 Welcome everyone to the 2021 ANU Japan update which is presented to you by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. I'm delighted today to have to officially open the Japan update Professor Helen Sullivan who has recently been appointed Dean of the ANU's College of Asia and the Pacific. As many of you know Professor Helen Sullivan is a world-leading political scientist and her research examined several key issues that are vital for our democracy including the theory and practice of governance and collaboration, new forms of democratic participation and public policy and service reform. And as many of you will be aware for the past few years Professor Sullivan has done a wonderful job as director of the Crawford School of Public Policy here at ANU and prior to coming to ANU she was founding director of the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne. Thank you very much Helen for joining us today and handing over to you now. Thank you so much Lauren and hello and welcome to everybody joining us from wherever you are. I'm watching the participant numbers climb as I speak and it's so wonderful to be able to welcome everybody to this ninth Japan update. As we begin I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands and indeed airways we meet today and I'd like to pay my respects to elders past and present and also extend those respects to any other Indigenous participants who are with us today from wherever you are. It's as I say my pleasure to welcome everyone to this this year's Japan update online the ninth in the update series but of course our college's experience with Japan is is extensive and goes right back to the founding of the university so while this series kicked off in 2013 we've hosted many conferences and events on Japan in the decades before. So as I say the ANU's research and engagement work on Japan dates back to the founding of the university 75 years ago this year with work on Japan at the forefront of our broader Asia engagement. That work continues today led by the Australian Japan Research Centre extraordinarily ably led by Dr Shira Armstrong. Now in its 41st year I must stress that Shira hasn't led it for the whole of those 41 years and the Japan Institute which is equally ably managed by Dr Lauren Richardson and it is wonderful that they are co-convening this event today. Now our commitment as the National University to Japan to Asian research is is really important in the current context where other centres of Asian research are being cut back across the university sector right at the time when we really do need more knowledge and understanding of our own region and also to double down on engagement with our partners there. And the College of Asia and the Pacific in the National University has become much more important in this context both as a place for students which is absolutely why we exist but also providing the space the career pathways and the support for academics to work in our region. The college hosts the largest number of Asia specialists in any academic institution in the English-speaking world and that's an asset both for our country and beyond and one that we really do need to invest in further and part of my role as Dean of the College is to seek and secure an advocate for that investment. Japanese continues to be the most popular in our suite of language programs and our research on Japan continues to thrive as is evident from the great panels that we have in the update today. We'll hear today how Japanese society is being shaped by the coronavirus pandemic, how science, defense and technology policies are changing Japan and also about the governance challenges the country faces. You'll hear some of ANU's research in the panels and insights from our speakers in Japan. I'm delighted to launch this year's East Asia Forum Quarterly issue on Japan, Confronting Crisis in Japan, edited by Rikki Kirsten, honorary professor at the AJRC in ANU and Ben Ascoen who's recently finished his PhD with ANU and is now one of Japan's top universities, Waseda. I'd also like to take the opportunity to foreshadow a major report that Chiro Armstrong from the AJRC is leading on reimagining the Japan relationship that's due out later this year. The Japan update brings us together to help understand what's going on in Japan and is part of an ongoing body of work at the ANU and I hope you can keep in touch with that through the various newsletters, seminars and events to which you'll be linked to during the update and do keep an eye on the chat because a number of links have already been put up and I know that there'll be lots going on in the sidebar as it were as well as in the main event. This was to be a hybrid event with an in-person audience and there was a lot of work that went into preparing for that and I would like to thank everybody involved in the preparation of these events. I know that a great deal of work goes on behind the scenes to make them work as well as they can. While we couldn't do the hybrid event I'm so pleased that under the circumstances we are able to transition seamlessly into a fully online event. We are becoming very adept at moving from one media to another these days. So as I say I'm very pleased to open this year's update and I will now pass on to Ipe, one of my other past colleagues from Crawford to begin with the proceedings. Thank you all. Okay thank you very much Helen. I'm still the president you know colleague of yours still so that I just wanted to say that but okay so that anyway so the welcome to the keynote session I'm Ipe Fujiwara professor of economics here at the ANU and the KO University in Tokyo. So we first acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respect to the elders past under present. And okay so it is our great pleasure to welcome Professor Yasui Kisawada as the keynote speaker to the Japan Update 2021. Sawada-san is a professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo until very recently actually until the end of last month Sawada-san was the chief economist at the Asian Development Bank and was in charge of ADB's economic outlook and economic research. And Sawada-san's key research areas are development economics, microeconomics, the economics of disasters and the field surveys and experiments. And what I admire the most about Sawada-san is that he always put himself in the shoes of those who are suffering due to for example poverty, disasters, and so on. And I conduct the research to find out the causes of their suffering and what can be done about it. Economists unfortunately including myself tend to analyze topics that are intellectually interesting rather than relevant to reality. Sawada-san is steadfast in his pursuit of what is essential but at the same time many of them open up the frontiers in academic research. Sawada-san always reminds me of what it is to be a social scientist. I can continue for next 30 minutes or more to talk about how I have been impressed by Sawada-san but I know you would like to listen to the keynote speech as soon as possible. And during the Sawada-san speech, if you have any questions to keynote speech, please post them at the chat functions. I would like to ask the questions Sawada-san after his presentation. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Sawada-san. Thank you. Thank you very much. A very warm introduction. Dean Heran Sariban-san and also Ipe Fujiwara-san. Thank you for a very, very nice warm introduction. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Greetings from Metal Manila, the Philippines, where I am now. And thank you. Thank you very much for joining. And also I'd like to thank Shirou-san and also Ipe-san for having me arranging today's lecture. So little background. It's clear COVID-19 pandemic is the main challenge facing Japan, Asian region and also all the global society and economy today. Vaccines now give a hope. We can gradually turn the tide of pandemic and rebuild for a strong recovery but we are not still out of wood yet. We must focus our efforts now so that recovery can be lasting, long-lasting, available to everyone and including the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies. So my presentation in the next 25 minutes or so will be composed of three parts. First, you may wonder about Asia and the Brooklyn Bank in short ADB. So the first part is a brief introduction of ADB. Secondly, updating Japan's recovery situation and also Asia. The third part is about Asia's economic outlook. Thank you. So please move on to the next slide. So next slide is overview of Asia Development Bank. Can you kindly go to the next slide? So Asia Development Bank, ADB, in short ADB was founded in 1966. So more than 50 years. A few years ago we celebrated 50 years. Yes, this is right. 