Dr. Yuko Harayama (Ph.D.)
Former Executive Director at RIKEN
(Professor Emeritus of Tohoku University)

Career summary

1973	Bachelor in Mathematics, University of Besançon, France
1988	Bachelor in Education, University of Geneva, Switzerland
1996	Ph.D. in Education, University of Geneva, Switzerland
1997	Ph.D. in Economics, University of Geneva, Switzerland
1998	Assistance Professor, Department of Political Economy, University of Geneva, Switzerland
2001	Fellow, Research Institute of Economy, Trade & Industry (RIETI), Japan
2002	Professor, Management of Science and Technology Department, Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University, Japan
2006	Executive Member, Council for Science and Technology Policy (CSTP), Cabinet Office, Japan
2007	Member, Board of Directors, Companie de Saint-Gobain, France
2010	Deputy-Director, Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, OECD, France
2013	Executive Member, Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI), Cabinet Office, Japan
2020	Executive Director, RIKEN, Japan
2022	Co-chair, Board of Directors, Japanese Association for the Advancement of Science (JAAS), Japan
2023 - present	Member of the Board (Outside), Toray Industries, Inc., Japan
2024 - present	Trustee (Research Strategic Planning), Yamaguchi University, Japan

Career vision after finishing her undergraduate degree

Adachi: Dr. Harayama, looking over your CV, it says that you received your Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Besançon (now the University of Franche-Comté) in France in 1973. When you graduated from there, what type of future did you have in mind for yourself?

Harayama: That was so long ago now, I have to really reach back into my memory. Well, I can tell you that the reason that I chose to major in mathematics at the University of Besançon was simply because I thought mathematics looked interesting. As you may know, in the French education system, the key credential for continuing on to higher education is not a high school diploma, but the baccalaureate (baccalauréat général), which is an academic qualification that entitles one to enter a university. I took what was called at the time the “bac C,” designating a science track.
In France, one can apply to any national university once you have your baccalaureate, so I decided to apply to the University of Paris, but I was assigned to at the University of Besançon. I very much enjoyed my time there. It was possible for me to obtain my bachelor’s degree in just three years because there were no liberal arts curriculum requirements like at Japanese universities. During those three years, I completely immersed myself in mathematics. The science faculty of the university is located on the hilltop campus and my dormitory was there too, so that campus was my entire world. I wanted to continue on to a master’s degree, and my application for an exchange student scholarship was accepted. But, as fate would have it, I decided to get married and returned to Japan instead. So, coming back to your question, at the time I graduated, my hopes for the future lay in continuing to study mathematics, but because I got married, I moved back to Japan from France. And I was not sure what my options would be in the Japanese setting; moreover, I had no idea what my future held.

Adachi: Are you saying that you became a homemaker?

Harayama: I’m not sure I would put it like that, that I “became a homemaker”. What I did was get married. And even being married, I was still the same person I had been, so I still wanted to continue studying mathematics, and looked around at Japanese universities. The option I ended up taking was a kind of research student position at Waseda University in which I would be able to prepare to enter a master’s program, and was able to come and go to the university. So I began studying under a Japanese mathematics professor there. But then I became pregnant, and I began to feel somewhat uncomfortable being on the university campus once I was visibly pregnant. Ultimately, before I advanced to the next step, I gave birth to my child. It was at that point that I became as you said, a homemaker, in the sense that I made child-rearing my priority. So, for a period of time, I was “out of action” so to speak. My academic career wasn’t over, but it was paused.

Going from child-rearing back onto the career path

Adachi: I see, so you did take a period of time to focus on child-rearing. From your CV, it seems the next development was your graduation from the University of Geneva in Switzerland with a Bachelor in Education in 1988. You had gone back to being an undergraduate?

