Response to Change in Matured Economy and Society-Comparative Study of Japan and United Kingdom

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Both Japan and the United Kingdom face a common set of new problems as mature economic societies. This presents a big challenge to every researcher oin the sociences. Because of their multi-faceted nature these problems have to be studied in an interdeciplinary manner. The subject of response to change contains a wide range of topics to be studied, but we have to be sellective due to budget and time constraints. The following seven topics were identified for our major focus, considering the respective strength of the two universities.assistance to declining industries, politics of privatization, changing pay system, innovation by firms, land price issue, urban planning, and protection of privacyEach topic was tackled jointly by Japanese and UK scholars either in a joint paper or two separate papers. Every year for the past three years, a Hitotsubashi team visited Sheffield and a Sheffield team visited Hitotsubashi, both consisting of 3-4 project participants who were supported financially only partly by the budget, and held a joint seminar in order to discuss the result of the study as well as undertaking field study in assigned topic.English draft of individual papers have already been completed and they are now being translated into Japanese. We planto publish both English and Japanese versions. We address our report not only to English Japanologists and Japanese Anglophiles but also to greater audience interested in the response to change by matured economic society.