50 years, anniversary, a few years ago. And ADB has served as Asia and Pacific's lending regional development bank. From 31 members of the establishment in 1966, ADB has grown to and surpass 68 members of which 49 are from Asia and Pacific and 19 outside the region, including European countries, as well as the North American country, Canada, and the United States. ADB headquarters in Metro Manila, where I'm now based. ADB provides a strong and reliable finance to our developing members, a practical knowledge solution, and partnerships among the range of stakeholders. And so basically ADB not only providing loans and financing instruments to our member countries, developing member countries in Asia and Pacific, but also we provide knowledge product like my research department and also policy guidance, policy dialogue. And also one particular nature of ADB. ADB not only support each individual developing member countries and economy, but also a group of countries together we support, which is called the regional cooperation integration. One example is countries around the Mekong River. We have been doing celebrated the Greater Mekong Stabilization Program soon after the political instability in Mekong River region stabilized in 1980, 1990. And ADB has more than 3,000 staff members and one-third is about one-third international staff. Please move on to the next slide. So I said 68 members, 949 are from region, so you can see ADB regional members covering from Central Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and also Pacific island countries. Out of 49 members, Japan, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand from the beginning kind of donor members, not the recipient members. So rest 46 economies are called the developing member economies or INSHOT DMC. But out of 46, Taipei, China, Hong Kong, China, Brunei, Thailand, Singapore, and Korea, there are no longer recipient countries. So this is ADB regional members. Please move on to the next slide. So for today's Japan update, I think it's relevant to point out Japan has been number one contributor in terms of ordinal capital resources, which provides the funding or conventional regular or conventional funding and loans program, but also Asia Development Fund, which is a basically grant resources. Japan is a top contributor. And international staff, I said around one-third of 3,600, 1,300 international staff, about 10 140 Japanese, and actually Japanese share is the largest and together with the United States. So I think this is somewhat peculiar. ADB is one of the very few international organization in terms of financial contribution and also staffing. Japan play a very important role. Please move on to the next slide. So next slide organizational charts. So President is current President, Mr. Masatsugu Asakawa, who used to be the Deputy Finance Minister of Minister of Finance of Japan, and he joined last year just before COVID-19 pandemic, February last year. And so I was in charge of economic research and regional cooperation department in short ERCD, which is the research arm of Asia Development Bank. And I just retired from ADB end of August. So next slide shows the ADB operations. So last year we made a financial, ADB made a financial commitment set to 1.6 billion US dollars, quite sizable commitment. Left is by country disaggregation and right is sector composition. So we can see in Asia, large countries such as India, Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, PRC, large clients of ADB. Right side shows the sector disaggregation of year 2020. Last year was a bit peculiar because of COVID-19, many member countries started putting a large-scale financial, I mean physical policies to support people and also businesses. So naturally, ADB support of our member countries shifted from the infrastructure funding to budget support. So that's why last year little peculiar public sector management, public sector support are the largest component. Next slide shows the more balanced year our support. So this is outstanding loans covering last, even last couple of decades, loans program. By country again, big countries, India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Philippines, our very important clients, bisector transport is about the quota. So I think this is the ADB's COVID-19 operation about one quota of resources devoted into transport sector, especially metro and railway programs in big cities, road and port support programs and projects. And also energy sector play a very important role in supporting a renewable energy shift in Asia and Pacific region. And next slide is the final slide for ADB. ADB adopted strategy 2032 years ago for the next 10 years strategy up until 2013. ADB set the seven priority areas including poverty, gender, disaster resilience and climate change, urbanization, and also rural and agriculture, government support and regional cooperation and integration. So particularly ADB has been supporting gender mainstreaming and also energy sectors and climate change, supporting mitigation and also adaptation. So this is the end of the first part about ADB. So please move on to the second slide. So second part I'd like to discuss Japan's recovery situation so far as well as the forecast this year and next next year based on Asian development outlook. And the Asian development outlook is ADB's flagship publication focusing on gross focus, inflation focus, and broader economic outlook. So next slide please. So ADB's Asian development outlook focus, basically we focused on developing member countries as I mentioned 46 member countries. But in order to make 46 developing member countries and economies and members, we need to set the global assumptions and global economic outlook. So this is a table summarizing particularly we track group of three United States, Europe, area and Japan. So this is basically our ADO assumptions. And overall outlook for major advanced economies listed here, group of three countries recovery in the US and Europe area seems to be on track, setting aside ongoing delta variant recurrence. These economies continue to reopen basically. In Japan however, new waves of COVID-19 infections in the first half of this year 2021 have hurt the economy, prompting a downgrade to 2021 gross focus. So renewed the COVID-19 pandemic waves have delayed recovery in Japan. However, economy is expected to rebound in second half of 2021 throughout 2022 as the current wave of infection recedes and also vaccines roll out accelerate. We see some sign, a little bit some sign of receding a current wave of infections in last a few days. As I will show you just in a minute, manufacturing PMI percent manager index remain in expansionary territory in Japan and industry production machinery orders have bounced back in recent months. So GDP gross forecast for Japan 2021 we slightly revised down from April forecast to latest July forecast from 2.9 percent to 2.6 percent. But mirrored by upgrade for 2022, 2.4 percent 2022 forecast in April we now upgraded to 2.7 percent. By the way, July forecast the latest I can share with you and September 2022 in two weeks we will release ADO updates. So if you're interested please join our webinar for agent development outlook updates webinar. So please move on to the next slide. Next slide shows the overall movement of GDP since the Q1 2019 up until Q2 2021. As a contraction of 7.1 percent in Q1 2021 last two bar charts right end shows the Q1 Q2 2021. So Q1 was not good minus 3.7 percent and surge in COVID-19 cases increased the restriction dampened the consumption but the Q2 Japanese economy rebounded slightly 1.3 percent positive 1.3 percent growth in Q2. This rebound was driven largely by consumption which grew by 3.4 percent effectively offsetting a decline in Q1. Although we show the disaggregation in bar charts red one is a private consumption it's a little bit difficult to see but Q2 recovery can be attributed to consumption growth. Consumption growth came despite the state of emergency across Japan in May and June suggesting consumers may be adapting to their restrictions physical restrictions. Vaccination rollout has also played a role roughly 36 percent of population now over more vaccinated and recent restrictions look to have had a smaller impact on mobility. Growth was supported by private investments which grew by 3.4 percent. Public investment meanwhile contracted by 5.7 percent contraction. Export grew 12 percent quite a strong recovery of export we observed. However this was outpaced by 21-22 percent growth in imports so as a result net export effectively weighted down economic growth so but I would say this is an indication of recovery export strongly rebound partly due to recovery of a global economy but same time import is very strong because of the recovery so net export is not necessarily contributed to GDP if we adopt this very basic demand side decomposition of GDP growth. So please move on to the next slide. Next slide shows multiple economic indicators. Industrial production is shown in blue bars here and retail retail sales are denoted in orange bars in this chart. These indicators have registered volatile growth as we can see up and down this year but averaging 0.1 percent and minus 0.5 percent month to month growth respectively from January to May. Contraction in industrial production in May was driven by a large drop in car production due to a global shortage in semiconductor chips and this