Harayama: I know there is quite a gap in years on my CV. In Japan, for example, when you apply for a job, and submit your resume, the interviewer would ask you, “What did you do during those years?” Well, I had my first child, and then had a second, and eventually a third, and I was raising them. During those years I was not able to work a full-time job, but I pieced together various part-time ones teaching at universities and so on. In reality the activity that I was fully committed to in those years, above all else, was raising my children, so I only took other opportunities that didn’t clash with that framework. Meanwhile my husband was working as an assistant professor at a Japanese university. One day he said to me, “I’d like to try working outside Japan.” I welcomed the idea. So I said, "Let's go!" And our whole family moved to Geneva.
My husband obtained a faculty position at the University of Geneva, and our children and I moved there with him. I assessed our living situation in Geneva. We were living in a very safe area and there was ample childcare available, so I felt comfortable making the decision to return to my career. Of course, it was challenging to hold down a full-time job while raising children, so I decided instead to try student life again by enrolling in the university.
When I was first thinking of going back to university, what I had in mind was to resume my studies in mathematics, but when I explored the university’s program, attending lectures and so on, I began to realize that the 10-year gap in my academic history would be impossible to make up. So I decided to pursue a different direction. I thought it would be great if I could make use of my personal experience with child-rearing. And that led me toward the idea of studying how to improve systems of education. The University of Geneva offered programs in educational sciences, with much more flexibility than other departments. It was designed to accommodate people who were in the workforce, and it was possible to take courses at one’s own pace. That was absolutely ideal for my needs, so I entered as a first-year undergraduate in the Faculty of Educational Sciences. That made it my second go as an undergraduate, now in a different field. In the course of that, I fell in love with academic life. So when I finished my second bachelor’s degree, I wanted to continue on to their doctoral program.
That meant I needed to decide on a doctoral thesis topic. Fortunately, there was a professor there whose ideas helped me to decide on my topic, and in the course of our discussions I ultimately elected to follow that path, although there were some twists and turns along the way. There are various angles from which to approach education as an academic field, and the angle that interested me personally was, “What is the value of education?” That led me toward more and more of an economics-based approach to that question. In that framework, I found myself wanting to know more about the value of an educational system, especially of a higher education system, in terms of economics and economic value. My doctoral advisor made it clear that the only way I would be able to attack that problem was if I armed myself with theoretical framework obtained from a solid grounding in economics. So I decided, “Now it’s time to learn economics!” And I launched into my third bachelor’s program, once again starting as a first-year undergraduate. That is how I ended up with three bachelor’s degrees. After that, at the doctoral level, I pursued educational sciences and economics degrees simultaneously. I finished the educational sciences doctorate first, then the economics doctorate the following year. My CV is a wild ride, isn’t it! (laughter)

Pursuing two doctorates

Adachi: I imagine it was highly demanding to be pursuing two doctorates at the same time, wasn’t it?

Harayama: If you think about doing it in a Japanese university context, it would be hard. And in fact, even at the University of Geneva, the system has changed since my time, but back when I was studying there, the requirement for admission to the doctoral program was to find a doctoral advisor and gain their agreement on the topic of the thesis research. Then, based on that topic, you would have to prepare a comprehensive research proposal at the initial stage, submit it to a committee made up of professors, and have it approved. Completion of those milestones made one recognized as a doctoral student. From that point on, there weren't many more requirements until submitting your doctoral thesis to be examined. That meant that I could arrange the timing of the process however it suited me. Because the process was so minimal, there were a lot of people who dropped out before completing their doctorate. In fact only a small percentage of those who enrolled in that doctoral program saw it through to the end. The plus to that system was its flexibility; the minus was that the burden was all on me. If I could not manage my progress entirely on my own initiative, I would not make it through to completion. But in other words, I was able to do the thesis work at my own pace, and I could take a paid position as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Economics while pursuing my doctorate. I spent my weekdays working there and writing my economics thesis, while on the weekends I focused on writing my education thesis. That’s how I structured my life.

Adachi: By mastering the approaches of two different disciplines in the fields of education and economics, you completed writing lengthy theses. Is that right?

Harayama: As you say, the approach to writing a thesis differs between the two fields, as does the way of defining research questions. When I reflect on what drew my interest to the field of economics, it was the economics of education, after all. I was extremely interested in that topic, which was at the intersection, in a sense, of the fields of education and economics. From that vantage point, new perspectives opened up. There are differences between the two fields in the way a research topic is defined, the use of research tools, the methods of proving your argument, and so on. My starting point was that I personally was very much aware of the issue of what could be done to improve Japan’s system of higher education. So I investigated the issue by conducting field research on best practices in higher education systems.
Meanwhile, at the time I was working on my doctorate, over on the economics side there was a great deal of debate over how to promote economic growth, and what macroeconomic and microeconomic factors play a role in that. One factor that was debated was how public investment contributes to the growth of entire economy in theory. Public investment includes things like using government funds to build bridges and schools and so on. Furthermore, higher education, along with research and development, also receives public investment. The question that particularly interested me was why it had to be the government that invested in research and development. Even if we take it as a given that investment from somewhere is required in order for science to progress, nevertheless, there is a logic that public investment in science and technology (S&T) is supposed to result in economic growth. Figuring out how that pathway actually functions in terms of cause-and-effect relationships was a matter that I found truly fascinating. And that became the object of my economics research.

Career aspirations after obtaining dual doctorates

Adachi: In the end, you received your Ph.D. in Educational Sciences in 1996 and your Ph.D. in Economics in 1997. Now that you had these dual doctorates, what did you imagine your career path would be from there forward?

