Glocal Diary for Local-to-Local

Recently, I am interested in the role of design for social innovation. Last month, I have known an Italian designer, Prof. Ezio Manzini, who wrote his book, titled "Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation". I have not yer read this book until now, but tried to watch his lecture video on this book. I learned the viewpoint of designer on social innovation, especially from social problems to social sustainability via social innovation. There are many points as he mentioned about the role of designers for social innovation. In different ways from it, I have learned the same thing as the role of facilitator or catalyst as strangers to local community. The basic role of designer looks like the same as that of facilitator.  Especially, I focused on his word "cosmopolitan localism". He tries to avoid extreme "globalization" and extreme "localization". Local community should keep a kind of equilibrium between them a...

I was born in Fukushima, Japan, from my father and mother with Japanese nationality. Automatically, I had my Japanese nationality. I did not have any right to choose my nationality. Nothing more than a coincidence. If born in Indonesia from my Indonesian parents, I became an Indonesian. I could not decide to choose the place I was born. If born in the Dutch East Indies 100 years ago, I might have no sense of any nationality. Nothing more than a coincidence. But, after I was born, I had lived with my family at a place. The place is called as my hometown. My place of birth has had a special meaning for my life. Maybe I has lived in several places other than my place of birth. Those places often have special meanings for my life. There are deep memories of my living there. Such place is not regarded as the nation, but as the local. I have special feelings on Fukushima as my place of birth, Tokyo as my current living place with my family, Busan as my first visited foreign city in my life, ...

Kemarin (13 Juni 2020), ada kontak lewat WA dari seorag teman saya di Batam. Kalau tidak salah, saya ketemu beliau di Batam pada tahun 2010. Sangat bersyukur karena beliau masih ingat saya meski sudah hampi sepuluh tahun yang lalu. Pada tahun 2010, saya mengunjungi Batam untuk menyelenggarakan suatu Seminar Pengembangan Produk UMKM untuk ekspor ke Jepang atas nama expert JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization). Saat itu, saya bertugas di Jakarta sebagai penasihat pengembangan UMKM untuk KADIN Indonesia. Kali ini, beliau minta nasihat tentang strategi pengembangan Kabupaten Anambas, Provinsi Kepulauan Riau. Saya sendiri belum pernah ke Anambas, maka saya minta waktu untuk mempelajarinya dari bahan informasi seperti media dan internet yang saya bisa dapat di Tokyo. Sekaligus saya minta beliau mengirim bahan informasi tentang Anambas jika ada. Besoknya, beliau langsung mengirim dokumen PDF dengan berisi 97 slide PPT kepada saya dengan WA. Akhirnya, saya harus membaca dokumen tersebut. L...

I myself have worked in Indonesian studies for 35 years, and during that time, I have made efforts to deepen my experience and expertise in regional/community development in my own way for 25 years. Therefore, when people ask me what I specialize in, I try to answer that there are two main areas: Indonesian studies and regional/community development. I became strongly aware of regional/community development in 1995, when I started to work as a regional development policy advisor for Eastern Indonesia. Prior to that, for two years from 1993, I had studied whether Japan's industrial policy would be effective for the industrial development of Southeast Asian countries. Just then, the World Bank published a report called "The East Asian Miracle," which drew attention to the fact that the World Bank, which had kept a market fundamentalist stance, had given a certain amount of credit to Japanese-style industrial policy. In Japan's industrial policy, there was a discussion a...