 Welcome to the final session. I'm Ipe Fujiwara, professor of economics here at ANU and the KO University in Tokyo. We first acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on food tradition lunch we meet and they pay our respect to the elders past and present. This session, so that's gonna start the final session. So this session will discuss governance challenges. Very exciting topic. And we are fortunate to have three distinguished speakers in this panel. The first speaker is Keiichiro Kobayashi, professor at the KO University and is also the member of the subcommittee on novel coronavirus disease control of the Japanese government. This morning, he just participate in this meeting. So we should be able to know the, what is the forefront in Japanese government actions to COVID-19? The second speaker is Motoko Rich. Motoko is a Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times. Motoko is a graduate of Yale, as well as Cambridge University. And Motoko has been a reporter with the New York Times since 2003 and has covered a broad range of topics such as Japanese politics, society, economy, education, gender, the arts, and many more. And the final speaker is the Shirou Armstrong. To the participants to this Japan update, I believe no introduction is needed to Shirou. Shirou is the engine of this Japan update and is the leading scholar of the economic and the political issues in Japan and the region, and the Asia. As the director of the Austrian Japan Research Center, Shirou has been contributing to the better understanding of Japan in Australia. So without a further ado, I would like to hand over to Keiichiro. So could you start your presentation, Keiichiro? Are you ready? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Thank you very much for inviting me to this very precious opportunity. I will share my presentation slides now. So I would just talk about some problem between government agencies and the government issues on policy response in response to the COVID-19. So what I want to talk to you today is there were lots of coordination failures among the government agency in the last one year and a half in response to the COVID-19. And so actually before this crisis, government agencies in Japan are quite independent with each other and there are problems of the coordination in the Japanese government. And so typically they have, each agencies have some kind of compartmentalized thinking. I mean, they care only about their own backyard and they don't care about others. And so each government agency are very good at local optimization of the objectives. But they are very bad in a, not very good at global optimization when coordination is necessary, just like just as in this COVID-19 crisis. So I talk three examples here and the first one is a fallacy of composition of fiscal policy in COVID-19 policy measures. And secondly, I talk about the rules or delayed border control in this crisis. And also I, finally, I talk about why Japanese government cannot implement many cases of PCR testing in COVID-19 crisis. This is a number of cases of PCR testing in Japan was very small, extremely small compared to other nations like a UK or United States. So I talk these issues here. Okay. So first of all, I think there is a big fallacy of composition on the fiscal policy in the policy measures in Japan. The start line is that the bottom line, the Ministry of Finance in Japan always wants to improve government fiscal bonds because Japan has already suffered from huge amount of government debt, which is nearly 240% of GDP before the COVID-19 crisis. And after this crisis, I mean, in the end of 2020 the public debt surged to the 260% of GDP now. So it's a huge amount. And so the Ministry of Finance wants to improve the government budget so they want to cut any expenditures on COVID-19. So especially they want to cut expenditures on payment to restaurants, which is some kind of compensation of closure of the restaurants in Japan. But Ministry of Health wanted to continue the shutdown policy on restaurants. So they want the Japanese restaurants to close at eight o'clock in the evening. But they have to compensate the profits. So the government has to pay some amount of the compensation to the restaurants. But anyway, so the Ministry of Health wanted to continue the shutdown policy sufficiently longer to reduce the infection. It is reasonable. But given the Ministry of Finance's intention that they don't pay anymore, the Ministry of Health cannot offer any more payment to the restaurant. So given this normal payment, the restaurants in Japan resisted to obey the shutdown policy in Japan and politically the Ministry of Health has to end prematurely the shutdown policy. So then infection increases again after the lifting of the shutdown policy. And then the infection increases again very rapidly and the government is forced to impose shutdown policy again. So this is a cycle, innocent cycle of policy measures in COVID-19 crisis repeated in several months cycles. So then finally the consequences that the economic cost increases and that impairs government fiscal bar. So the intention, the first intention of the Ministry of Finance was that they want to improve the government fiscal balance. But the consequence is that we have more worse government fiscal balance and also continued infections in Japan. So that's what we experienced in the last year. And this problem is not solved yet. And so government is still very reluctant to pay to the restaurants and the restaurants never, now, many restaurants just ignore the government requirement to shutdown the restaurants. That's one problem here. And then we also suffer from the loose border control. For example, the announcement of Boris Johnson that in UK they found a very dangerous alpha variant the announcement was December 14th in the last year. But since then the Japan string since the border control and the shutdown, the entry of all foreigners from the world. But it's on the January 14th this year. So it takes very long time. I mean, it takes one month to shut down the border even though we know that they existed, the alpha variant in UK. So the Ministry, this is some kind of coordination failure between Ministry of Health and public health experts. The Ministry of Health resisted to shut down the border already because they say they needed the scientific advice from public health experts. On the other hand, the public health experts did not, could not give advice timely because they needed time and data to analyze a new variant because it's an experienced one. So because of this kind of coordination failure, so the politicians do nothing. And so they just extend, they just continue to open the border to the foreigners for nearly one month and they finally shut down January 14th. So that's one experience. And also we repeated the same kind of experience for the Delta variant, which is found in India in late April in this year. So Japan's government started to isolate the isolation of the entrant of 10 days. I mean, the entrants are Japanese and Japanese residents from India. So the isolation of 10 days just started on May 28th this year. So it takes about one month to