seems to be continued and this car production decline was not driven by its important appointed not driven by a demand but rather from a supply chain bottlenecks industrial material semiconductor supply. On the other hand retail sales have dampened by declaration of a state of emergency in several prefecture in January and again in April and now supporting expectation of weak consumption. Leading indicator shows a reasonable for optimism. Just consumer confidence yellow line shown here reached 37.6 it's highest since February 2020 and manufacturing PMI showing a gray line. Although seems to be a rather flat gray line but remains in exponentially territory above the 50 threshold. So next slide summarize COVID cases and vaccine rollout as we we can see from the left chart Japan's experiencing another uptick in COVID-19 cases after seeing a surge in January and April this year so can be attributed to delta variant and the blue shows the new cases. So if we take a really latest figure I think blue should show us some some type of a tapering shape. A state of emergency was issued for major area including Tokyo and Osaka and mobility restrictions were imposed on more than 10 other prefectures throughout August. In the right chart vaccines have been progressing steadily which can which is encouraging I admit uncertainty 36 percent population now fully vaccinated roughly 48 percent of population have received at least one dose of end of July. So this is a little bit old fear we have a much higher vaccination right now. Number of deaths looks to be decoupling from the rise in cases and largest surge suggesting that vaccination have prevent infections resulting in a serious illness and deaths. So left chart yellow shows the new deaths. Having said this delta variant the recent figures which is not included here shows the increasing in mortality due to COVID is really one serious signs of recovery. So next slide shows the Japan's trade indicators. Export growth orange looks to be slowing after registering a strong rebound through a second half of last year and early this year. So yellow line is export. The surging export was driven in large part by solid demand for cars and port parts from the US EU and shipments of semiconductor producing equipment to China. The recent slowdown is more likely due to a semiconductor chip supply shortages and constraints rather than softening external demand. Mihoari imports shown in the gray line here has locked strong growth in recent cases. Due to a rebound in crude oil prices and government purchases of COVID-19 vaccines which have driven up imports of pharmaceutical products. Moving on to the next slide. So this is a summary of Japan parts. Japan's economy is picking up but the weaker than expected private consumption in the first half will delay the recovery. Economy activity is expected to rebound in a second half of 2021 and throughout 2022. Our gross focus or our basic assumption of Japan focus 6.2 percent for 2021 gross and 2.7 percent gross in 2022 which is a slight downgrade for 2021 and upgrade for 2022. If we compare April 2021 focus, ADO focus and July 2021 focus. Grows will be driven largely by recovery in private consumption, private investment. Private consumption expected to pick up as more people got vaccinated and thus mobility restrictions are mitigated. Also, since external demand remains strong as supply chain disruption subsides, private investment is expected to increase as manufacturing keeping up with strengthening external demand. Inflation is expected to be zero in 2021 before rising gradually to 0.5 percent next year. Development around the COVID-19 remains the largest risk to the outlook. More COVID-19 outbreaks and renewed lockdown can dampen economy activity as it did earlier this year and now ongoing. Rabbit progress on vaccination is a key in decoupling inflations of cases from hospitalization and deaths. And will thus be crucial. Vaccination will be crucial for enabling resumption in economic activity, so delays to vaccination would be a downside risk. On the other side, major upside risk is a new fiscal package that may be announced in coming months. So this is the end of Japan's part and finally I'd like to quickly go over Asian parts. Next slide please. So the latest focus outlook of ADB is 46 developing members, DMCs. Here again, numbers are 46 DMCs within Asian past peak. 49 region members minus Australia, Japan and New Zealand. So next slide summarizes the main messages. So first, COVID-19 outbreak persists in number of economies in the region. Vaccination is progressing but the developing Asia is still far from achieving a hard immunity. Second, recovery path diverges as export and domestic demand boosts growth in some countries while containment and travel restrictions restrain other members. Thirdly, developing Asia's growth is expected to rebound 7.2% this year 2021, slightly lower than 7.3% April forecast because of the outbreak affected economies have being downgraded. Growth forecast for next year is 5.3% in April forecast but now upgraded to 5.4%. So this is the main focus numbers and then number four, although regional inflation slowed up taking early 2021, following a steady decline throughout the 2020, inflation will remain benign at 2.4% this year and 2.7% next year. Finally, but not least the biggest risk to the regional outlook is still pandemic, including a renewed outbreaks and delayed vaccine rollouts. So this is the key messages and I'd like to take a closer look at these issues, some of these issues. So next slide, please. Next slide is COVID pandemic outlook left chart. Black line shows the evolution of new COVID cases in developing Asia since last year. After picking last September, cases declined steadily through February of this year but in part because of new variants, the Delta variants and other variants, cases searched in March and April and peaked at 1.7 cases per million people or around 434,000 cases in total for the region. So this has been happening now up until now. The rise was driven largely by South Asia first, shown in the red and then followed by other Asian countries. Now Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, we in the middle of resurgence, especially Delta variants. While cases in South Asia have fallen sharply, cases in South Asia, Southeast Asia yellow, yellow is the Southeast Asia, Central Asia's blue and Pacific green have recently been rising and also in Asia we see rising cases. Right chart shows the vaccine rollouts progressing in many economies in Asia and Pacific but developing Asia is still far from achieving a hard immunity. As of August 12th, a little odd number, region had administered 65 doses per 100 people, slightly above a global average of 59, but well below 105 in the United States and 92 in Europe. So this is the overall situation of COVID and vaccine rollouts. Vaccine rollouts are progressing but on the other hand new variants is really affecting the whole region. So next slide shows the past economic performance. Amid the pandemics up and downs, Asia's experiencing economic revival, though even one, here I put the 10 largest economies in Asia, developing Asia. Year on year GDP growth in Q1 2021, white dot, so each of 10 largest economies put here, there are two bar charts in this state. Left bar chart is last year's growth decomposed from the demand side and right chart is Q1, I call it growth 2021, white dots. So yellow dot is last year's growth and white dot is Q1 growth in this year. So all of the 10 largest economies, we see recovery from yellow dots last year growth to white dots recovery across the board. 2021 Q1 year on year growth was particularly strong in China, People's Republic of China, shown in the left end is PRC, very strong recovery of white dot. So this is the notable. And the improvements, across the board improvements, came both from domestic and external front. Contributions from private consumption, blue bars, became less negative or time positive for all 10 economies. Contribution from investment, showing the orange bars, also improved in eight out of 10 economies. External side net export, gray bars, were bigger boost to growth in Q1 for several export-oriented economies, especially in the middle segments, newly industrial economies, NIES, PRC, Hong Kong, China, Singapore type of China, gray bar, very strong. That means global economy recovery really helped a revival of these economies. And the next chart that zoom in few aspects, recovery continues to be supported by a robust manufacturing revival showing in the left chart. Left chart is PMI. PMI in the manufacturing sector. So big drop in last year, PMI really recovered strongly and remain in a positive territory. So still we are in a positive territory and manufacturing is expanding. So this is the one supply side recovery pattern. And the right chart shows the real exports. So this upturn in manufacturing showing the left has gone hand in hand with the strengthening trade. Global regional exports have rebounded. And as we can see from our right chart, black and green lines for global. And green is