Harayama: It was true back then and it is still the case now that I have never been one to put much consideration on my career path. The reason for that is simply that, as the mother of three children, my days were always hectic, and I had my hands full taking life one day at a time. There was no room to ponder the future. As a student, I had the same “one step at a time” way of approaching things. After I had my Ph.D.s, I did not think of myself as having arrived at my destination. It was more like getting a certification. My doctoral advisor once told me, “A doctoral thesis is like your business card.” On the one hand, when you show it to people, it tells them what kind of work you have been doing. At the same time, it is a launchpad for explaining to them what you are hoping to do next. In other words, a Ph.D. is a starting line, not a finish line. There were a lot of things I wanted to do as a researcher at that point, so the path of academic research seemed like the best fit for me. But it wasn’t a question of finding what department at what university because I was tied to Geneva at that time, a precondition for whatever I was going to do was that I was able to do it at the University of Geneva.

Adachi: Given your field of research, I wonder whether you had considered taking a public sector position, such as with one of the UN-affiliated agencies. Was that the case?

Harayama: Okay, I see. Let me tell you when I started to get the feeling that I might be able to make it in this field of study. My doctoral advisor in economics at the University of Geneva suddenly said to me one day, “I obtained a year of research funding so you can go anywhere you want to go for a year.” That was the year I had just finished my Ph.D. thesis in educational sciences. By then I had ample experience in Europe, but had never even set foot in the United States, so I said, “If I have a year of research funding, I’d like to go to the U.S. and experience different approaches in a different research environment.” As I was considering where in the U.S. to go, a different professor who had been supporting my progress offered me a lot of advice, and the bottom line of it all was, “Stanford University would be the best place for you.” I was looking over the faculty members in economics at Stanford and landed on Prof. Masahiko Aoki. After I told him my research topic, I went on to explain, “I do already have a doctorate in educational sciences, but am still working on my doctorate in economics. So I am sort of like a postdoc, and sort of like a doctoral student. Could you accept a year at Stanford with an in-between status like that?” It was tricky to work out at first, but ultimately, Prof. Aoki did take me on that basis.
So I spent a year at Stanford University in the U.S. as a visiting scholar. And in a way the experience was like scales falling from my eyes. Stanford is situated in the heart of Silicon Valley and is tightly linked to industry there. Moreover, they didn’t do things in the old-fashioned style of university-industry linkages (UILs), instead they engaged in all kinds of parallel, interactive initiatives involving the school and companies. And now I was not just reading about this phenomenon of synergy and mutual benefit between Silicon Valley and Stanford in a paper or books, I was there to see it firsthand. It was stimulating for me. I thought to myself, “This synergy could not have just sprung up overnight, it must be rooted in history, so what historical process led to the phenomenon we see now? What created fertile ground for it to happen here?” If I were to summarize what I actually did during my time at Stanford, it was spending time in libraries that held extremely rich archives on the subject and tracing through historical documents. I made my research topic about what a university could be like. And because some of the people who were instrumental in that history were still alive, I was able to meet and interview them, in addition to my archival research.
Similar to what we are doing now, I interviewed a number of people who had “flipped the switch,” so to speak, to turn Stanford into the flagship model for that kind of synergy. As I heard their stories and sifted through historic documents, I somehow gained a concrete grasp of how a university could evolve and progress in such a way. I was convinced that not only was it a fascinating topic of academic research, but also of tremendous real-world importance. It wasn't just research, but "action research," a practical action-oriented approach. At that time, I wanted to prompt real-world change, and the subject became my research topic.
Let me mention another thing. I was at Stanford as a visiting scholar affiliated with Prof. Aoki, but I also had the opportunity to get to know his colleagues. Prof. Aoki took a paper that I wrote summarizing my findings at Stanford and showed it to one of those colleagues, Prof. Nathan Rosenberg, suggesting that my work might be of interest to him. In fact, Prof. Rosenberg did show great interest in my paper and wanted to meet with me—but by then I had already returned to Geneva. So he proposed that I meet him in London on his upcoming trip there. It was our first in-person meeting, but we were very much on the same wavelength. This meeting with Prof. Rosenberg encouraged me to dive deeper into this research field. I was making connections which took me through many ups and downs, but things clicked unexpectedly that time. Prof. Rosenberg said to me, “Your work on the relationship between higher education and innovation is something that has not been given much research attention in the past, but I’m currently very interested in it. It might not be efficient to aim at getting a paper accepted in a prestigious journal, but the work you are doing is very valuable.”
Prof. Rosenberg was very eminent in the field by then, but he told me that when he wrote a paper on the mechanism of innovation, very few journals showed interest in it. So instead of publishing his work as a paper, he wrote a monograph. And he suggested I take the same path. It was a great conversation, full of earnest advice like that. And in the end, I decided to take his suggestion. But that was not out of career calculations at all. Whenever I was deciding whether to follow my curiosity another step further into research, or to quit, or whether to go for different area of research, there was someone to give me a push in the right direction. Although, that is something I only realized in retrospect.

Career development after returning home

Adachi: So was it because you wanted to pursue more in-depth research in your field of interest that you decided to become an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Geneva?