have a, to implement this stringent border control. And the minister of health resisted to make a stringent isolation because they say that they do not have sufficient human resources to manage this, many entrants from India. So because they don't have sufficient staff, they want to release the entrant to the domestic, society. So it's a kind of, I think it's a very inefficient decision making in Japan. So finally, sorry, I think it's time, sorry, but I talk about extremely small number of cases in peace testing in Japan. So as you know, the COVID-19 has many asymptomatic patients. So we have incomplete information in the market that we don't know who are infected in the economy. So it's this kind of uncertainty and the information incompleteness make a shrinkage of economic activity. It's a very serious problem in economic policy. So if we consider the PCR testing as economic policy, it has a very effective to rectify the incomplete information and revitalize the economy. So in this view from the economic point of view, the test negative result is a very useful result because we know that you are not infected. So it's a rectified the incomplete information and revitalize the economy. So we, so economists in Japan argue that we should implement PCR testing on everyone or as many as possible. So this is a view of the business community and the economists in Japan. But the views of public health actors are very different from this. They say that the purpose of PCR testing is to find the infected patients and isolate them and cure them efficiently. So implementing PCR tests on many asymptomatic citizens and getting many test negative results is very inefficient use of test resources. So this is their argument. So public health experts directly resist to increase the capacity of PCR testing in Japan. And they think it's not efficient use of test capacity, so test resources. So they want to restrict the number of capacity and number of implementation of tests in Japan. So in a sense, they never accept the idea that PCR testing is useful as an economic policy. And they insist that it should be used to only for the medical purposes. So it's kind of coordination between medical community and economic policy community. So I think it's a very serious problem in Japan. Sorry, I used too much time. Okay. Thank you so much for the fantastic presentation, Keiichiro. So you identified in a clear manner about the obstacles which prevent the sweet policy decision making. Thank you so much. And I would like to have a question and answers. I would like some questions on this issue later. And so next we're gonna have Motoko as a presenter. So, you know, so many things happened at recent Olympic Games and the Paralympics and the, you know, the election for the Prime Minister this month. And we're gonna have a general election next month. So there's so many things. I don't know whether 10 minutes or 15 minutes is enough for you, but I would like to hear your views on this. Please go ahead. Thank you so much. And also thank you so much, Keiichiro, for a really interesting topic. Just quickly, I want to mention that I'm obviously no public health or economic expert, but based on what you say, what's so fascinating having just covered the Olympics and also been sort of a participant in their testing regime, the philosophy of the Tokyo Organizing Committee was to test rigorously. Every athlete that participated in the Olympics and Paralympics was tested every single day. And the sort of negative test was part of their policy in order to assure the safety of the whole community. So it's very interesting this point that you're making. I think the Tokyo organizers and the IOC and the IPC actually recognize the wisdom of what you're saying, of using PCR testing as a policy instrument to help ensure, in their case, the ongoing sustainability of the games, but also the health of all those who are participating. But thank you so much to Australian National University, the Crawford School of Public Policy and Shiro and Ipe and Lauren Richardson all for inviting me to this distinguished panel. It's really an honor to be here and I'm always glad to speak to people who are interested in Japan and its place in the world. And I think that what's so interesting about Japan is it's not just a place that people who are specifically and explicitly interested in Japan can learn more by talking about it together, but there are so many challenges that Japan faces that are not unique to Japan and that other countries around the world could learn from by learning more about the challenges and the solutions that Japan is trying to propose. But in the current moment, so last Friday it was almost the end of the Paralympics in Tokyo and I was just about to jump on a train and I was going to go see Bachi. And the reason why I wanted to go see this sport is I had previously talked to the head of the Japan Bachi Foundation and she had talked about how an inclusive sport this was. She said, people of all ages and abilities can play together. And it sort of seemed like a fascinating model for how different groups in Japanese society could work together and take better advantage of the diversity that already exists in Japan. So I'd already been to watch Badminton, which is one of the few sports where mixed teams of men and women play together and I'd watched a match between a wheelchair match between a 23-year-old player and a 53-year-old. So this was a huge age gap between these two players who were competitive with each other, although the younger player, by the way, won and went on to win a gold medal for Japan. But my Paralympic plans on last Friday came to a screeching halt because as I was about to leave my apartment to get on the train, of course, this alert popped up on my phone saying that Prime Minister Suga has decided not to stand for re-election as leader of the party. So gotta cancel those Paralympic plans and I spent the afternoon scrambling to interview political scientists and write a story about why Suga-san was going to be one of Japan's infamous one-year Prime Ministers. And I don't wanna get too metaphorical here, but it sort of felt like I was about to see this possible model for a different kind of future for Japan, and I was dragged back into business as usual Japan, the one where factional politics and a bunch of mostly men in back rooms get to decide what happens in the country. And to some extent, it's very likely that that's what's gonna happen this time around. Most political analysts believe it's basically a foregone conclusion that whoever wins the leadership election for the head of the Liberal Democratic Party at the end of this month will become the Prime Minister of Japan and that when we have a general election either next month or November, it's not gonna change that outcome. Yet I think we may also see some hints of a slow transition towards a different Japanese future, even in what is happening now. So in this crazy week that preceded Suga-san's decision, he first said he would stand for reelection and he was sort of trying to desperately hold on to his position. He said he would reshuffle the cabinet, appoint a new Secretary General of