region, Asian region. But red line is really strongest, which is China's export PRC, strengthened ahead of the rest of developing Asia. And China and also especially other East Asian economies, recovery has been driven. First buy exports are medical supplies and productive protective equipment PPEs. But then electronics products probably partly attributed to stay home restrictions and also work from home arrangements. But exports in the rest of developing Asia have been catching up in recent months. So little lacking behind. Next chart, please move on to the next chart. Having seen a rather rosy picture of our export, unlike these rosy picture, tourism still show little signs once back as we can see from this chart. This is international tourist arrival for major economies, major tourist dependent economies in Asia. Tourist arrival have remained depressed since April 2020, as we can see almost 100% decline or 80% decline. Only red line, which is Maldives, shows the recovery. Maldives opened up a country to tourism in last July, July 2020. Even there, tourism arrival still well below a normal time. So these are the really big, still big severe recession elements on the tourism dependent economies. Georgia, Maldives, Thailand, several Pacific Island economies. Next chart. Thank you so much for the fantastic presentation, but could you wrap up your presentation? Yes, yes. So I will wrap up. Please move on to the next slide. Next slide is overall recovery. As I said, overall, next slide. Yeah, move on to the next slide. Yes, so this is our gross focus this year and next year. So this year, 7.2% gross and next year, 5.4% gross. That's our overall focus. Green shows the update of our focus since April up until July. We see East Asia has been really recovering well, more than our prior expectation. And then South Asia and Southeast Asia seem to be encountering negative COVID recurrence. So this is the quite divergent recovery pass of Asian economy. And please move on to the slide 25, the next and next slide. So inflation actually skip commodity price recovery of global economy, commodity, and also energy and food indexes. But overall, inflation seems to be a benign and well under control. So this year, 2.4% inflation, next year, 2.7% inflation, which is well below in the last few decades, inflation. So inflation is under control. And then, yes, this is a summary, but key message I just summarized at the beginning. So let me skip this and move on to the next slide. So what has been, ADB has been doing. So ADB basically has done two major, yes, support. First one is 20 billion comprehensive COVID-19 response package. Main ingredient is supporting budget of our member economy. And then our next slide, the final slide, we also supported through newly created Asia Pacific vaccine access facility, APBX December. We announced and started 9 billion package to support our member countries access and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines because procurement and getting supply is one challenge financially and also physically. So in order to support this, we provided 9 billion new newly created APBX facility. So with that, I'd like to stop my presentation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Again, over to you, Ipe-san. Okay. Thank you very much for very comprehensive and the insight for presentation. We got a very nice, you know, comprehensive view on Japan and Asia dwelling and after the COVID crisis. So we'd like to have questions and the comments, but the next session is waiting. And luckily, Sawada-san kindly agreed to participate in the next session as a panelist. So if you have any questions, some of you already posted questions at the Q&A. So maybe Loren, the chair of the next session will pick up some of them at the end of the Q&A sessions in her panel. So please join me thanking Sawada-san for fantastic presentation. And now I'd like to pass my microphone to Loren. So Loren, please. Thank you, Ipe. So I'll be chairing this first panel of the Japan update on the impact of COVID-19 on Japanese society. Before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we're broadcasting on, the Nun of all people. And I wish to acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this city and this region. In last year's Japan update, we looked at many of the macro effects of the pandemic and we expected that this year in 2021 we would be in a kind of recovery mode. As you've heard from the keynote, that's not the case. And the Delta variant that really took hold in Japan and many other countries this year has almost resulted in a whole new pandemic. So in this panel, we'd like to look at the kind of shadow pandemics that have emerged from this and their impact on Japan. And that includes equality, gender and aging issues and how Japanese society is set to recover from this pandemic. So we look at mental health, also suicide effects of COVID-19 and the gaps in the social safety net and progress with opening up to immigration. The first panelist today, I'm delighted to have Dr Nana Oishi who's an associate professor in Japanese studies at the University of Melbourne. And she completed a PhD in sociology at Harvard. She's done a lot of excellent research on topics related to migration and a variety of other social issues. So thank you, Professor Oishi. I'll hand over to you now. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. And thank you very much for having me here. And I'd like to first like to thank all the organizers of ANU for their kind invitation and extended to me to speak at this great event. Today, I'd like to talk about COVID-19 in migration in Japan. And my talk is going to be structured this way. I'm going to start with an overview followed by the impacts of COVID on migrants and the government's support for migrants and the what kind of remaining challenges they have. And what's going to happen in post-COVID Japan? I think this question is something that a lot of us, I'm not just in Japan, but on Australia are posing or people in other countries all over the world are posing. So I'd like to at least comment on this question in the context of Japan. Right. Okay, so this is the overall increase, the trend of migration in Japan. It has been increasing since 2012. And it hit the highest last year, but it slightly declined due to COVID last year. And this is unfortunately the latest stock data that is available from the Minister of Justice. And the migrants comprise about 2.3% of the country's population. It declined slightly, but it was still increasing until last year. And however, when you look at the skilled migration flows, you can see that it still increased even in 2020. So that means the number of migrants who enter the country between January and April, when they significantly started closing the door, the border really was quite huge already. So that really shows how many companies still want the migrants to Japan. And so as I said, the total migrants comprise about 2.3% of the population. But when you look at migrant workers, they comprise 2.5% of their labor force. And it hit the record high since 2007. So it's been on the increasing trend. And their countries of origins actually changed last year. Both total migrants for migrant workers in both categories, for the last few years or so, Chinese people were the biggest group. But last year, Vietnamese replaced Chinese in the category of migrant workers. In total migrants, Chinese people are still the biggest minority or the biggest group in migrants. But when it comes to migrant workers, the Vietnamese are the largest group now, followed by Chinese, Filipinos, Brazilians, and Nepalese. Right, so as you know that the border has been closed across almost all countries in the world due to COVID last year. But in Japan, Japan too started gradually closing its border since February. In the number of countries that the border closure was extended to began to increase over time. So as of August last year, the border closure was extended to 159 countries and territories. But at the same time, in July, the government began to open the border gradually to certain countries. So they created two categories, residence track and business track. The residence track is for medium term stayers, such as international students or the, I'm sorry, not international students, I'm sorry, the workers, temporary workers, or medium term workers. So and they started sort of negotiating with various countries, governments. So the Thailand and Vietnam, the Thai and Vietnamese started coming in in July. And Malaysian, Malaysian Cambodians and there are several other countries, governments concluded the bilateral agreement in September, etc. So it was done in a bilateral basis. And the business track was created for short term visitors, businessmen or business woman. And Singapore, Korea, Vietnam and China were accepted through this track. And in October, the border was fully open to all migrants, including international students and all visa holders, our value visa holders. However, it was suspended in late December due to the surge in COVID cases. In January to