Harayama: That’s right. I was teaching as well as doing research at the time, and then it so happened that Prof. Aoki was appointed as the President of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI), which had been made an independent administrative entity under Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). And he invited me to take a position at RIETI. I had never really even considered working in Japan, because I had set my own assumption that I probably would not be readily accepted in the Japanese employment market. But now I had a job offer from Prof. Aoki, and it seemed to me that with him at the helm of RIETI, it would be an interesting place to do research. So I accepted his offer, eager to contribute to the start of something new and exciting with him. I resigned from my job at the University of Geneva and was appointed as a fellow at RIETI. It wasn’t that I returned to Japan because I had a goal of building a career in Japan. It was simply that an exciting opportunity came along and it happened to be in Japan. Some of my colleagues in Geneva said, “The work environment in Japan seems so stifling for women, so you’ll probably come back to Geneva in a few years’ time,” and I replied, “You’re probably right.” But as it turned out I spent the rest of my career in Japan, up until now, and never did move back to Switzerland.

Adachi: What brought about your move to take a professorship at Tohoku University in April 2002?

Harayama: It was a completely unexpected turn of events. As I just said, Japan’s universities were the object of my research. Because I was trying to describe a model Japan university system, I used actual Japanese universities as case studies. But I had never actually been a student at a Japanese university nor taught at one. I was doing research about them from the perspective of a complete outsider. So it never crossed my mind that I would end up as faculty at a Japanese university. It was very roundabout but remember that my research interest was focused on the relationship between how a model university functions, and how investment in science and technology can ultimately drive growth in the field. One part of that long and roundabout path is the story of how the results of R&D at universities are commercialized by companies in the form of products and services, and the introduction, improvement and diffusion of those products and services to consumers.
Now, that chain of processes is what people mean when they use the word “innovation.” But is it a phenomenon that takes place naturally or does it only happen as the result of certain actors taking purposeful actions? I was absolutely fascinated by that whole area and wanted to do research on specific cases. Just as I was discussing earlier. When I was at Stanford, there were so many researchers and students involved in entrepreneurship, launching startup companies. I saw those innovation processes as objects of my research. In retrospect, there was a narrative emerging that such processes were important in Japan at around that time. This was around the year 2000. Now, a couple of decades later, people throw around the word “innovation” all the time, but back then it had a ring of novelty.
I set out to teach these things to students in the Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University. The idea was that engineering students, right from their undergraduate days, should start learning how the technologies they will be developing someday are turned into useful real-world products and services. Based on the perspective of recognizing the importance of being aware of the mechanisms of innovation diffusion, we established a new academic unit called the Department of Management Science and Technology. This department and its mission to create a context to study and do research on the relationship between technology and society marked a new chapter in the Graduate School of Engineering’s century-long history. When the new department was created, Tohoku University mapped out ideas to the staff with about 50% of professors from engineering fields and the other 50% from non-engineering disciplines such as economics, business, management science, policy studies and so on. For the engineering half, Tohoku University had a huge number of existing faculty to draw from. But for the other half, they lacked savvy about what professors they should be recruiting from where.
It so happened that in the Faculty of Economics at Tohoku University, there was a professor with whom I had organized various events, and that person mentioned me as someone the university should recruit. At the time, I was working at RIETI, having moved back to Japan from Switzerland. I received a phone call out of the blue explaining Tohoku University’s initiative to found the new department, asking me to join. Up to then, I had been doing research about just the type of initiative Japanese universities were now undertaking, but I wanted to get involved in actually implementing such initiatives, and this seemed like the ideal setting for me to take that step to do action research. It would make me part of building up a department within the Graduate School of Engineering that would enable engineering students, for example, to transform their inventions into startup enterprises. It was a chance I could not pass up, so I eagerly said yes to Tohoku University’s offer. In making that decision, none of my motivation was based on obtaining a post in Japanese academia, or advancing my career, or anything like that. It was simply that the opportunity was to do something that I really wanted to do, so I jumped on it enthusiastically.
Nowadays, I know that many people struggle to get academic jobs after obtaining their doctorate. Whereas I ended up with a faculty position despite not having gone along the usual “academic track.” It goes to show that opportunities come along in many shapes and forms, and it all comes down to whether or not you seize them. Doing that requires a certain mindset of determination. And it is vitally important that you are driven by your own genuine interest. Looking back, I would say those are key factors that come to mind.

Lab management style

Adachi: In this interview series, we ask each interviewee to talk about the management aspect of their careers. In your field, economics, I have the sense that there is much less co-authorship of papers than in the natural sciences for example. Instead a scholar just works with perhaps a research collaborator, and even students can each have their own individual research topics. So if we think of being a PI as having the status to independently set your own research agenda, would you say that happened when you became an Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva?