the party, but the reason he was doing this in the first place was he was trying to quell a minor rebellion among the younger generation in his party. They didn't wanna run in a general election with Suga as the head of the ticket. So it was the younger generation that was driving his actions. So maybe we're seeing the beginning of a moment of generational transition. We don't know yet whether the younger generation, particularly in the LDP, will represent a change in direction for the party in terms of actual policies, but we've seen some glimpses, right? So Shinjiro Koizumi, who's the currently the youngest member of the current cabinet, took paternity leave when his wife gave birth to their first child. It was a very tiny short leave, but it was something and his father certainly never did that. So it appears also that the former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, perhaps he's still trying to burnish his womanomics credentials is backing Sanae Takahichi as leader of the party. And if she were to win, she would become the first woman Prime Minister of Japan. I think there are some feminists who might feel ambivalent about that milestone, given that Takahichi's son has some fairly right-wing views that aren't entirely supportive of women's rights, but her leadership itself would nevertheless represent a historic moment in Japanese political leadership. And Japanese politicians often surprise you. So for example, Tomomi Inada, who was also backed by Prime Minister Abe when she served as his defense minister and is known as a far-right conservative on many issues, earlier this year, she backed a much more progressive cause when she tried to introduce an LGBTQ anti-discrimination law in the diet. Unfortunately, some of her other right-wing colleagues didn't allow the bill to come for consideration on the floor of the diet, but the fact that she was the one that was kind of ardently supporting it was surprising and very interesting, I thought. There are many voices in Japanese society that are still fighting to be heard and the powerful structure that favors long-standing elites can make it very difficult for those voices to break out and be heard. But again, there have been recent signs that the old guard is at least on notice. So in Yoshinomori, a former prime minister and the president of the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee made sexist comments about women's and they talked to much in meetings, I think in another era, maybe just a few years ago, even he would have survived after making a public apology. But a group of young women organized a petition that got a lot of traction on social media and he ultimately had to resign and Seiko Hashimoto, a woman, took over his position. And more young people that I talked to seem to be breaking out of the traditional college to retirement track of joining one company and staying for their entire career. I've talked to a lot of mixed-race Japanese who are looking to develop environmentally sustainable projects. So there's change in the younger generation. On the flip side, the younger generation is the least likely to vote. One of the reasons that the LDP has remained in power for all but four years since 1955 is that people just don't vote in Japan anymore. I recently read a pretty arresting statistic. So Shinzo Abe won a landslide victory or the LDP under Shinzo Abe's leadership won a landslide victory in 2012 with fewer votes than when the party lost in 2009 to the Democratic Party of Japan. So if more people wake up and decide to vote politics might change in Japan. Japan is such a wonderful country in so many ways but it faces a lot of challenge that its current political leadership does not seem to be reckoning with in a serious way. There's a demographic overhang that will only become more pronounced as the population ages, significant entrenched sexism that holds back women, looming environmental and energy catastrophe. There's a lot of talk about the importance of dealing with these problems but few bold policy prescriptions. It seems like Japan needs more than the men in the back rooms to help make the kinds of changes that we'll need to survive and thrive in the future. And I welcome the chance to have a really engaged Q&A with all of you. So I hope you'll ask lots of good questions. Thank you so much. Okay, thank you so much for Motoko-san so that you can see my gesture. So it was so fantastic presentation and you covered so many topics and that's definitely ignited lots of discussion. And thank you very much for identifying the problems at the same time that, you know, showing the some signs of the tradition of the transition. So that, so that we're gonna discuss lots of things in a Q&A session. So the last but not least, we're gonna have a presentation by Shiro. So you're gonna talk about maybe the security issue but also you can comment on the previous two presentations. So Shiro, please go ahead. Thanks so much and thanks for that really kind introduction before. When we talk about governance, we've heard a bit about how Japan's responded to COVID and the politics now and a bit more than the politics transformation of Japan. I wanna focus on Japan's new economic security policies or as a Japanese government's calling an economic security strategy. We foreshadowed this a bit in the previous panel but this is really a response to US China's strategic competition and really a more uncertain external environment. So since 2019, Japan's been implementing these new economic security policies and making changes to the machinery of government and I'll come back to that. Why I think it's worth focusing on this is it really affects Japan's international economic posture and the competitiveness of the Japanese economy. So we're really talking about how Japan interacts internationally economically but also its productivity at home and its welfare. This idea goes well beyond ideas of energy security and food security of the past and rulemaking and strengthening the global rules-based open economic system. Japan I think's got a very good track record there recently especially of leadership in concluding the Transpissive Partnership without the United States and with being the president of the G20 and hosting a successful all-sucker summit. But on these new policies since 2019 this is where Japan has really led the way I think internationally with proactive changes to policy but also bureaucratic machinery and there's a real attempt to break down bureaucratic silos across decision makers and policies silos across economics, foreign policy and security and to add some coordination within and across ministries. So in 2019, Meti, Ministry of Economy Trade Industry set up an economic security division and then in Ministry of Foreign Affairs we had an economic security policy division and then this undergone a couple of changes but that's in the Foreign Policy Bureau now. And then of course in the National Security Secretary in the Prime Minister's office in 2020 they set up an economic division or an economic security division. So these are attempts to bring together economic and national security considerations. A key question here is