by Rector Marcis Auzins; Professor Ina Druviete, the former Latvian minister of education and science; Nippon Foundation Chairman Yohei Sasakawa, who described his work towards the eradication of leprosy; and Tokyo Foundation Director for Leadership Development Takashi Suzuki.

July 24

Many universities held fellowship presentation ceremonies in 2014. Members of the Tokyo Foundation attended one at Waseda University, where two graduate students were awarded Sylff fellowships during a ceremony at an administrative building named after university founder Shigenobu Okuma. The recipients for the 2014 academic year are Aya Kudo, who is in the fourth year of a doctoral program at the Graduate School of Political Science, and Nguyen Thi Phuong Thanh, a first-year doctoral student at the Graduate School of Commerce. We extend our warmest welcome to all new fellows around the world!

SYLFF@TOKYO

We welcomed many current and graduated fellows to the Tokyo Foundation in 2014.

May 29

Roger Cliff, a Sylff fellowship recipient in 1991 at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University, visited the Tokyo Foundation on April 4 to participate in a conference on East Asian security. The day-long workshop on extended deterrence in East Asia, organized by the Tokyo Foundation and the Atlantic Council, was attended by security experts from Japan, the United States, and South Korea. Cliff is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, where he is engaged in the Center’s Asia Security Initiative as a specialist on East Asian security issues.

June 26

Paulo Ravecca, who received a Sylff fellowship while at York University and was awarded an SRA grant in 2011, visited the Tokyo Foundation while in Japan on an invitation from the Embassy of Ecuador. Ravecca is currently enrolled in a PhD program at York University and is writing his dissertation on the “politics of political science” in Chile and Uruguay, showing that the changes in political science in these Latin American countries are a product of power relations at different levels.

October 10

Jonathan Shalfi, who received a Sylff fellowship in 2013 and 2014 while attending the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, visited the Tokyo Foundation to discuss Japan’s energy policy with Foundation policy experts. He was attending the University of Tokyo at the time as an exchange student to study Japan’s energy security, particularly the potential steps Japan can take to ensure safe fuel shipments from abroad. Three Foundation research fellows explained the policymaking challenges facing Japan in the field of energy policy and national security.

November 10

Madhuchanda Ghosh, a Sylff fellow from Jadavpur University (2004) and assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Presidency University in Kolkata, India, visited the Tokyo Foundation and met with members of the Foundation staff, including Executive Director Sanae Oda. Ghosh is a preeminent scholar of Japanese studies and was invited by the Japan Foundation to conduct research at the Graduate School of Law and Politics of Rikkyo University in Tokyo. She wrote an article that was published in the Japan Times, a leading English paper in Japan, just before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan in September.

November 19

Ahmad Adriansyah, who received a Sylff fellowship from the University of Indonesia in 2002, visited the Tokyo Foundation while in Japan to attend the Ninth International Conference on Business and Management Research, hosted by the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, where he made a presentation on the Indonesian banking industry. This was his first visit to Japan, and he said he had a strong desire to visit the Tokyo Foundation to convey his gratitude for the Sylff program. “I wanted to say thank you,” he said, “not only because the Sylff fellowship supported my PhD study but it also opened up opportunities to receive additional awards. It also gave me the opportunity to build a global network with other fellows through my participation in the Chiang Mai Regional Forum in 2003.”

 

Wishing You Peace and Joy in the New Year!

(on the back row from left to right) Tetsuya, Yoichi, Keita, Eriko, Tomoko
(on the middle row) Yoko, Mari Suzuki(Director), Yumi, Akiko
(on the front row) Akiko Imai(Executive Director), Masahiro Akiyama(President), Sanae Oda(Executive Director), Takashi Suzuki(Director)

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Sylff@Tokyo:New Opportunities through Sylff

November 19, 2014

Adriansyah, center, with program officers at the Tokyo Foundation

Adriansyah, center, with program officers at the Tokyo Foundation

Dr. Ahmad Adriansyah, who received a Sylff fellowship from the University of Indonesia in 2002, visited the Tokyo Foundation on October 28, 2014.

He was in Japan to attend the Ninth International Conference on Business and Management Research, hosted by the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, where he made a presentation on the Indonesian banking industry. This was his first visit to Japan, and he had a strong desire to visit the Tokyo Foundation, he said, to convey his gratitude for the Sylff program.

“I wanted to say thank you,” he said, “not only because the Sylff fellowship supported my PhD study but it also opened up opportunities to receive additional awards, including the prestigious Indonesian government scholarship for PhD research. It also gave me the opportunity to build a global network with other fellows through my participation in the Chiang Mai Regional Forum in 2003.”

He has worked at his alma mater as an internal auditor and was recently offered a tenured teaching position at the Indonesia Banking School, a reputed college of economics owned by the central bank of Indonesia.

