Euro-Japanese Seminar
Social Economy in Japan
Economie et Humanisme is a non-governmental, independent organization founded sixty years ago. Its activities encompasses a range of socio-economic research in areas such as: urban development and environment, labour economics, and ethics of economics, particularly with respect to Asia; publications; organization of conferences; and participation to think-tanks. Economie et Humanisme is interested in stimulating mutual understanding between Asian and European societies through supporting exchanges of views between actors/observers of comparable social and economic backgrounds, and raising important social issues.
By ERIC BAYE
Following the first Euro-Japanese Colloquium (Lyon, 1997)1, Economie et Humanisme organized a three-day seminar in Tokyo on the theme of the social economy in Japan. It was jointly organized with the Pacific Asia Resource Centre (PARC), with the support of the Japan Foundation. About forty Japanese and European participants attended to the event, among whom were leaders of the Seikatsu Movement, experts from Sophia and Meiji Gakuin Universities, representatives from the PARC, the Japanese Consumers' Co-operative Union, collective workers' unions, and farmers associations. Among the European participants were experts from Grenoble, Marburg and Padova Universities, from the Social Economy Consortium (Oxford), the French CNRS, and Economie et Humanisme.The seminar theme was based essentially on research experiences conducted in the archipelago by the Japanese participants. The seminar enabled extremely active discussions to take place between participants from both professional and academic circles. Aside from the clarification of a number of concepts and terms, discussions led to better understandings of the gravity of the present crisis in this sector in Japan, as well as of differences and similarities between the Japanese and European contexts.
Proceedings of this workshop are available (English and French texts of papers originally in Japanese are not yet available). Economie et Humanisme published the main Japanese contributions of the seminar in a special issue of its quarterly journal (no.349) focusing on Japan (French only). *
1The Colloquium was made possible with the support of the European Commission. The theme was the relationship between business and three kinds of workers: youth, women, and foreign workers.
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