whether they lead to integration of economic and security interests or whether one is being subsumed by the other. In the case of the National Security Secretary perhaps economic policy being subsumed by security policy. So why is Japan doing this? Well, it's really to try to find a middle ground and to avoid that extreme of decoupling of technological or economic decoupling within the US-China strategic competition. So it is proactive by Japan but it's really in response to US tightening export controls of advanced technology. And that started in 2018 under the Trump administration and it's part of the broader decoupling between the United States and China. This of course brought back memories in Japan of being caught in the crossfire between the United States and Soviet Union with Toshiba being caught and a bit of memories of being fined significantly in the 80s. So the policies to protect non-allied acquisition of advanced technology and these are really, I'll talk a bit about these, restrictions on foreign investment, export controls and scrutiny of collaboration with research that involve Chinese links. So even the Ministry of Education has included an economic security division. And this is an area of active policy development. So there are new laws being prepared and strategies that really work on supply chain resilience, a digital strategy that promotes democratic values and semiconductor cooperation with allies. And they've identified a number of sections. So this is all very positive and proactive and forward-looking but this is an extremely complicated and difficult area. And I just wanna focus on three episodes that demonstrate the difficulty of these policies and also some early policy stumbles. The first is a restriction on foreign investment. So Japan has made foreign investment more restrictive coming into Japan. And this is, I think, a problem for Japanese competitiveness. Japan's already very closed to foreign competition and further restrictions, including making the threshold for foreign investment count from 10% equity stake to 1%. And it flies in the face of policy goals to improve Japan's competitiveness in attracting foreign investment. And this is a problem because Japan is dead last in the world in terms of how much foreign investment there is in the Japanese economy. So that's stock of foreign direct investment relative to GDP. A common measure for this and Japan has 4.3%. World average is 42%. China has 20%, for example. And Japan has less foreign investment in its economy relative to the size of its economy for the North Korea. That should tell you something about how closed Japan is to foreign investment. The second issue is on supply chain resilience. This is where in response to worries about disruptions in supply chains, especially early on in the pandemic, the Japanese government deployed subsidies to try to reduce exposure to the Chinese market. Now, they weren't called, they didn't have China in the name. The press often reported them as China exits subsidies. There were $2 billion, US billion dollars worth of subsidies to onshore Japanese manufacturing in Japanese companies and $200 million to expand manufacturing in Southeast Asia and South Asia. Of course, if you offer subsidies like this to companies, they're gonna take them up. And I think this was probably at worst, sorry, at best just a waste of money in corporate welfare, but it probably did distort some decision making. So we had Japanese companies returning from the United States to Japan and from China to Japan, but from elsewhere as well. Now this concentrates risk in Japan, another flood or an earthquake, for example. But also there was already a trend of companies moving from China to Southeast Asia and South Asia in search of lower cost manufacturing. So companies were already moving and would of course take up these subsidies. So this $2 billion of subsidies really flew in the face of Japanese investment going into China, which last year was $11.3 billion. So almost six times the amount of the subsidies. And of course, first quarter of this year has continued to grow. So $2.5 billion of Japanese investment is still continuing to flow into China. So the LDP policy heavyweight, Mr. Amari has talked about supply chain resilience in terms of strategic autonomy and strategic indispensable ability. This to me, not really clear what this means but it looks like more meaty, old school meaty protectionist industrial policy than anything modern and new that's gonna protect from these concerns of being stuck between the United States and China. I'll end here with probably the biggest policy stumble, I would say, and that's with the trade war with South Korea. So right after the Osaka G20 summit, Japan was championing a rules-based order, of course, successfully concluded that summit but took South Korea off the whitelist for exports of critical technologies, three critical technologies. That's of course caught up in the broader political spat between Japan and South Korea and the Korean Supreme Court decision on reparations for comfort women. So three key technologies. The Japanese government intervened in the export of these to South Korea. These are important for semiconductor production, memory chips, OLED displays and things where South Korea really dominated downstream industries. Japan's a major exporter of these and South Korea is a major importer. The technical justification was of course, you don't want these critical technologies to end up in North Korea or the Chinese military, but the reality was, of course, these were heavily politicized. The problem here was that Japanese restrictions shook confidence in Japan as a reliable supplier. Japanese companies moved to some to South Korea to supply these technologies to South Korean firms, but also Japanese firms supplied these from Belgium and elsewhere. The Korean government subsidized heavily the development of this industry in South Korea and the share of Japanese exports of these three, especially one key technology, one chemical fell drastically. So there are active policies now in South Korea to substitute inputs and they think of this as trying to achieve supply chains and it's from Japan. So in the name of economic security in this really difficult new uncertain external environment, Japan has deployed some policies that I think are more in the name of national security and some have been politicized heavily, that I don't think we quite have the balance right on these in these cases between economic interests and competitiveness and the national security interests. So I'll leave it there and look forward to questions. Thanks. Okay, thank you very much for very insightful, offering your insight for views on the foreign policy in Japan. And I'll also thank three panelists for very detailed and insight for discussions on the Japanese Japan at the moment. So maybe the three panelists could you turn on your video? Okay, so we already have a lot of nice questions, but do you have any questions each other? So if you have any question and I would like to have some discussion among three. Is there anyone who'd like to go first? Well, I'd love to ask Kobayashi-san about the