Ageing Society in Italy and Japan:

A Multidisciplinary Workshop

distanceS in thE Covid-19 era

Alphabetic order

Stefania Bandini is a full professor of computer science at the University of Milano-Bicocca and Fellow at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo. She is Director of the Complex Systems & Artificial Intelligence Research Center and of the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication. She is also Director of the Milano-Bicocca Cini Node “Artificial Intelligence & Intelligent Systems”. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence and complex discrete dynamical systems. Since 2004 her research has focused on the field of crowds and pedestrians, in particular modeling and simulation to support crowd management. From 2009 she extended her research in the field of mobility in an ageing society. She co-chairs the working group “Ageing Society” for the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Marcella Bianchi is currently a trainee in social psychology in the Department of Humanities at the University of Naples Federico II, and is aiming to continue her research by pursuing a PhD. Her research interests concern the study of the impact of digital technology on human wellbeing through a psychosocial lens, with particular reference to aspects of risk and opportunity.

N. Alberto Borghese is full professor and head of the Applied Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano. His research is based on designing, developing, and testing real-world problems, methods, and algorithms, based on computational intelligence, paying particular attention to limited processing time. He has developed a novel methodology and technology in the fields of motion capture, unobtrusive tracking, sensor integration, and e-health. He is co-author of more than seventy peer-reviewed journal papers and one hundred conference papers, and he holds sixteen international patents. His research has been financed significantly by industry and by national and European grants and projects such as CNR Robocare, MIUR SI_Robotics, EU-FITREHAB, EU-REWIRE, EU-MOVECARE, and EU-ESSENCE.

Paolo Calvetti is currently Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo. He has had numerous teaching experiences both in Italy and abroad. Leaving his alma mater, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, in 2009 he moved to Ca’ Foscari University in Venice as Professor of Japanese Language and Linguistics, and has covered many institutional roles since then: directing the former School of Asian Studies and Business Administration, was a member of the Academic Senate, and then he became Director of the Department of Asian and North African Studies. From 2003 to 2007 he was Cultural Counsellor for the Embassy of Italy in Tokyo. His main research interests are history of Japanese language, Japanese sociolinguistics and Japanese lexicography.

Daniela Caso is associate professor in social psychology in the Department of Humanities at the University of Naples Federico II. She is currently Vice President of the Italian Association of Health Psychology (SIPSA). Her academic interests concern the study of socio-cognitive models for changing health, pro-environmental, and purchasing behaviors, mainly through Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (1991); communication studies, with particular reference to the evaluation of the effectiveness of persuasive messages aimed at behavioral change; and the study of personal and social identity, enhancing research in online identity construction. Her main field is social health psychology, mainly applying quantitative methodologies and employing research-intervention in the school, health, and community contexts.

Paola Cavaliere is an associate professor of Japanese studies at the School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, and the Associate Director of the Human Sciences International Undergraduate Program. Her research interests are in the areas of gender in the context of disasters, religion, and civil society in Japan. She is currently investigating gender and religious dimensions of vulnerability and resilience through an analysis of women’ s roles in faith-based volunteer groups contributing to post-disaster activities. She holds a PhD in East Asian Studies from the University of Sheffield, and a PhD in Law from Tohoku University. She has published several works on a gendered approach to Japanese faith-based volunteering and is currently editing the Handbook of Disaster Studies in Japan (forthcoming 2022).

Florian Coulmas is senior professor of Japanese society and sociolinguistics in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Duisburg-Essen University. As Director of the German Institute of Japanese Studies in Tokyo (2004–2014), he conducted research on the aging population and happiness/life satisfaction. He is currently heading a research project about migration, language, and happiness. His recent publications include Identity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019); An Introduction to Multilingualism: Language in a Changing World (Oxford University Press, 2017); Guardians of Language: Twenty Voices Through History (Oxford University Press, 2016); Tokio. Vom Glück urbanen Lebens (C. H. Beck, 2014); and Writing and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2013; Chinese translation: 文字与社 会导论 外语教学与研究出版, 2019).

Andrea De Antoni is associate professor of anthropology and religious studies at Ritsumeikan University. He specializes in the anthropology of Japan and, more recently, has carried out ethnographic research in Italy. His fields of research include the anthropology of space and place, death, experiences with spirits, spirit possession, and religious heailng, with a focus on perception and affect. He has published extensively on these topics, in English and Japanese. He is the author of Going to Hell in Contemporary Japan: Feeling Landscapes of the Afterlife, Othering, Memory and Materiality (Routledge, forthcoming 2021), and the editor of several books and special issues of academic journals. He is also the coordinator of the international research network “Skills of Feeling with the World: Anthropological Research on the Senses, Affect and Materiality,” based at Ritsumeikan University.

