Arbitraging Japan Miyazaki, Hirokazu
2013., 20121202, 2013, 2013-01-01, 20130101
eBook
For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come ...to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? Hirokazu Miyazaki answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.
Mayors worldwide are currently actively engaged in transnationally coordinated efforts to address climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and other global challenges, and a significant amount of ...scholarly attention has been paid to this development in the fields of international relations, urban studies, and security studies. Yet, curiously, the pioneering work of the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their Mayors for Peace campaign and other related efforts to promote a vision of a world without nuclear weapons since the 1970s has scarcely been examined in city diplomacy research. Drawing largely on archival research in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this article addresses one of the key issues in the field—the legitimacy of city diplomacy. How do mayors justify the use of the limited resources at their city hall’s disposal for a global campaign associated with a policy goal that is beyond their jurisdiction? In the defense and security fields, where national leaders are the primary policymakers and deciders, this question of legitimacy is especially acute. The cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s city diplomacy for the elimination of nuclear weapons are no exception, despite the fact that their legitimacy has often been taken for granted given the two cities’ unique historical experience. The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have consistently, and at times jointly and at times separately, sought to establish their legitimacy locally, nationally, and internationally. Their city diplomacy since the 1970s has successively revealed several different registers of legitimacy. Each register of legitimacy—enacted through cooperation with the national government; confrontation with the national government; and collaboration with cities, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals outside Japan, respectively—is relational and has entailed distinctively spatiotemporal reconfigurations. While city diplomacy researchers have persuasively argued that the emergence of city diplomacy is emblematic of the structural transformation of the world order in which actors and issues are not simply local, national, or global, the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s city diplomacy serve as a reminder that the legitimacy of city diplomacy demands consistent relational recalibration through which the current world order is reimagined.
In a speech delivered in Japanese at Cornell University, atomic bomb survivor Tomokazu Ihara describes the bombing of his home city of Nagasaki in 1945, traces his activism against nuclear ...proliferation, and issues an impassioned plea for a world without nuclear weapons. Cornell Global Perspectives is an imprint of Cornell University's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The works examine critical global challenges, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, and are intended for a non-specialist audience. The Distinguished Speaker Series presents edited transcripts of talks delivered at Cornell, both in the original language and in translation.
In this article, I respond to Vincent Crapanzano's recent call for attention to the category of hope as a term of social analysis by bringing it into view as a new terrain of commonality and ...difference across different forms of knowledge. I consider the efforts of participants active in the capitalist market to reorient their knowledge in response to neoliberal reforms side by side with the efforts of academic critics of capitalism to reorient their critique. These efforts to reorient knowledge as a shared method of hope bring to light contrasting views on where such a reorientation might lead.
Social scientists have recently shown how markets are discursively constructed and have documented the role of central banks in these constructions. Although framed as a critique of the neoclassical ...economic view, this approach still operates within a narrow vision of the world as divided into distinct political, social and economic spheres. Our goal in this paper is to replace this view with an exchange-based understanding of agency and relationality. The puzzle of our paper is one that has captivated academics and practitioners alike: Why did the market respond so powerfully to the Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda's quantitative easing in 2013? Our focus is on the proliferation within the market and wider society of 'expectations'. A multiplicity of expectations, of different orders, different kinds, different scales, and different targets folded together to generate the efficacy of this event in central bank politics.
The Economy of Hope Hirokazu Miyazaki, Richard Swedberg / Hirokazu Miyazaki, Richard Swedberg
2016, 2017, 2016-01-01
eBook
Hope is an integral part of social life. Yet, hope has not been studied systematically in the social sciences. Editors Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg have collected essays that investigate ...hope in a broad range of socioeconomic situations and phenomena across time and space and from a variety of disciplinary vantage points. Contributors survey the resilience of hope, and the methodological implications of studying hope, in such experiences as farm collectivization in mid-twentieth-century communist Romania, changing employment relations under Japan's neoliberal reform during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the dynamics of innovation and replication in a West African niche economy, and Barack Obama's 2008 political campaign of hope in the midst of the unfolding global financial crisis. The Economy of Hope shifts the analytic of anthropological and sociological investigations from knowledge to hope, presents case studies on the loss of collective hope, and concludes by offering techniques for replicating hope. In the hands of Miyazaki and Swedberg and their distinguished contributors, hope becomes not only a method of knowledge but also an essential framework for the sociocultural analysis of economic phenomena. Contributors: Yuji Genda, Jane Guyer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Annelise Riles, Richard Swedberg, Katherine Verdery.
The recent debate concerning the 'sociology of arbitrage' has firmly established arbitrage as a category of theoretical significance in the social studies of finance. In this article, I seek to ...complicate this debate by drawing attention to a particular kind of ambiguity inherent in the category of arbitrage, as it is put to use in financial markets. I present certain Japanese arbitrageurs' reflections on the difference between arbitrage and speculation and examine the interplay of belief and doubt underlying arbitrage operations. I argue that the resulting ambivalence towards the category of arbitrage is a marker of arbitrageurs' particular epistemological stance, identity and ethical commitment. Finally, I consider the implications of arbitrage's ambiguity for the dominant trope of speculation in the critical study of financial markets more broadly.
The Temporalities of the Market Miyazaki, Hirokazu
American anthropologist,
June 2003, Letnik:
105, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Social theorists' recent interest in global capitalism is partially driven by their sense of "being behind" in a changed and changing world. It is also part of their larger efforts to critique the ...present. In this article, I seek to find analogues of this sense of temporal incongruity between knowledge and its objects in the Tokyo financial markets. My focus is on the anxieties and hopes animating some Japanese securities traders' life choices. I argue that these traders' differing anxieties and hopes resulted from their divergent senses of the temporal incongruity among strategies, workplaces, and Japan's national location vis-à-vis the United States. Drawing on a parallel between social theorists' and traders' efforts to generate prospective momentum in their work, I propose that anthropologists investigate the work of temporal incongruity in knowledge formation more generally.