sort of fundamental clash over all of the COVID management has been sort of between the economy and the epidemiological community. And at least it seems from observing and talking to folks that the political will has sort of leaned toward the economic side sometimes to the detriment of the science side. But do you think that's a fair evaluation? I mean, I think most citizens that I talk to and analysts think that the government, you know, made many decisions like with the go-to campaign and inviting the Olympics that they seem to be favoring the economy rather than public health. But do you think that's a fair assessment? Yeah, I think in a sense it's, politically they prefer to respond to the economic needs, but I think they want to relax the restrictions for any time. So they want to go to start the go-to campaign and they want to go to start the Olympic Games. But I think the judgment of the government may not be helpful to increase the welfare or the economic welfare of the Japanese society because government prematurely relaxed the restrictions. The consequence was that we repeat it. We are forced to repeat the state of emergency many times, right? So it is harmful for the economy as a whole. So the judgment of government is in a sense too short-sighted even though their intention was to increase the economic welfare, but their action reduced the economic welfare of the Japanese people. That's my assessment. So their intention is good, but their action was bad. Maybe it's my answer. Yeah, that makes total sense. Thank you. Any other question each other or fighting each other or no? I think we have a lot of great questions in the Q&A. Yeah, that's right. So let's go to that. So I already have several questions. So the two participants asked that the one, Koizumi or other administration may, I think moved towards more like a top-down decision-making, but Keiichiro mentioned lots of coordination failures. So do you think that maybe they changed the words, still there were not so many changes in the Japanese policy decision-making? Yeah, as a former Japanese government bureaucrat, I can say something about this history. So Koizumi government, the Abe government in early 2000, they implemented reform, political reforms. And I think it makes some improvement in economic policy, but public health policy or medical policy is some kind of dinosaur in Japanese government. So they never changed after the, you know, World War II. And the procedure of their policy-making is very closed. And in the Ministry of Health and Labor and Welfare, there are so-called experts. I mean, Ike Giga, which is the medical technicians in the Ministry of Health and Labor and Welfare, they have a medical doctor degree and they form a very close community. And they decide everything about medical policy in Japan and the government, I mean, economists and some other experts in other field cannot intervene to the decision by the medical experts. That's what we continued for the last 50 or 60 years. And so then we have a COVID-19 pandemic crisis now and the medical policy was in the forefront of the policy issues of the Japanese government. But the system is very old-fashioned as a dinosaur. So their decision-making is very, in a sense, weird from our point of view. So we try, I mean, economists try to communicate them very well and improve their decision-making. But we are now still struggling to how to communicate with these public health experts. Of course, they are rational. I think their policy-making is rational in their own field. They make a very rational policy-making. If we focus on the medical field, but they don't care about the huge cost of economic community or some outside community. So that's the problem in Japan. Thank you very much. And also, Motoko, you mentioned the signs of the transition. So can you share your views with us? Well, I mean, I think the signs of transition that I mentioned were more very small buds at the beginning, not necessarily addressing some of these very big problems that Kobayashi-san has very ably explained. And I think anyone who's worked in Japan has experienced this sort of, I mean, isn't there a word, Tatewate Gyosei, the sort of siloed administration? I mean, even if you try to file some paperwork in Japan, you're probably familiar with how you have to go to three different departments. And if you go to the wrong department, nobody feels, nobody has agency to sort of think creatively and collaboratively. And in this case, it has been a real problem because the sort of idea of expertise is so siloed and narrow. And so as Kobayashi-san is saying, this sort of narrow definition of who is a medical expert and who is allowed to have an opinion or bring their expertise to the decision has been very difficult and sort of puzzling to watch because in some ways we now have a lot of evidence about what works. And one of the things that we do have evidence about is that testing is a fairly, I mean, in Japan, like I was saying at the beginning of my talk about what happened during the Olympics, it is puzzling to me that a Japanese agency could not now say that there is evidence. They don't have to wait for evidence. It's already available. There were very few, relatively few cases in the Olympic bubble. And part of that presumably has to do with the sort of rigorous testing and the requirement for rigorous testing, both coming to Japan, everybody had to take two tests within 96 hours of landing and then they were tested every day after they landed. Sure, the idea that there isn't this ability to look outward, I don't see enough signs of that part, sort of that big picture changing. I also saw a question in the Q&A about whether the result in the Yokohama election suggests that there might be more mobilization of voters which is an issue that I talked about. It's an excellent question and I think perhaps that's what the opposition's hoping for. We've seen a lot of these signs though that it appears a lot of times that voters use these local elections to punish the LDP but not actually to presage a change. So for example, Abe suffered terrible losses in a Tokyo local election and then went on three or four months later to win so-called landslide in a national election, again because of low voter turnout but it was clear that the people turned out in the local Tokyo election and gave the LDP a drumming to sort of teach him a lesson but then when it came to the national elections it didn't sort of, there was no follow-through. So I'm not sure I see that transition yet. Can I just- Do you wanna add, yeah please please. It's been a really helpful presentation to understand why the response has been what it has been because I've been quite surprised really with the structure of decision-making having changed as a question I mentioned and the centralization of decision-making really in the Kante and Kobayashi-san you mentioned that's mainly around economics but surely that's where someone especially like Suga who was in charge as the chief cabinet secretary would be able to balance some of those different views and different opinions from the business sector, from the economic ministry, from the health ministry and in