Kentaro Oku: Encouraging Collaborative Research

May 17, 2024

Recently, together with my colleagues, I published an academic book titled "The Policy Affairs 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 Affairs Research Council (PARC)—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. With a third one out, people might think I am particularly fond of collaborative research. However, it is quite a laborious task. First, the logistical coordination costs, such as simply scheduling dates and setting up venues, are surprisingly significant. But even more difficult is the cost of coordinating the substance—that is, determining the density of the "collaboration" and finding the right balance.

To be specific, in historical collaborative research, it is not particularly difficult if you simply divide up the eras, let each author set their own themes freely, and then just sum them up. However, to conduct meaningful collaborative research, I believe it is necessary to examine the path toward the goal with colleagues and share analytical perspectives. In the aforementioned project, we spent a lot of energy establishing which aspects of the PARC were most meaningful to focus on for our analysis. On the other hand, if there are 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 reaching the goal by mobilizing the intellectual power, information-gathering abilities, and analytical skills of one's colleagues. Furthermore, the intellectual excitement of discovering a fresh perspective while debating various points—the moment when ideas undergo a chemical reaction—is a luxurious experience that cannot be obtained through individual research.

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