Between May 20-28, I was part of an interdisciplinary delegation of researchers and international office staff from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to visit Japanese research institutions, to foster new collaborations, and to reconnect with local partners. Apart from many individual meetings, we collectively visited the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Keio University, Waseda University, and took part in an event and roundtable discussion at the Embassy of the Netherlands in Tokyo, where we also met with alumni from the Vrije Universiteit. The interdisciplinary delegation comprised 24 members from five faculties of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

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On May 24, I was invited to give a guest lecture at the Faculty of Political Science and Economics of Waseda University in Atushi Tago‘s undergraduate course on International Relations. I presented findings from a working paper “Zeitenwende: German Security Policy in the Wake of the Afghanistan Withdrawal and Russia’s War against Ukraine”, and related these to current developments in Japan. Many thanks to the students for their intriguing questions after the talk and to Atsushi Tago for hosting me at Waseda University!

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The Japanese academic publisher Chikura Shobo has acquired the rights to translate Qualitative Comparative Analysis: An Introduction to Research Design and Application (Georgetown University Press, 2021) into Japanese. The Japanese edition will be published in late 2023/early 2024. The translator is Professor Nobukazu Azuma of Aoyama Gakuin University. On May 23, I met with him in the offices of Chikura Shobo in Tokyo.

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