fact call on other experts within Japan in that kind of structure where it's you don't have to rely on one ministry so much. So I mean that is pretty surprising to me and I guess a question going forward then is we do have perhaps it's gone too far with the centralization of this decision-making in the Kante and top 600 bureaucrats being able to be fired quite easily by the chief cabinet secretary. Are we likely to see a reversal back maybe the pendulum has swung too far away from the bureaucracy towards elected politicians? Is there likely to be a bit of a correction back towards the bureaucracy in some way? Yeah, okay. Thank you very much. So we would like to go on to the next question. So Motoko-san kindly already answered about Yokohama the voting turnout kind of thing and the related topic is still the voter turnout for the younger is really low. And why? And also related the question is that it's a bit that related the question is the sociologically young Japanese still reluctant to marry. So what is the kind of the low activities among the young generation? So that and what the policy can do to activate activate them more or something if you could share your view, that would be fantastic. So I did do a story about the youth vote because I was so puzzled about it as it just turns out that when I first arrived in Japan they lowered the voting age. And so I had assumed that there would be this huge turnout among these newly enfranchised groups. And in fact, there was not. And in talking to people, I think there is this sort of sense of resignation. They just don't think that their vote matters all that much or that they can change that much or that even if they vote for another party there will be that much change. I mean, certainly when I arrived in 2016 the wounds of 2011 were still very raw. And so the narrative I often heard from analysts and from some voters was, we gave the opposition a chance and they messed it up. And so we don't want to trust them again. As we get further away, I mean now commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 311 disaster. I mean, certainly from a Western perspective where we kind of have this kind of throw the bums out voting activity or changing between parties happens in a lot of places, it's sort of curious why it doesn't happen here. But I think there is this sense that the vote doesn't matter. I think on top of that, there is this sense that everybody who's running the country is super old and is not listening to the young people. So I think their feeling is, why should we show up to vote? It's not like they're listening to us. It's not like they're like us. They don't represent us. So I think there's a lot of that feeling. There's a disconnect often between public polling on certain kind of, you know, touchstone or hot button issues where it appears that the public thinks exactly the opposite of mainstream LGBT policy, but the LDP does nothing to change it. And so I think a lot of voters think, why should I vote? Because they're not listening to me. They don't care. They do what they want. I think on the question about whether young people are showing a disinclination to marry. Yes, definitely. And it's gotten a lot worse during the pandemic. We don't know if that's more of a temporary phenomenon because people were, you know, struggling with work. If they had contract jobs, they may have lost them. If, like the point that Kobayashi-Sensei has been making about the subsidy, if you worked at a restaurant and your loss is not getting a subsidy, then you're not getting paid or you're getting paid less. You're not in the mood to sort of marry and family marriage is considered kind of the start of family formation. Why would you take on more responsibility when you don't even have enough income to cover yourself? So I think there is a lot of disinclination to marry, but I think it's complicated. I mean, I think from the woman side, it's seeing what a traditional marriage means in Japan still does despite some change and more active involvement by men. There's still been a lot of feeling that the women do everything and they don't really wanna get buried and start families when they also want to have fulfilling careers. They don't see how they can possibly balance it. On the men side, it's, oh my gosh, I have to be able to support a traditional family structure where my wife can quit her job and stay home with the kids, but I don't have a job that makes enough money to support that. So I think there are a lot of complicated factors that play into that. Thank you so much for answering the two rather independent question nicely, but I would like to know so that it's true that maybe young people's voting doesn't matter too much, but then if this situation continues, the policies tend to be not so good for them so that some change must happen in the future and all this continues this way or so that Shiro or Keiichiro do you have any thoughts on this issue or are we going to see some changes in the voting behavior for the young people or never? I better let Kobayashi-san answer that. It's a very difficult question and the problem is that elderly population, elderly people care about their grandchildren and young people. So if LDP and politicians want to do something good for the elderly people, they have to do something good for their grandchildren. I think so that's kind of communication from elderly voters to the politicians may change policy regime from elderly oriented to the younger people oriented ones. Then maybe young people will change their voting behavior, but I don't know. It's a kind of some miscommunication between politicians and the voters. So we need to, I think politicians need to recognize that the elderly voters want them to do something good for their younger children and grandchildren. So that's the point, but I don't know how to correct this kind of misunderstanding between politicians and voters. I don't know what's the answer, but... Okay, thank you very much. So maybe it's not the director to the younger generation, but the through older generation in actually affecting the younger generation, maybe there's something to be taken as a good measure to be taken in your future. And okay, I have so many questions, but okay, so I'd like to have a view from three. So that somebody asked about communication policy by the government, especially by the prime minister, Suga on the COVID. But so I would like to know whether there's any way to improve the communication of the policy by the Japanese government or Keichiro, if you share your views on how much we would have gained by better communication policy or something like that. So that Keichiro, could you start? Or maybe you are, I'm asking you too much. So maybe we can start the reverse order. So maybe this time, Shiro, could you start discussing about the communication policy by the Japanese government? Yeah, look, I'll try. I'm more interested in hearing what Kobayashi-san and Motogawa have to say about this, but this is not an easy issue for any government through this period I think. And I think we've heard a bit about vaccine hesitancy and all of that in Japan. I think when it comes to the crunch, the