Harayama: I didn’t really see myself as a PI; if anything I would say I have followed a kind of “lone wolf” path. So, although of course there were people whom I engaged in discussion with, the papers I wrote were almost always my own individual work. Furthermore, although there were cases where I did collaborative research with others, who therefore became my coauthors, I wasn’t leading the charge as the PI securing research funding for the project, the relationships were less defined. I certainly didn’t think of “being a PI” as part of my self-image. When I moved to Tohoku University, my students would come to me—on an individual basis, just as you said—and say, “I’d like to do something like this” and I would advise them, “how about such-and-such a topic?” I would describe my style as giving broad guidance, but generally waiting for the student to come to me and say what they wanted to do. So, at Tohoku, rather than my students collaborating, they were each doing their own thing: the doctoral students, the master’s students, basically everyone.
When I joined the faculty at Tohoku University, my research lab consisted of myself and one associate professor, and we worked as a pair, but we also each had our own independent domain. At the same time, I actively used my lab to promote interaction among students and among researchers. In this interview series so far, you have been asking female researchers at RIKEN about what their work was like before and after becoming a PI, isn’t that right? In my case, that transition is not really part of my story, because instead I bounced around doing a lot of different things, launching various projects under the auspices of different organizations over the years. And even though in some cases I was heading up those projects, I would not say that I had the same status of PI in the sense that you have been discussing it with other interviewees. So I am a bit of an outlier.

Adachi: So you had students affiliated with your lab. What about research staff?

Harayama: I had people come work with me in essentially a postdoc-type capacity. They would each tackle their own research topic and write their own papers, and I was there to offer a sounding board and advice along the way. In some cases I have been a coauthor on that basis, but it was more like I was just responding to each individual’s needs. That being said, it did create a stimulating environment as we kept up to date with each other, “So what are you doing now? Oh really? I’m over here doing this.” I would say there was a kind of chemistry in those relationships, and I’m happy to say it continues to network together lab alumni who are off working in various places.

Adachi: So as far as your style of managing your lab, did it include for example a journal club, or having students present their research and then holding discussions?

Harayama: Yes, we did those kinds of things in my lab. Each person presented on their topic and we had interactions around that. But I have never consciously considered myself to be “managing a lab” in the organizational sense. It’s not really my personality to want to impose a lot of formal structure. There were many other professors in the department, so I encouraged students to go and talk to all kinds of different people. And I welcomed members of other research labs to come and see me. It is true that I wanted my lab to be a kind of “open-door forum” for discussions. Because Tohoku University was the first Japanese university I was ever part of, I was shocked when students who came up through Japanese universities came to me and asked, “I’m interested in the work of Professor so-and-so, do you think it would be okay if I went and talked to him or her?” I answered, “Absolutely, go and talk to that person! Why would you need my permission?” I was very surprised. It made me realize that people have different ways of doing things in different places. But I couldn’t get used to doing things that way, I always went and struck up a conversation on my own initiative with anyone. And so my stance has always been that my door is open to anyone who comes to me.

Establishing a lab within the Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University

Adachi: Would you say that when you established your own lab within the Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University, that you were influenced by the way things were done in the engineering department?

Harayama: Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Engineering has a storied history and spans many different fields of engineering, with notable accomplishments in many of those fields. Because of that rich historical legacy, certain accepted ways of doing research, of defining research questions, of managing research labs, have been handed down. Under that weighty legacy, the department that I was affiliated with was a newly founded one. And from the viewpoint of other departments, some things about the mission of the Department of Management Science and Technology probably were not intuitive. So we in the department recognized that we were seen as different, but conversely, did not feel that we needed to conform to pre-existing expectations. Because half of our departmental faculty were engineering professors, they brought with them their own lineages. They had roots in labs with a very storied past, and those faculty members wanted to continue that legacy, while also working in the context of a newly founded department to explore new ways of doing things. It sounds negative to use this term, but our department was a kind of “catch-all” for faculty with backgrounds in engineering or in other fields. What we were trying to accomplish at the outset was, on the one hand, to create a distinct identity for our department, while on the other hand, make sure we create a common understanding about the philosophy of education, criteria for awarding course credits and degrees, and so on. That was the very first step. For example, this sounds so obvious, but master’s students have to write a master’s thesis, right? Actually, though, how that thesis is evaluated varies tremendously between fields, even between different fields within engineering. In such a heterogeneous organization, master’s degrees conferred by a department have to represent a consistent quality standard. It was vital in setting our standards to figure out what the points of commonality in evaluation there were between different fields in our department, and that turned out to be quite a difficult task. During the department’s first year there was a lot of trial and error, and after a few years we had things nailed down. So in that sense, in terms of setting standards, it was vital that we accommodated ourselves to others. I learned a lot and the faculty who came from the engineering side accepted that our department would be doing things differently. We were able to find a common denominator, but it took a lot of discussion to get there. We really didn’t know each other well, but going through those discussions, people had a lot of “a-ha” moments: “Oh, so this is how you think about that?” or “I see, this is how it’s done in such-and-such a field?” And so on. I certainly learned a great deal in the process.

Adachi: So it sounds as though you were able to establish a level for your department’s master’s degrees and doctoral degrees that would maintain consistency with the standards inherited from both the engineering and economics sides. In other words, were you able to standardize the levels of two very different academic domains?