present, migration has been mostly suspended except spouses and children of Japanese citizens and permanent residents, athletes and Olympics related personnel. Okay, so this is the flow data during the migration of the COVID time. So you can see that when the border was fully open, you can see that a lot of people started coming in, reaching almost 70,000 people coming into Japan just in December, although it declined. And then again, in July, we started having Olympics. So more people started coming in as well. And so how did the COVID impact migrants? And well, you can see that just like Japanese people lost their jobs, a lot of them lost their jobs. Migrants also did lose their jobs as well. So they faced a lot of them face financial difficulties. You know, a lot of them couldn't go home even though they wanted to because the number of flights was reduced and the airfare became very expensive. And even their home country's border was closed. So a lot of them kind of got stranded in Japan and they lost their jobs or they were underemployed even though they kept their jobs, even the employers reduced their hours. So it became very difficult for them to make their own living. And there are a lot of civil society organizations in Japan that are providing help for them. But it still became more difficult to reach out to these migrants because of the restrictions, mobility restrictions, even though Japan hasn't really had huge lockdowns, like the ones that we have in Melbourne or Sydney or Canberra. And there is nothing similar to that. But still people are discouraged from moving around and a lot of people try to comply. So it has become difficult to provide sort of physical help people, the migrants, helping migrants in person. And also some of the civil society organizations have been having difficulties in fundraising because their donors also had some economic difficulties due to COVID. So the situation has been quite challenging for them. But the situation, however, particularly for temporary migrants, the situations for temporary migrants are actually quite good in Japan. Well, I shouldn't say good, but the Japanese government is really trying to provide support for temporary migrants. When I say temporary migrants here, I mean non-permanent resident migrants. So those people who are here in Japan as international students or people who have valid work visas or investors and so forth. Non-permanent resident migrants. So the Japanese government basically doesn't really differentiate migrants or non-migrants or like Japanese citizens or non-Japanese citizens in terms of public support, financial support. So when it comes to COVID related support, financial packages and so forth, it's quite generous. So when you have a migrant family of four, for example, each person, each family member gets 100,000 yen, which is about 1200 Australian dollars. Like the lump sum money. So each person gets that. So if you have a family of four, that's like 4800 dollars. That's quite good. And plus, if you are a single parent, no benefit as well. And you can apply for small loans. Various types of support are available. If you're an international student in Japan, you can also apply for the same COVID cash payment of 100,000 dollars as long as they are registered as local residents and in the municipalities. And also they have student support emergency payment. They can also apply for short-term loans, et cetera. And if you're just a worker, if you are holding a migrant work visa, then you can also apply for special cash payment and you can apply for job seeker equivalent of Australia up to 330,000 yen, which is about almost like 4000 Australian dollars per month. And they can apply for small loans, reduction of social insurance payments or moratorium payment, et cetera. So they can also get a lot of benefits. If you're a migrant entrepreneur, you can also apply for job keeper equivalent support plus business support packages up to 1,000,000 yen, which is about, I'm sorry, this is, I think it's the exchange rate is wrong. Sorry about that. And the rent subsidies and so forth. And even some asylum seekers who apply for refugee status and staying in the country, they can still get the cash payment, COVID cash payment. So they're fully covered. So it's quite generous. So that's in Australia, I think the, if you're a permanent resident, even if you're a migrant, as long as you have a permanent resident status, you can get that package, job seeker, job keeper and stuff. But other than that, international students are not covered, except in some sort of lump sum cash support from certain governments, certain state governments. But other than that, there is no support from the federal government as long as I understand. Okay, as far as I understand. And then, but there are remaining challenges. The first challenge is that irregular migrants are not covered. So all this public support available are actually linked to residential status. So they have all those people who are registered with a local council, local municipalities are eligible to get those benefits. So those people who are staying in the country on an irregular status, then they won't be able to get the support. That's, they are 82,000 or 868 of them in the country. So those people don't have access to those benefits. So those people really suffer a lot without much help. And also the, as I said, NGO MPOs are facing difficulties due to mobilities and financial difficulty as well. And also provision of multilingual information is still challenging because it's very difficult for municipalities and also even the national government to keep up with the update information in different languages. So the Japanese government provides the information in 18 languages, which is, I think it's a big improvement for the last 10 years or so. But there's still some time lag. And also, so what happened is that because there's some time lag, a lot of municipalities are trying to translate that information into several languages by themselves. But then some municipalities can do it very quickly. Others can't, depending on the amount of resources that they have. So there's some kind of discrepancy in terms of the provision of information. And some municipalities, because they don't have money, they don't have resources, they use Google translator. And you know how accurate that is. And then sometimes it's like accuracy can have to be compromised, even though this sort of generic information could be communicated, but still that's really not perfect either. And there are some different translations by different municipalities that could cause confusion sometimes. All right, so what's going to happen in post-COVID Japan? Some people, actually a lot of people do argue that there will be more migrants who will be choosing Japan. Gracielio Fala, for example, in her latest book or the latest article, that particularly international students from Asia will choose Japan because of the future job opportunities, limited agent anti-agent racism, and low tuition. Japan, Japanese universities, Tuitions are much lower than the Tuitions in Australia or the US. So a lot of people in Asia are also hit by COVID, and then a lot of middle-class families are likely to choose sort of cheaper tuition, lower cost education, higher education for their kids. So they might, they are likely, their other, Gracielio at least, is projected that they will choose Japan over other countries, particularly because more and more Japanese universities are offering the curriculums and programs in English. Okay, and the Japanese government will also boost migration due to accelerating population aging, and I know that they are really determined to increase the number of migrants because of the sort of structural, demographic situations. And then population aging is really severe. And so they are really trying to boost the number of specified skilled workers that they just created the new scheme two years ago, and I think they're going to keep pushing for that. And the Japanese public is very, very supportive of migrants, and that would really help facilitate for the migration I would project. And my research partner and myself recently conducted the data analysis, and we found a very interesting finding, but before that I'll just tell you that Japan is one of the most supportive countries for immigration. So it's the second highest sort of supportiveness for migration. According to the International Social Survey Program already in 2013, so it's very Japanese people are quite supportive of migration now. I think it's really in contrast to sort of stereotypical image of Japanese. And this one too, this is the latest one, the 2020 data. To the question, is it a good thing to have more migrants? You know, almost 70% of Japanese said is yes, it's a good thing. Now only 30%, roughly 30% of them say it's not a good thing. So the majority of Japanese people do support. And the latest research published earlier this year also sort of verified that about 60% of Japanese did support. Migration. And my call in Japan, that nationalism is really not linked to anti-migrant, not necessarily always linked to anti-migrant sentiments, which is the case for many countries in the world. You know, like in many countries, nationalists or patriots are really trying to sort of argue that our country is for our people, et cetera, et cetera. But interestingly, according to our data analysis, the nationalism in population decline areas in Japan was actually correlated with pro-migrant sentiments. You know, it's very contrary to our sort of typical image, right? So those people who love Japan and truly care about its long-term future support, its long-term future, they support migration because it's one of the very few options left to sustainability. So we presented the new conceptual framework of structural economic nationalism, which refers to economic nationalism determined by democratic structures. So because of this, and because of persistent labor shortage in regional areas, we project that migration will continue to increase in post-COVID Japan. And this is the data that we got. So they could higher the nationalism level than the perceived values of negative contribution of migrants to Japan will decrease. So I'm going to stop that. And yeah, that's it for my presentation. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for the excellent presentation and great to see all of that data there. Thank you so much. Moving on now, our next panelist. I'm delighted to introduce is Dr. Yoko Ibuka, who is professor of economics at Keio University. And she works on a broad range of topics in the field of health economics, focusing on understanding health-related behavior and exploring effective public health policies. So thank you, Professor Ibuka. Without further ado, I will pass over to you. Thank you very much. So thank you very much for having me here today in Japan Update this year. And thank you everyone for participating. I'm Yoko Ibuka, health economics at Keio University. We all know that the impact of COVID-19 is massive and therefore it's been affecting almost all dimensions of people's life. Today, I would like to talk about one of the very important public health concerns under the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Which is suicide based on published scientific articles. So recent studies show some alarming situation. Suicide all behavior has been increasing during COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. What is less clear now is suicide incidents as there is partly because there is a barrier to access to real-time data of suicide. Japanese government reports a number of suicides every month and therefore an immediate update of suicide incidents is possible and has been done using Japanese data. Even before the pandemic, Japan was one of the countries with high suicide incidents rate among high income countries in the western Pacific earlier. It is well known that suicide is related to macroeconomic conditions. And as the policies mitigating COVID-19 have been disrupting economic activities so much, this would add to concerns regarding the situation in Japan. Therefore, to understand how the pandemic have been affecting suicide is essential for further policymaking regarding public health, social and economic policies under COVID-19. Before I start talking about what has been shown about suicide in Japan, I would like to briefly touch upon the trajectory of COVID-19 in Japan from early 2020 up to now. So this figure is very similar to what Sawada-san shows in his talk, but this shows COVID-19 new cases and accumulated deaths over time. As you see here, there have been five lips so far, and the state of emergency has been in place for four times in Tokyo area. The concerns, the contents of intervention package differ in general, the state of emergency in Japan request individuals to stay at home as much as possible without- As much as possible without- Sorry, sorry. As much as possible without imposing any punishment in case of violation. At the same time, the government often request bars and restaurants to close completely or close earlier or not to provide alcoholic beverages. Now, Tokyo is in the middle of the fifth wave due to the Delta variant, and the current wave has been producing the greatest number of cases, as you see here. But the intensity of the measures taken was the strongest in the first wave, the first state of emergency in April last year. Regarding suicide in Japan so far, I have identified four studies which investigated suicide incidents under COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Those studies used the data up to four 2020 last year, investigating the impact of the first and second waves. Two main results are consistent across these four studies. As for the trend, the suicide first decreased in April and May 2020 and started increasing after the this may be quite unexpected. However, similar results are reported by a study regarding high income and upper middle income countries in the initial stage of pandemic. Also, it is known that there is a reduction in suicide after massive disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes followed by an increase in suicide. In addition, some Japanese-specific factors may have affected the reduction in suicide. Specifically, the initial stay at home order included school closure and it also led to a reduction in working hours among adults. Knowing that in Japan, some suicides are related to long-hour work and suicides among children tend to increase after a long vacation. Those factors may have further contributed to a reduction in suicide. Finally, as Oishin mentioned, the government provided sort of generous cash benefits to all students to mitigate the economic impact of COVID-19, which may have helped as well. Another important finding is a difference in the impact by gender and age. Specifically, an increase in suicide among females is more pronounced than males. This is consistent with findings from earlier meta-analysis and waiver paper regarding suicidal behavior during COVID-19 from various countries. However, it shows a clear contrast to the impact reported by the government reported in the context of past macroeconomic shocks where they tended to influence males more than females. And there are potential reasons why the impact is larger among females. Those include worse economic situation due to a greater impact on female dominant industries, such as food service or hospitality industry, an increase in domestic violence during the state of emergency, and an increase in burden of working mothers to take care of children due to the stay-at-home order. Finally, as for the age difference, a study by Sakamoto and others investigated the impact by age group in details. And it shows that the impact was most pronounced among relatively young individuals. It is also important to understand the similarity or difference in the trend between suicide incidents and suicidal ideation or attempt. Based on the data of emergency dispatches associated with suicide until July 2020, one study shows that suicide attempt was higher compared to the level in pre-pandemic years in the early stages of the pandemic. This study also showed that the most affected population was females aged 25 to 49 years. A study based on an online survey provided an important information on individual characteristics of those who have suicidal ideation in the early phase of the pandemic. There was a small decline in suicidal ideation over all after the pandemic. However, those who reported suicidal ideation increased among those who did not report it before the pandemic. So this indicates those people became at risk after the pandemic started. Also, the study showed that individuals in their 30s, those with unstable employment status, those without the children, and with relatively low income were more likely to report suicidal ideation after the pandemic started. Suicide is really caused by a single factor and various factors would be affecting people in a conflict's way under COVID-19. Literatures so far discussed such factors include health problems such as worry of being infected or and or being transmitted to others, financial insecurity, or loss of employment caused by the pandemic, burden of unpaid care work because of school closure and work from home, an increase in domestic violence, isolation feeling, which led to impaired social and family relationship, and a disruption in receiving mental health care due to limited health care service access. So as published literature so far has revealed the figures only by fall 2020, I tried to estimate a percent increase in suicide after fall 2020 using the publicly available aggregated data. So here in this figure, this number shows a change in comparison with the same month of the pre-pandemic period from 2017 to 2019. So how to estimate this number is basically similar to what literature has done. And you see there was a peak in October in 2020 and the increase in suicide lasted during 2020. And this is a breakdown by gender and you see the impact has lasted longer among the females as you see here. So to summarize, so far studies identified females and the young as being at higher risk of suicide worldwide as well as in Japan. Also in the impact of the pandemic on suicide has been changing over time. It is important to keep an eye on infusion when and where the COVID-19 affects suicide in the middle run and long run. And measures has to be taken at various health care levels for people at risk. At the same time, operation-wide evidence-based public interventions should be implemented. Such interventions include the limitation of the access to the means of suicide such as suicide linked substance along strong emphasis of media's role in minimizing the risk of imitative suicide. Finally, further research is needed to disentangle what economic and public health interventions mitigated the impact of COVID-19 on mental health of individuals. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Professor Ibuka for that really important presentation and for addressing what is a very serious and important problem. It seems that not just in Japan and many countries including Australia that there's just been so much focus on just curbing the immediate viral aspect of the pandemic. And although many governments have been aware of this shadow pandemic of mental health issues, they've been really lagging with addressing that. And so I think the data you've provided would be helpful for also the Australian government. I'd now like to just offer if Professor Sawada, would you like to make a few comments or come in on the two presentations before we move into the Q&A? Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you very much, Roland. And also thank you very much, Oisang and Ibuka-san for really wonderful presentation. I'd like to make a few comments on Oisang's presentation on migration. I learned a lot and thank you very much for providing us a very comprehensive profiling of what happened among the migrants. So my comments is from a developing Asian angle what happened to the migrants and the more importantly, remittances flow to our recipients and home family. Actually, just before COVID-19, according to our tracking, data tracking, remittances in flow to Asia continuously increased. And around 300 billion in total, that money is flowing into Asian Pacific region. So this is like a record high. And 300 billion, which is comparable to tourism receipts, tourists visiting Asia and spending money. That total amount is about 300 billion. So same. And also another very important source of financial inflow to Asia, which is FDI, foreign direct investment. And net foreign direct investment inflow to Asia before COVID-19 is about 550 or so. So FDI, people in general, we understand FDI is a really key driver of Asian development right now. But actually, in terms of financial inflows, about half of FDI inflow, we are getting money through migrants, remittances, sending money back. So naturally, how COVID-19 and the border control affected migrants' inflow and also remittance inflow. And actually, early stages of pandemic, World Bank made an estimate, probably remittance will collapse and 20% decline in 2020. But looking back, actually, what happened in 2020, this collapse in remittance inflow didn't happen. Actually, according to our tracking data, developing Asia, total amount of remittances were rather slightly increased, 1.4% increase, or almost stable. So actually, this is a bit surprise and somewhat good supplies. It's maybe somewhat similar to what you described. Migrant situation seems to be better than our prior expectation from this aspect, right range of challenges. And for Asia, developing Asia, why remittance inflow didn't collapse? So there are multiple reasons. Although senders have hardship in Europe or developed economy and high-income economies, but in general, remittance inflow is characterized by counter-secular behavior. So home country suffering from hardship then increase. So definitely it's a counter-cyclicality, cyclicality player role. And also increased saving, consumption, and travel options are limited. So migrants seems to save money and send back. And also because they cannot bring money home, they tended to use official channel, Western Union or some bank channel. So some data artificially increased. But more importantly, we see observe some country-specific elements. For example, Bangladesh, Pakistan, particularly we saw remittance inflow increase. And this can be attributed to so-called haji effect. So now many migrants, workers in Gulf countries, could not do the haji in July and August. So rather than spending money, they started sending. That seems to be one channel, especially Pakistan and Bangladesh. And Pakistan actually, expectedly and expectedly, I don't know exactly. But they put some tax exemption framework to facilitate more remittance inflow. That can stimulate more incentivize more remittance flow. So I think these are the really interesting observations. So I was wondering if you have some, you know, some findings around the remittance flow of migrants related to Japan. So that's my one bigger comment if I may, or question if I may. Thank you very much, Professor Souda, for those very interesting remarks. I will give Dr Oishi a chance to respond. And I'll also just pick up two questions for Professor Oishi from our audience. And one is the matter of naturalization is very low in Japan. Do you expect there'll be some more public debate on this at some point? And another question is when you're discussing, when you were talking about the fairly quite degree of public acceptance of migration in Japan, is there, can we distinguish between acceptance of permanent foreign workers? Or is this just an acceptance of temporary workers? How do Japanese people feel about these two categories? Okay, thank you very much for great questions. And first of all, I'd like to really thank Professor Souda for very, very important information. I used to work for the ILO. I worked with people in ADB before. And I was really actually in charge of remittance issues as well. So this is really core to my heart. So I'm really glad that you addressed that. And actually, well, for me, for this time, I still haven't been able to conduct research on remittance situations in Japan. I've been talking to people like entrepreneurs, and then they're actually making quite a bit of money from the tourism industry, even under COVID, partly because of the benefits that the government has been offering. But to what extent they are remitting that money back home? It's really not, that's something that I really need to do more serious research on. So sorry that I can't really answer that question at this point. But I will definitely keep an eye on that. I was quite intrigued by the fact that the remittances didn't collapse in Asia. That's extremely interesting. I actually like to, I hope to talk to you a little bit more about it later on after the Japan update. But anyway, answering the second question about, or there are two questions, above the low naturalization, I don't think the rate of naturalization, I don't think it's going to increase in the near future because Japan doesn't really allow dual citizenship or multiple citizenship. So if they do, then I think naturalization rate will increase. But for anyone to naturalize, then they have to give up their citizenship of the country of origin. And I think a lot of people hesitate to do that. So I don't think that naturalization rate is not going to increase rapidly even in the future. And it's really easy to get permanent resident status in Japan. And it's not going to make huge difference between permanent residents and naturalization in terms of benefits. So that's my answer. The second question about the acceptance towards temporary migrants versus permanent migrants. If you live in any countries, it's really hard to distinguish or differentiate who are temporary migrants, who are permanent migrants. And it's really hard to judge for anyone. So whenever these surveys are conducted, they don't differentiate the categories of temporary migrants and permanent migrants. They lump them together sort of migrants as a whole group. They do research on a survey on. So I don't, and I really don't think that will make a big difference. But at least as far as I know, migrants, whether they're temporary or permanent, they're really fully accepted as full members of community is many regional areas these days. That has been a big change in Japan. And they used to be kind of excluded from various communities, but they are getting more integrated because of the severe population aging and people are willing to accept them and embrace them as community members. That's it. Thank you. Okay, great. Thank you. And I just have one more question for Oishi. Sun, it's about the link between nationalism and support for migration. Have you found any differences in the level of support according to residency status or type of migrant? For example, migrant worker versus asylum seeker. Okay. Well, as times, I'm sorry, like I'm not really quite sure about the question. The level of support from who? In Japanese society, again, there's