communication on that hasn't been too bad in Japan and the vaccine rollout has accelerated. You know, I think it's, talk about going through a difficult stretch anyway, but then having to host the Olympics and having a bit more clearer communication in one aspect I was watching would have helped. And that was the tendency to blame the Olympians or the people coming into the country for spreading the virus. But this new wave was not, of course, brought in by Olympians. It was just the loosening of restrictions really or the fatigue of the soft lockdowns and the Delta variant going, you know, unleashing. So, you know, we did see a lot in the press in the public domain of blaming, foreigners, unfortunately, during this new wave. And that's a kind of area where I think a bit more communication of, you know, from the government would have been pretty helpful. Sorry. Thank you so much, Shiro. So, Motoko-san, could you go next? So, your view about that. I mean, I actually, sure. I mean, it's hard to imagine how communication could have been worse, to be honest, under the Suga administration. Yes, this has been a challenge for every government around the world and every government has had to deal with different communication challenges. But I think, to be honest, Suga-san was uniquely bad at communication on everything. But especially about this most important issue that was really affecting people's daily lives. I think there are a lot of people who just don't trust the government anymore. They don't believe anything they're being told. They were very untransparent. I mean, I was very closely following all the developments with regard to the Olympics and there was, you know, a lot of kind of coyness about the decisions that they were making and when they were making their decisions. They should have been much more straightforward and trusted the Japanese public. I mean, I think one of the great things about the Japanese public is, you know, you see it every time there's a massive earthquake, the kind of rollout of communication from NHK and sort of the coordination and the ability of people to kind of pull together and react in a certain kind of way, you would have thought in a way. Like I was sort of shocked that Japan didn't do better about this. And at the very beginning, they were quite good about it, right? They sort of got that message out right away that we should all mask up. And obviously they didn't have the challenges, the political, cultural war challenges that were experienced in the United States and the UK, but it's not like everybody walks around wearing a mask 100% of the time in Japan either. So you did have to communicate the importance of that. Everywhere you went, there was this message about washing your hands. And, you know, some of it was a bit of theater, but it kind of creates a culture where they're taking your temperature anytime you walk into, you know, Uniqlo or a restaurant or anything. So it's sort of communicating the seriousness of this. And at the beginning in 2020, Japan was one of the countries that was doing quite well on COVID. But then when they started sending these mixed messages, you should go on vacation on go-to. No, you should do this. No, we have a state of emergency. No, you have to close at eight, but yes, you can do this, please do this, but don't do that. I mean, it's very, very confusing and it was not unified. And I understand why the public was fed up. You can't say, oh, we're gonna have to go ahead. It's more important than anything ever before to, you know, even with the Paralympics, when they decided not to have spectators for public health reasons, they decided to go ahead and allow school children to come in because it was a good idea for the children to see the Paralympics. It's such mixed messaging. You just can't do that as politicians to send so many mixed messages and expect the public to trust them. So, you know, yes, there were many challenges, but it's really hard to imagine how they could have done it worse. And I really hope that the next administration has learned from some of this. And I think it is tied into a collaboration since I was talking about, you know, different agencies having different agendas and maybe that was confusing and the Conte was trying to coordinate all of that, but that's their job and they have the power to do better. So, you know, I can see why the public has been very, very frustrated with this response. Thank you so much Motoko for very insight for comments. Keiichiro, I think maybe if you can say... I have nothing to add, but... Right. Yeah, I have a very short comment. Olympic games, I think the perfect failure of the communication strategy is an episode of Olympic in Japan. So, before the Olympic, I talk in the TV program that we can have an Olympic game with spectators in the stadiums because I know that there are several simulation results by Professor Nakata University of Tokyo. They show that even though we have Olympic games with spectators, the increase of infection is not so much. And I also know there are other research that show the same results. So, I insisted that we should have an Olympic game with spectators, but... And the problem is that the government should keep people, you know, all Japanese people inside of their home. So, stay home. So, if the government can success in the communication strategy to make people stay home, then Olympic game could have been successful. But the problem is that government and experts and all mass media focus on the problem of whether or not we should have the spectators in Olympic stadium or not. This is a single issue just before the Olympic game. But it was a very serious mistake which the government should focus on how to make people stay home. I mean, all Japanese people stay home. That was a hidden issue, but they cannot, I mean, government cannot make good communication to the Japanese people. So, that was a very serious failure in the Olympic games. Yeah, thank you so much for your answer. So, we have so many good questions, but we are running out of time so that I can not cover all the questions. But this is really a fantastic panel, and let me think so many new things and I feel like I need to think deeper. But before closing, so that maybe that why don't, why each panel is to say something which you think the most important. So, maybe the few words before closing this session so that maybe the Keiichiro, so that could you start, what could be the most important challenge or most important change in Japan for foreseeable future? Could you give us few words? Well, it's a very difficult question, but I don't know, we will have a election this October. And so, as many people here say that younger voters, if younger voters can participate in voting this time, that would change the consequence and maybe we will see a very big change in the political regime and then we will have a better future. But I don't know how to do that, but. But thank you so much, that's a great point because some small change may lead to the drastic change in the future. So, we should closely monitor that kind of the small changes as Motoko is identifying. So, Motoko, could you share what you