In addition to his academic pursuits, Adriansyah is interested in contributing to society. He was inspired by his visit to Omron Kyoto Taiyo, a factory in Kyoto where most of the workers are disabled. He is hoping to engage with a social business that will offer jobs to elderly people in Indonesia, who are rarely given an opportunity to work even if they wish to do so.

The Tokyo Foundation wishes him continued success with his budding career.

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Sylff＠Tokyo: Japan Expert in Tokyo as Post-Doc Fellow

November 10, 2014

From left to right, Takaaki Asano, Sanae Oda, Madhuchanda Ghosh, Mami Ino, Mari Suzuki, and Akiko Inagaki.

From left to right, Takaaki Asano, Sanae Oda, Madhuchanda Ghosh, Mami Ino, Mari Suzuki, and Akiko Inagaki.

Madhuchanda Ghosh, a Sylff fellow from Jadavpur University (2004) and assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Presidency University in Kolkata, India, visited the Tokyo Foundation on July 16 and met with members of the Foundation staff, including Executive Director Sanae Oda.

Ghosh is recognized as a preeminent scholar of Japanese studies by the Japan Foundation and was invited to conduct research as a post-doctoral fellow in Tokyo at the Graduate School of Law and Politics, Rikkyo University, for three months.

She is a specialist in Japan-India relations. At the Tokyo Foundation, she met with Research Fellow Takaaki Asano and exchanged opinions on political issues in both India and Japan, as well as on the history and current state of Japan-India relations. During her previous stay in Japan in 2011, she interviewed several Japanese lawmakers, including Shinzo Abe, the prime minister since December 2012, who was then a member of the opposition.

She wrote an article that was published in the Japan Times, a leading English paper in Japan, just before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan in September. Excerpts from the article, entitled “Modi’s Focus on the India-Japan Relationship,” are as follows (from the Japan Times Online):

In 2011, Abe opined that the two states would gain significantly from economic complementarities such as India’s growing market of more than 1.2 billion people and Japan’s search for new markets, Japan’s strength in hardware and India’s in software, and India’s huge infrastructural and energy needs and Japan’s technological expertise.

India can offer Japan, the world’s largest pool of skilled manpower. Abe also views that the pattern of relations among the U.S., Japan and India as of crucial importance in the context of the emerging security architecture in Asia.

Given Abe’s strong admiration for India, his friendly ties with India’s new premier and his urge to bolster the India-Japan strategic and global partnership, Modi’s forthcoming visit is likely to bring about a major transformation in India-Japan relations in the changing complex Asian geopolitical and geo-economic scenario.

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How the Leopard Got Its Spots: Gender Dimensions of Land Reform in Cambodia

October 10, 2014
By 19590

Large-scale land acquisitions by agribusinesses have negative social and environmental side effects, and many governments are exploring ways to balance commercial interests with those of individual residents. Alice Beban, a Sylff fellowship recipient at Massey University, conducted research in Cambodia, where the national government is advancing bold land reforms to attract agribusiness investments, using an SRA grant. In this article, she examines the socioeconomic implications of the land reforms for the country’s smallholder farmers.

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Forest Patrol Walking: A group of 16 rural villagers and representatives from the Forestry Administration patrol an area that was designated as a community forest in the land reform to check for illegal land clearing.

Forest Patrol Walking:
A group of 16 rural villagers and representatives from the Forestry Administration patrol an area that was designated as a community forest in the land reform to check for illegal land clearing.

Land and food production has returned to the center of global development concerns in recent years, spurred by a dramatic rise in large-scale farmland investment for agribusiness and speculation (White et al., 2012). The Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia is a key site for farmland investment, with around 50% of the country’s arable land reportedly awarded as “economic land concessions” (ELC) to agribusiness companies in recent years (Bickell & Lohr, 2011; Borras & Franco, 2011).

Now, with mounting concern over food security, public unrest, and the documented negative social and environmental consequences of large-scale land acquisitions (also known as “land grabbing” by some academics and activists), many governments are asking what can be done to balance a desire for agribusiness investment with environmental and social concerns.1

One response is smallholder land reform. This was the approach taken by Cambodia in 2012, when the Cambodian government announced a bold new initiative to expand post-conflict land registration to households living on the ELCs. Thousands of student volunteers from Cambodia’s capital began knocking on doors in remote areas of the country to survey land for redistribution to smallholders. This policy—dubbed the “leopard skin policy” by Prime Minister Hun Sen—envisages large scale agribusinesses and smallholders coexisting like animal spots on the landscape, with the plantations gaining a labor force and smallholders gaining secure title to the land on which they live (Naren & Woods, 2012).

Mountain spirit meeting: Rural people who had lost land to an agribusiness company meet to ask spirits to help them recover their land.

Mountain spirit meeting:
Rural people who had lost land to an agribusiness company meet to ask spirits to help them recover their land.

I was in Cambodia when this land reform was carried out, and I was fascinated with the scope and speed of the initiative and the potential it holds for shifting the trajectory of “land grabbing” across the country and offering lessons to many other countries struggling to develop a socially just agrarian policy.

