午夜剧场

Recently, together with my colleagues, I published an academic book titled "The Policy Research Council and Japanese Party Politics: A 130-Year Trajectory" (Yoshida Shoten, 2024), edited by Kentaro Oku, Yuichiro Shimizu, and Shinsuke Hamamoto. This volume traces the history of the Policy Research Council—the policy-making organ of political parties—from the Meiji era to the Heisei era. I believe it has become a quite unique work in terms of its long historical scope and its nature as a collaborative study between political scientists and historians.

In fact, I have published two other collections of collaborative research papers before this. By the third book, people might think I am someone who simply loves collaborative research. However, collaborative research is quite a laborious task. First, the logistical coordination costs, such as simply adjusting schedules and setting up venues, are surprisingly significant. But even more difficult is the coordination cost on the substantive side—that is, deciding the density of the "collaboration" and finding the right balance for it.

To be specific, in historical collaborative research, if you simply divide up the eras and let each author freely set their own themes and then just sum them up, the research is not that difficult. However, to conduct meaningful collaborative research, I believe it is necessary to examine the path toward the goal with your colleagues and share analytical perspectives. In the aforementioned study, we spent a lot of energy setting the perspective on what aspects of the Policy Research Council were meaningful to focus on for analysis. On the other hand, if you create too many rules, collaborative research becomes stifling and motivation is hard to maintain. This is because researchers, to put it kindly, love "freedom," and to put it bluntly, are more or less a "selfish" breed.

Regardless, collaborative research conducted while overcoming these difficulties is truly interesting. There is an irresistible sense of accomplishment when you reach the goal by mobilizing the intellectual power, information-gathering abilities, and analytical skills of your colleagues. Furthermore, the moment of discovering a fresh perspective while debating various points with colleagues—the intellectual excitement when ideas undergo a chemical reaction—is a luxurious moment that cannot be obtained through individual research.

At the risk of sounding like further self-promotion, I would be delighted if you could pick up our new book, "The Policy Research Council and Japanese Party Politics," to see for yourself what kind of chemical reactions of ideas occurred among us and what kind of goal we reached as a result.