think the most important was? I actually just quickly saw in the question, somebody asked a great question about what role the education system plays in this and we haven't talked about that at all. That's the subject of a whole other panel. I'm really fascinated by it, but the Japanese education system is so consistent and coherent in its own terms, but I think it passes on a lot of values and fails to pass on other values. So, one of the point that the question was making, I think it was Barbara Holtus about whether or not Japanese children even have a political edge or civic education that teaches them the importance of voting. I think that's really important, but there's so many other values. I mean, when researching the questions about inclusivity and disability policy, kids with disabilities go to separate schools. And so that really entrenched this mindset that people with disabilities are somehow different. If you really want to create an inclusive society, it's not just about throwing the Paralympics once in a lifetime. It is about embedding that in your education system. And I think that's true for so many issues that Japan struggles with, that the education system could be a really fundamental building block for helping effect change in Japan. Yeah, thank you so much, Motoko. I thought about picking up the Barbara's question, but we're running out of time. So thank you so much at listening to that question. So, Shiro, could you give a few words? Thanks, Ipe. For me, this discussion really highlights the weaknesses in the structure of decision-making and the policy processes in Japan, the health response, of course, education policy, like you mentioned, Motoko. But coming back to what I mentioned initially, one thing I think that does fly under the radar a bit, but it's the policies and the orientation of Japan trying to navigate this constrained external environment between the United States and China and whether we can do that without adversely affecting Japanese prosperity. So that's what I'll be watching in addition to all the other challenges of governance. Okay, thank you very much so that we can continue this panel next two hours, or three hours, but the time is running up so that we would like to close this session. And again, please join me in thanking three fantastic panelists for great insight for discussion. Thank you very much. And thanks for your moderation, Ipe. It was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so now that we should move on to the closing remarks, Shiro, so are you ready? I am ready. It'll be very quick. Okay. Well, thank you, Ipe, for that last panel and thank you, everybody, for staying on online. I'm not gonna attempt to summarize the whole day. We had a lot, but just very quickly to remind you of what we've heard. An overview, of course, from Salata-san at the beginning in the morning of Japan and Asia and where we're at and we're a long way away from out of this crisis yet. And we really heard some challenging things about the response in Japan and the effect on society in Japan in the first session. The suicides going up and the inequality there where there are really big gaps in the social safety net. And I think we touched on this idea in the last session of social capital and how important that is in Japan. Well, there are limits to that. And I think we're seeing some of the limits to that during this pandemic. And of course, Japan being open to immigration and quite surprising, I think to some of you, just how much support there is from the Japanese government. Looks like a very different story from the Australian government, which we had a nice presentation on that in the morning. And then of course, the second session on Japan as a global tech leader. I think there's still a long way to go. So make huge progress in digitalization and work from home. Of course, the energy transition is already underway, but all that points to drastic change that's coming still or needs to come. So this is where, of course, the governance challenges and the sort of communication that also structured decision-making needs to improve in Japan. So that the energy transition can be undertaken and to reach that net zero by 2050 target, but also to really bring Japan out of the era of faxes, the age of faxes. And already, I think we're getting rid of the hunker. But more importantly, building in flexibility to work hours and work practices so that we can get participation rates up and be able to judge people more on output, not just input sitting in offices for a long time. So in that final session, we heard a lot about the governance challenges and the coordination problems, which is the clearest explanation I've heard of why the response in Japan to the COVID crisis has been how it's been. And I think the lackluster response there on borders and the shutdowns and encouraging people to travel to all corners of the country. I mean, I think this is where even though Japan succeeded in holding an Olympics and a Paralympics in such a difficult time, I think the Japanese population could have asked for much more and should have deserved much more. So as Motoko said, we can all learn from Japan. It's pretty important to recognize these gaps in governance and it's a pretty big opportunity for the new leadership in Japan. So we had a pretty full day. Thank you all for sticking with us and joining us online, despite all the Zoom fatigue everybody has. I wanna especially thank Alexi Heasel, who's been behind the scenes, organizing everything. Put a lot of work into running this as a hybrid event. So with a live audience in Canberra and an online audience, but of course we have to transition to an online only event. So thanks Alexi for all the hard work that hasn't been wasted, but also the help you've had to from Shion, Takiguchi and Sakura Kapilaki and the rest of the team. Thank you to the speakers, to Motoko and Keiichiro, who are still with us, but also the speakers who joined us earlier on today and even from Washington very late at night. The update of course wouldn't happen without your insights and it's such a privilege to be able to get you together for one day a year to hear the latest on Japan and to tease out some of these ideas. Hopefully we can do it in person next year and get some of you down to Canberra, but also broadcast this live online as well. Finally, almost finally, thanks to the audience. Realize it's not easy just transitioning to online. We tried to make it a little bit shorter than an all day event, but please we'll send a survey out through an email and please give us your feedback. We'll try to improve this of course like we do each year. I think in our ninth year just for this series we're getting a bit better at running things and the balance of the panels. So look forward to your feedback. And finally to thank Lauren and Ip Bear, like the conspirators in this Japan update for what was I think a very successful update from my perspective and hopefully we get another big one next year with people in person and online as well. So thanks to Lauren, Ip Bear, the rest of the team and thank you all for joining us yet again. Close this year's Japan update. Thank you.