Harayama: I don’t know if we standardized them, but we reached a common ground to make a kind of provisional rulebook. For example, in the case of a master’s degree, since it was impossible to compare, we could create a sense of equivalent value, along the lines of, “Let’s say that the minimum standard would be roughly, in engineering, to present at this conference, in economics, at that conference.” In the case of doctoral students, we compared thesis submissions between the two sides in order to say, “We are aiming to have a standard where the thesis would be accepted in a journal like this.” That’s what we tried.

And in a thesis defense, we did our best to employ a cross-section of faculty from the two sides. Of course the thesis supervisor would be on the dissertation defense committee, as would a faculty member also from our department, but representing a different field. So someone submitting a thesis in engineering would have an economics professor on their committee also. We decided that even though there would also be an outside professor on the committee, that we also wanted to have the two sides of the department itself represented. That was one rule we made because we wanted to train our students in a certain way. That is what I mean when I say we were developing a rulebook. Although we were not able to pin those standards down with certainty from the outset, we were able to create a rough sense of equivalent value. We knew that these rules were only provisional and would not be set in stone forever. I would think that things have evolved a great deal in the many years since I left the university.

Adachi: What type of background did the students who joined your lab typically have?

Harayama: They had an amazingly wide variety of backgrounds, actually. And from my lab, they went on to a diverse range of fields afterwards. I was fortunate to have very interesting students. I would find myself amazed to hear where they turned up working a few years down the road. Some of them came from an engineering background but were more interested in diffusion of technologies than in developing new technologies. On the other hand, I had students who had studied in business administration but were interested in engineering and came to our department because it offered exposure to both sides. I had students who came out of Japan’s National Institute of Technology, generally called Kosen, which had equipped them with serious hands-on experience and practical sense.

Adachi: So you had a mixture of sciences and humanities background students in your lab?

Harayama: I don’t tend to think of things in terms of a dichotomy between sciences and humanities. I would accept a variety of students from different fields of academia, so they could engage in discussions that would lead to discoveries. Ultimately, my lab was not based on teamwork, but on conversations around shared interests. One reason that I was happy to land at Tohoku University was that it draws a lot of students from outside Japan. And I had foreign students in my own lab. Because it’s usually difficult for them to become acclimated immediately after arrival, the university provided support, such as assigning a Japanese student in the same field to serve as a guide at first. The student guides received some money, not a lot, just spending money, to thank them for helping out in this way.
I had quite a few foreign students from France. Each time, I would ask our Japanese students, “We have a new foreign student coming, is someone willing to be their guide?” One of the students stepped forward and said, “My English is not that great, but this will be a good opportunity to practice and improve it,” and he made a tremendous effort. It’s been a decade now and just a few days ago he sent me a photo of himself in France with the former exchange student to whom he offered guidance. That is why it is so important to bring people together to meet each other. I went off on something of a tangent there.

Lab started from scratch

Adachi: What would you say were your core principles in managing your lab at Tohoku University?

Harayama: That’s a good question... Now I need to recall what my core principles were! It was not my preference to assign research topics to students, I preferred the approach of describing some possibilities and sounding out what appealed to them. So you could say that means I required my students to be self-starters. With the students having such varying academic backgrounds, and with the department itself being newly founded at the time, there was no stockpile of theses from previous graduates of the program to point our students to as examples. So, at the start we had to figure things out as we went along, the faculty and the students together. There was also an associate professor in my lab whose field had been in nuclear engineering, but who shifted dramatically to engaging society in dialogues about the various problems with nuclear power. He was a hardcore engineer, but also fascinated by social sciences approaches. He and I did our research independently of each other, but there were also projects on which we collaborated, that we planned together.
I’ll give you an example. We took some students to the large-scale nuclear power-related facility at Rokkasho in Aomori Prefecture. In addition to touring the site itself, we interacted with local citizens. Our students visited high school students there, and we also invited local high school students to visit Tohoku University. In parallel with regular lectures, we implemented various activities within the framework of education. And we didn’t restrict our activities to students in the Department of Management Science and Technology, we also opened it to students from other departments at Tohoku University. In terms of aspirations, I tried to make my lab an open forum with an atmosphere where students and faculty could take part in the discussions.
One more thing. Right when I moved to Tohoku University, a reform of higher education took place in Japan under which the national universities (of which Tohoku University was one) were converted from government entities to independent administrative entities. I moved to Tohoku University just before that change happened in 2004. The change to an independent administrative entity ushered in a revolutionary period at the university as they tried to figure out how to manage that new legal status. Considering that the object of my own research was how university systems work, and how to manage them, and that I had experience in universities outside Japan, I was invited to contribute my expertise to the discussion about how Tohoku University could navigate the massive wave of change. So if we talk about my experience with managing, it was not just my own lab, but an entire university. When I was so new to the place that I didn’t even know my way around yet, I was being asked to give my opinions on how Tohoku University should shape its future. That was an incredible experience.