Patrick Heinrich is associate professor in the Department of Asian and Mediterranean African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Before joining Ca’ Foscari, he taught at universities in Germany (Duisburg-Essen University) and Japan (Dokkyo University). His present research interests focus on sociolinguistics, in particular on language endangerment and on communication in the city. His recent publications (as editor) include The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics (Routledge, 2019), Being Young in Super-aging Japan (Taylor & Francis, 2018), Urban Sociolinguistics: The City as a Linguistic Process and Experience (Routledge, 2017), and the Handbook of the Ryukyuan Languages (De Gruyter Mouton, 2015). He is currently working on a language documentation project on Yonaguni Island in Okinawa and is editing a book on language and happiness

Paolo Heritier is full professor in the Department of Law, Political, Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Piedmont. His present research interests focus on visual legal studies, intercultural studies and disability, and new technologies law. He is the author of eighty journal papers and several books. His forthcoming publications include “The Reasonable Interpreter: Perspective on Legal and Not-Legal Semiotics” for the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law; and “Italian Law and Humanities” for Law and Literature. He has also been a visiting professor at the Cardozo Law School of New York, the Institute of Advanced Studies of Nantes, and Kyoto University.

Laura Liverani is a documentary photographer and lecturer based in Japan and Italy. Her work focuses on socio-anthropological issues and has been published and exhibited internationally. She has published in the Guardian, the Washington Post, and New Scientist. She has held exhibitions at the Singapore International Photo Festival, the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, and the Japan Foundation in Sydney. She has been commissioned by Benetton, the Whitechapel Gallery, and Iperborea; for an Italian publisher she was assigned the photography for The Passenger: Japan, a monograph on Japanese culture and society. She has also lectured on photography at several universities, both in Italy and abroad. She is part of the photojournalism agency Prospekt Photographers.

Tomoo Matsuda is Research Director at the Mitsubishi Research Institute (MRI) in Tokyo and specializes in the revitalization of communities and an active, aging society. He is also a visiting professor at Kochi University. He founded MRI’s new policy project "Platinum Society Association” in 2010 and almost five hundred people from industry, government, and academia across Japan have joined this association. He has conducted many research projects with public and private clients. He has served as a committee member and advisor of the Aging Society Forum Committee of the Cabinet Office; on the Advisory Council of Community Planning for All Generations Cabinet Secretariat; as lead speaker of the roundtable on resilient cities in aging societies in 2014 at the OECD; on the local vitalization promotion council in Kochi Prefecture; and on the niche and top company evaluation committee in Ishikawa Prefecture. He is the author (in Japanese) of Market Trends in Japan From Interviews With Thirty Thousand People (2014); Japan-Style CCRC (2017); and Bright Reverse Shift: From Tokyo to Rural Areas (2020).

Katsuhiro Nishinari is a professor at the Research Center of Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), the University of Tokyo. His research elucidates the emergent behavior of complex systems in terms of mathematical physics, and considers real applications of emergent systems. He is especially interested in the interdisciplinary study of the collective dynamics of self-driven particles and its jamming phenomena, which we call “jamology,” including vehicles, pedestrians, ants, packets in logistics and the Internet, and proteins in organisms. The jamming phenomenon in this study is considered as a kind of dynamical phase transition from a free to a congested state due to instability of flow. Our research is based on mathematical and physical analysis, followed by computer simulations and experiments in order to create better models that show emergent properties. The research includes the reduction of traffic jams on highways, the smooth evacuation of pedestrians, social animals and their emergent behaviors, and supply chain networks and granular flow.

Yukio Ohsawa is a professor and the department chair of Systems Innovation in the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. He received BE, ME, and Ph.D. from the The University of Tokyo (1995). Then worked for the School of Engineering Science at Osaka University (research associate, 1995-1999), Graduate School of Business Sciences at University of Tsukuba (research associate, 1999-2005), and moved back to The University of Tokyo in 2005. In the year 2000, he created a new domain, chance discovery, meaning to discover events that have a significant impact on decision making. He has given keynote talks at conferences and published books on the extensions of chance discovery, including the innovator’s marketplace on data jackets.

Vincenzo Paolo Senese is associate professor in psychometrics at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli and head of the Psychometric Laboratory. He is a member of the PhD program “Science of the Mind” at the University of Campania, of the scientific committee of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS), an International Affiliate of the Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection, and serves as Regional Representative for Europe for the International Society for Interpersonal Acceptance-Rejection. His main research interests are on the application of measurement models in the development of tests and questionnaires, and on the evaluation of the role of genetic, implicit, and automatic process on caregiving propensity.

Born in Tokyo in 1956, Atsushi Sugano joined Kodo in 1982 after receiving his masters in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has spearheaded and organized projects both domestic and foreign, and has traveled with Kodo to over thirty-five nations around the world. In 1988, he was instrumental in the formation of the first “Earth Celebration,” Kodo’s international arts festival on Sado Island, now in its thirty-third year. Currently he is the Managing Director of Kodo Cultural Foundation and on the board of Kodo’s American nonprofit company, Kodo Arts Sphere America (KASA).

Silvio Vita is a professor at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, teaching courses on comparative cultural history, Japanese history, and Italian studies. Prior to 2012 he taught East Asian Religions and Intellectual History at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” and the Sapienza Università di Roma. He was appointed Director of the Italian School of East Asian Studies in Kyoto for two terms (2001–2005; 2008–2012). He has worked on Chinesea nd Japanese Buddhism, and edited volumes I and II ofB uddhist Asia, before turning to the cultural history of modern and early modern Japan. He has recently been researching the Marega collection in the Vatican Library within the frame of a project by the National Institutes for the Humanities of Japan.