a kind of difference between say, migrant workers versus asylum seekers, those kind of categories supporting. Well, asylum seekers who are full community members, but then the local people are asylum seekers who are temporary migrants who are permanent. It's really difficult. So as a society, they're trying to embrace migrants no matter who they are, and particularly local municipalities don't differentiate them in terms of providing support, financial assistance and so forth, social service, providing social services. Although I would say that the asylum seekers sort of social support, because their asylum applications have been rejected and then staying in Japan, then that would be a different story that then they wouldn't be registered on the municipal residential list. That means that they have no access to official, officially speaking, they have no access to various public support. So whether in Japan, whether you are on the residential list or not, residence list, Jumin Toroku or not, that makes a huge difference. Okay, thank you very much. Your sound was breaking up a little bit, but I think we can still hear you, no worries. And I'd just like to direct a question to Professor Ibuka. It was interesting how you mentioned this kind of being different waves of, you know, I guess you could say groups who are vulnerable to suicide as the pandemic has kind of evolved in Japan and sort of some latest news articles I've read have said that school children are now a really concerning category. And that's something that we're seeing in Australia as well, that the mental health challenge is there. So yeah, I'm wondering if you could kind of forecast as the pandemic sort of continues to evolve in Japan, will the sort of public health policy be directed at, you know, these kind of different categories or if you could comment on that, that would be great. Thank you very much for the very good question. So of course, it's very hard to forecast in the future. But based on those studies which have become available so far, you know, we see there is no direct correlation between number of COVID cases. So the degree of the pandemic and the suicide incidents. So we may be a bit worried about some kind of time lag between the COVID situation and the suicide incidents. And in particular, at this moment, the government has been providing the economic packages, including the business support package and individual cash benefits and those things. And some of those economic packages will expire sometime in the not very far from now. So I'm worried about the impact of such termination of those economic stimulus packages on the mental health of individuals. Because in Japan, especially the macroeconomic conditions and also the people's employment status and suicide incidents are highly correlated. So that is what I think. And also for the difference by population, you mentioned the effects on children. And of course, that is additional worries at this moment. Because of the Delta variant, at this moment, some of the schools still close and the school closure may have some impact after the school closure terminated. So careful intervention would be necessary for the transition period from school closure to the normal school lives. So that is what I think. Thank you. Okay, excellent points. And also in Australia, we're kind of struggling, and I think many countries, including Japan, we're trying to find the balance between protecting people from the actual virus and also managing the increasing mental health toll. Increasingly, there's calls in Australia to open up schools and just find a way to let children go back to schools, which is seen as really important for their mental health. I'd just like to hand over to Professor Sawada once more who wants to comment on Professor Ibuka's paper. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. I'd like to make quick comments on Ibuka-san's presentation. So I think you can see my slide, I hope. Oh, I can see. Not yet. We can't see yet. Oh, there it is. Yes, it is. So I'd like to mention this is a very important issue, and lots of media put big attention to suicide issues in Japan after COVID-19 pandemic. But I'd like to mention there is some long-term very important elements on this COVID-19 driven suicide increase in Japan. This is the one slide from my book we published four or five years ago. So this covers up until 2014, since 1989. Japan's suicide increase, 97 to 98, when financial crisis hit Japanese economy. At that time, we saw a jump is driven by a middle-aged male unemployed or economically troubled self-employed people. And then since 1998, about 10 years, there is some continued suicide numbers and trend. Total number remained over 30,000 over 10 years. But the ingredients actually age shift from older cohort to younger cohort. So younger people's suicide increase. So this has been a suicide issue has been a really chronic vexing problem in Japan and Japanese society. Governments set the basic law, suicide prevention, 2006. Then situation started changing, continuous decline, especially suicide prevention fund and government fund, sizeable fund has been allocated. And also municipalities started setting suicide prevention offices and started doing a lot of innovative programs to prevent suicide. So we started seeing a decline since 2008 up until 2019. So we observe this has been a successful case of government policy and government budget and local government supporting. But as Iwuka-san said, this trend, continuous declining trend of successful suicide control, just rebounded. And in fact, the first wave, February, January, July, suicide didn't increase. But as Iwuka-san showed in one of the slides, second wave, July, October, suddenly suicide started increasing. And also Iwuka-san mentioned Tanaka-san and Okamoto-san's nature, human behavior article. I think that's a very good article. Using, you know, because of this prevention, government started releasing monthly data at the Shikucho-son level monthly data on suicide. That helped a lot. And Tanaka, Okamoto nature, human behavior paper used this very granular Shikucho-son level panel data to perform a difference in difference type of assessment of COVID-19 pandemic. And they clearly found suicide increase among the women and also younger population. I think this is really annoying because also Okamoto paper showed that Shikucho-son, who has been successful in controlling suicide and suicide numbers declining, that kind of Shikucho-son encounter increase in suicide. And also women and younger people, we observe a big suicide. And also Tanaka-Okamoto analysis stopped in October last year. But Iwuka-san's analysis seems to show even after the second wave, October 2020, this trend continues. So I think this is really a big challenge government and also society is facing. Government should really design and adopt customized or targeted suicide prevention policies. And also broader society, I think we face this big challenge of COVID and stay home, driven mental stress. So one question, one further comment. One comment is actually ADB, we started using a Twitter big data to because we need to capture real-time psychosocial situation of population. So in order to do that, we started using Twitter and despairing and decoding by machine learning. So I think this may be one useful way. How to, in order to set the evidence-based policy instruments, I think granular data is important. So Twitter or social media or other new type of data can be crafted. And the other thing is Iwuka-san, this is a broader question. So I saw this is very important area of research. And I was wondering about your research plan. You continue to do this analysis of suicide prevention research. And what's your plan? If you can share some of your thoughts about this. Thank you. Thank you very much, Roland. Thank you, Professor Sawada. It was great to get that pre-pandemic context with the data. Professor Iwuka, I'd like to let you respond. Thank you very much. So just a quick reply to Professor Sawada's comments. And thank you very much for providing me the very useful information before the COVID pandemic and what government has been done in these areas. And as for your question regarding my future research plan, yes, at this moment actually I started working on the issues on DV, domestic violence with one of my colleagues. Because that is I think one of the very important factors which would be related to the female mental health status. So, yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you to all of our panelists. It's been a fantastic discussion. And I think everyone would have really enjoyed the rich data and analysis that you've presented to us in helping us to understand what the really troubling social impact of the coronavirus pandemic is on Japan. So thank you so much for your time and for joining us today. And also thank you to the audience for your great questions. We're now going to have a lunch break. And we're going to reconvene at 12.30 for a panel on science, defense and technology in Japan. So hope to see you all back then. Thank you.