Stepping into the world outside academia

Adachi: After that, as you continued to serve as a professor at Tohoku University, your career saw various other developments. You served as a short-term consultant for the World Bank, and as an Executive Member of the Council for Science and Technology and Innovation (CSTI) of the Cabinet Office of the government of Japan.

Harayama: At the time, the World Bank was conducting studies in a number of countries on the subject of how regional innovation occurs. Within that framework, a project was established to analyze the state of regional innovation systems in Japan. And I happened to be teaching at Tohoku University and living in Sendai when that project was launched. As a matter of fact, Sendai was the first place in Japan that I had ever lived outside the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Because I was moving to a place that was brand new to me, I wanted to really get to know the area. It seemed to me that the most practical way to do that was to get involved with initiatives involving local citizens. I mentioned earlier that my key strength was the research that I had done on commercializing R&D. So I created initiatives through which to engage with people in the Tohoku region in discussions about whether the region was effectively mobilizing the discoveries made at Tohoku University for regional economic development, and what could be done to improve that process.
The purpose was not only to benefit the region but for me to discover more about the citizens of the Tohoku region, especially in Sendai and Miyagi. It was an ideal opportunity to think about the situation of the Tohoku region, while being based in the Tohoku region. For that aforementioned World Bank project, the Japan study was handled by the Development Bank of Japan and the Tohoku regional study was carried out by staff of the Tohoku regional branch of that bank. And that gave me the opportunity to participate on two levels, the Japan-wide level and the regional level for the Tohoku region. In concrete terms, I assembled a research team from our department’s students and postdocs, and assigned them to that project. At the time, we had a new master’s student who I added to the project, thinking that the experience would be very valuable, and I believe it did serve him well on many occasions later in his career.
My work for the Cabinet Office came about because the topic of my research, innovation, had become a policy issue, as something that the government wanted to promote through active measures. They asked if I wanted to come over to work with government policy. I took the invitation to switch over from the academic side, studying policy, to the policy-making side. I was working full time at the university and took that on as a side job for the first two years. The content of the work didn’t differ all that much, but there was a part that focused on Japan’s regions, and a part that focused on Japan at the country level. After I had been at Tohoku University for almost 10 years, I moved to the OECD’s Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry in Paris. Once again, I found myself on the policy-making side related to science and technology. It is an organization that facilitates discussions of what policies the member countries of the OECD have adopted and should adopt. When the position of Deputy-Director happened to open up there, I threw my hat in the ring and was selected for the post. In order to work there, I took two years of sabbatical leave from the university. Working at the Directorate gave me the opportunity to discuss my area of research with people from many different countries. My formal duties more or less amounted to promoting discussion of these issues. I got involved in various things here and there.

Adachi: Listening to your stories, I am not sure it is fair to say this, but your action research which spans various fields has been conducted on many levels, from Sendai, to Japan at the national level, to the international level in Europe and the world. I find that really interesting.

Harayama: I really did do action research on many levels. (laughter) It was a lot of fun. Maybe some people would be upset with me for calling it “fun.”

The biggest “jump” in her career

Adachi: Looking back on your career, you jumped around so much, between economics and engineering, and even from academia to policymaking. Which of those “jumps” would you say was the most significant?

Harayama: Jumps? I did make a lot of jumps here and there. Perhaps the biggest jump was when I came back to Japan, because I had to be well-prepared mentally. And possibly, with the story I just told about joining the OECD, because I really had to think hard about that move. Maybe it is just my personality type, but when I go to a new place, it is an ongoing process to fully understand how things work there. But as I figure things out and reach the point where things are going smoothly there, paradoxically, I start feeling unsettled. I ask myself, “Am I okay with this status quo?” And I start thinking, “Maybe I should try doing something else.” That happens on a roughly ten-year cycle. Once I start to get that feeling, when a job offer comes along, or I hear through the grapevine, “There is a vacancy in such-and-such a post,” it gives me the urge to take on a new challenge, and I make the jump. Usually I don’t agonize over the decision to move, it’s just that my internal urge to shift into another area has built up to a critical point, and then an opportunity in that area comes along so I jump at it. Maybe it will happen again. (laughter) I’ll never say never.

Adachi: So you feel as though being able to grasp an opportunity and make the jump as you have done requires a certain mindset, of reaching a point where you are ready?

