27 October 2015

Venue: Seminar Room 6-2-15, Building 6, Level 2
Time: 12pm- 1pm

Japan: What Everyone “Needs to Know?”

The Social and Economic Transformation in Asia (SETA) Multidisciplinary Research and Education Platform and School of Business invites you to a Research Seminar presented by Professor R. Taggart Murphy from University of Tsukuba, Japan.

Overview

Much of what people around the world think they “know” about Japan is not exactly wrong but it misses what is really important about the country. It's not that Japan hasn't endured “lost decades,” that it doesn't face fiscal and demographic traps, or that Abenomics doesn't appear to be running out of steam. But there are other things that are perhaps more important in understanding Japan and its significance to the world, including:

1. The so-called “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s to explain much about Japan today and the fate of the wider Asian growth model
2. Japan as a fascinating political laboratory where developments of global significance can often first be seen in embryo
3. Japan's “zany” culture, which has attracted so much interest around the world
4. Japan’s firm hold as a powerful country in economic, political, cultural, and social terms

Prof Murphy will discuss these notions drawing on his recent book, Japan and the Shackles of the Past. The Economist has heralded Murphy's book as "an insightful analysis of what ails Japan" in Acumen, the magazine of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan, while Ian de Stains OBE proclaimed it "the most important book on Japan by a non-Japanese writer to have appeared in the last two decades."

About the Speaker

R. Taggart Murphy is Professor of International Political Economy at the MBA Program in International Business at the University of Tsukuba (Tokyo campus). Prof Murphy holds an A.B. in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he also received an MBA. His articles have appeared in The New Republic, The National Interest, Fortune, The London Review of Books and The New Left Review as well as the op-ed page of The New York Times. He is the author of Japan and the Shackles of the Past (Oxford, 2014) and the award-winning books The Weight of the Yen (Norton, 1996) and co-authored Japan’s Policy Trap (Brookings, 2002). He was a Non-Resident Senior Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a coordinator of the “Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus”, the web's leading clearing-house for serious writing on Japan.

Before launching his academic career, Prof Murphy was an investment banker working in the Japanese capital markets. He was previously the Managing Director at Chase Manhattan Asia Ltd. and Vice President at Goldman, Sachs (Japan) Corp. During his years as a banker, he arranged a number of financings for Malaysian entities including a ¥30 billion facility for the Malaysian Highway Authority.

Click Here to register online before Friday, 23 October 2015. For further information, kindly contact Ms. Hema at malini.gunasakran@monash.edu.