It also challenges gender norms by promoting joint husband/wife land titling. My PhD research examines this land reform and the roles it plays in contemporary Cambodian politics, society, and ecology. I had the opportunity to explore this issue with my SRA award, with mentoring and support from my Cambodian SRA host, Professor Pou Sovachana of Pannyasastra University, who is now research director at the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace (CICP).

I was a senior research fellow at CICP for six months during my SRA award. While at CICP, I was able to attend many conferences and seminars, meet researchers from around Cambodia and the world with similar interests to my own, and also give a lecture to Cambodian students and assist in CICP’s research projects.

Alice interviewing family: I am talking with a family and looking at the land title certificate they just received.

Alice interviewing family:
I am talking with a family and looking at the land title certificate they just received.

Most of my SRA award tenure was spent at a research site within Cambodia’s largest agribusiness concession, one of the first sites where the new land reform was implemented. I interviewed 18 government officials at both the central government and local government levels and conducted over 60 semi-structured interviews to gain a variety of perspectives from people in communities where land titles were given out, as well as the views of the student volunteers and organizations working on land rights. I also attended land title award ceremonies, agricultural training sessions, and forest patrols in communities that had received titles under the land reform.

I investigated the politics of the land titling reform’s implementation and the implications of the reform for people’s perceptions of security, agricultural production, and relationships within the household. My initial findings suggest that the benefits women and men in farming communities received from the land reform policy were highly dependent upon local authorities’ implementation.

Given Cambodia’s “neo-patrimonial” political system, where political power works through networks connecting elite politicians and businesspeople with their supporters at all levels of government (Un & So, 2009), it is perhaps not a surprise that, in some cases, local authorities and powerful players were able to use the land reform to their advantage (for example, by titling common forest areas and selling land to outsiders for personal financial gain). This meant that poorer families, including female-headed households, often benefitted less than wealthier families, as they did not have the political connections necessary to take advantage of the reform.

Receiving land titles: Officials from the Ministry of Land hand out land titles to rural villagers at the local village temple.

Receiving land titles:
Officials from the Ministry of Land hand out land titles to rural villagers at the local village temple.

My SRA grant enabled me to spend time in areas where this kind of elite capture was widespread and also areas where it was far less apparent. I found that even in areas with similar conditions, differences in the land reform process were apparent, in part due to the presence of supportive individuals in positions of authority and to strong community networks that were able to inform community members about correct process in the land reform and hold authorities more accountable.

My research also shows that assumptions of a simple causal relationship between a policy promoting joint title and women’s land rights overlooks deeper, gendered power relations. During the policy implementation process, I found that local officials’ understanding of gender roles had a large part to play in how joint land titles were awarded.

For example, there was confusion among officials and community members as to how people’s land should be titled when one partner was not present. This meant that some women I interviewed who had been abandoned by spouses were awarded joint title to their land with the spouse who had abandoned them. Flexibility in the law for local authorities to resolve specific cases can be a strength, as it recognizes that policies produced in the capital can never account fully for on-the-ground realities. But it can also mean that people with power and resources can use this flexibility for their own gain and that enduring gender constructs that view women as less capable of controlling household assets can guide the decisions of local authorities.

I expected that the award of property rights might reduce insecurity and enable farmers to increase production efficiency, but many people in my study with legal tenure security did not necessarily perceive their land to be secure. While land title recipients were usually happy to receive title and some people certainly felt more secure, a common theme that arose in interviews was people’s ongoing fear that their land would be taken even after receiving land title. The main reasons given for this was that the court system is expensive and incomprehensible to many rural people, and it is difficult for people to accept that the new paper titles will carry much weight in a system that for years has been dominated by money and power.

I am now continuing to investigate this aspect of the land reform in my ongoing PhD research, through examining the cultural bases of men’s and women’s sense of security, including the various type of evidence people use to support their claims to land and the ways people settle disputes locally.

The SRA experience was extremely enriching for me as I continue with my PhD. It not only provided me the resources to undertake an extended period of research but also connected me with a whole new network of wonderful Cambodian and international scholars whom I am continuing to work with on several collaborative research projects.

References

Bickel, M., & D. Lohr. (2011). “Pro-Poor Land Distribution in Cambodia.” Rural 21, 3, 33-35.
Borras, S., & J. Franco. (2011). Political Dynamics of Land Grabbing in Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.
Naren, K., & B. Woods. (2012, ). “Hun Sen Says Land Program Proving a Success.” Cambodia Daily, August 9, 2012.
White, B., J. Borras, R. Hall, I. Scoones, & W. Wolford. (2012). “The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3-4).
Un, K., & S. So. (2009). “Politics of Natural Resource Use in Cambodia.” Asian Affairs: An American Review, 36(3), 123-138.

1See for example the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure” and the country debate around this (http://www.fao.org/nr/tenure/voluntary-guidelines/en/).