Harayama: It is only my own personal experience so I have no idea whether or not it would apply to others. When I diligently work on something, I am learning new things and making discoveries, and eventually, after absorbing a sufficiently large amount of knowledge, I reach a state of being intellectually satiated. And that means I am probably ready to jump. Making a jump before I have “filled the fuel tank,” so to speak, is very risky, and I might not land on my feet. Because once I have jumped to a new place, I want to pursue a new challenge there. And in order to do that, I need to have enough intellectual fuel in my tank. That is the reason I am fueling up by absorbing knowledge: to be ready for the next thing that I want to do. So I have a kind of internal fuel sensor. I dive into a bunch of areas and I take what I need from them and when I have filled the tank with enough knowledge, I use it to make the next move. I don’t want to let my fuel tank get completely drained, but I know I will burn through plenty of fuel to take a new step. After taking that step I start absorbing knowledge and fueling up again in that new context. As I just mentioned, the fuller my fuel tank gets, and the more comfortable I feel where I am, paradoxically, the more unsettled I feel. That tells me the time has come to take on a new challenge. And that has basically been my pattern. But if you just bounce around following your spirit of curiosity without thoroughly fueling up with knowledge first, you won’t end up achieving as much.
That’s why I believe filling your fuel tank of experiences and knowledge is so important. Not only with positive experiences, but with difficult ones. You may have moments where you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you are groping around for answers to the question, “What should I do now?” When you scramble your way out of those situations, when you find a way to overcome obstacles by persevering, those become crucial learning experiences. Those experiences can fuel you to keep your nerve when you face similar difficulties down the road. That’s what I mean by the importance of filling your fuel tank. It’s not something you can plan out in advance strategically, it’s a product of encountering different circumstances and contingencies. Which is why I believe it is essential to have a mindset that makes something positive out of all kinds of experiences and turns them into fuel that drives you forward.

Adachi: I think everyone would feel unsettled before making a career jump. It must have been even more true when the jump involved moving to a different country. Didn’t those international career moves give you pause?

Harayama: I believe in personal accountability, so I have always tried to arrange matters so as not to cause trouble for other people. My husband might say, “Well, she’s always causing trouble for me!” But professionally speaking, I make every effort not to do things in a self-centered way that would have a negative impact on the people around me. That actually takes a lot of effort, so it doesn’t leave me with much slack to worry about myself. And so I guess you could say that when the time comes to jump, I jump first, and tackle any obstacles when I come to them, with a mindset that things will more or less work themselves out. Most things don't go well on the first try. But it is important to think carefully about your next move if things are not working out. I believe that you should never paint yourself into a corner with only one possible course of action. As I jump on opportunities that interest me, I always have given at least some thought to a fallback option, with the mindset that hopefully things will turn out well—but in case things don’t go well, I have an idea what I will do. I suppose having a fallback option in mind gives me a sense of reassurance. I don’t like being backed into a corner, so I don’t put myself in those kinds of situations.

Adachi: Different people have different priorities when making a career jump. For some people, the impact on their family is the foremost concern. Considering how your family would need to come with you, how did that factor into your career moves, especially the international ones?

Harayama: When my children were little, as a parent I was responsible for their wellbeing. But once they grew up into adults and could stand on their own feet, their lives became their own responsibility. Then parenting becomes something different. I tell my grown children that they can always come to me if they have a problem. It's best to be able to do something for them when something happens, that’s always how I've parented. But as for whether it is necessary to do more than that, it really depends on the individual child. I do believe that my children have respect for me. Probably. I am always trying to ensure that my actions don’t have any negative impact on them. Now that all my children are grown, I think that my responsibility towards them doesn’t necessarily go beyond that. I’m not sure my children would agree with my take on it. (laughter) I’ll have to ask them sometime.

Adachi: That’s all the questions I have now, thank you very much.

The reason for the fascination with mathematics

Matsuo: You mentioned that as an undergraduate, you were fascinated by mathematics. Currently there is a debate in Japan over why more women do not go into STEM fields, especially mathematics. In light of that, would you mind sharing with us what it was that sparked your love for mathematics?

Harayama: I was always terrible at arithmetic, actually. I made so many errors. Which is why it’s so nice these days to have smartphones to do that for me. So I was poor in math in that sense. Neither was I especially good at solving math problems by following a memorized formula for calculating an answer, nor did I find that interesting. What I did like about mathematics is the great beauty of its underlying flow of reasoning, using logic to tell a story, to understand, to make rigorous arguments, and to prove them. And I wanted to try doing that kind of reasoning myself. I was influenced by various people along the way, such as my math teachers in high school, but I think the essence of what attracted me to math is that it offered a different way of looking at the world. As a human being, going through life, one comes to realize that of all the phenomena in the world, only a small fraction can be understood through pure logic. Whereas the vast majority cannot. In the shadow of that dichotomy, we still have to make all kinds of decisions. To this day, being able to think about and understand things in that way is an extremely important part of me.

Across her area of expertise

Matsuo: You have switched between various academic disciplines, from mathematics to education to economics. It seems that those switches have largely turned out positive for your own career. But if there were negatives, what were they?

Harayama: In order to look at various real-world phenomena, we need various approaches, wouldn’t you agree? If you have only ever been in one field, you will only have seen one approach. When you have the ability to apply different approaches to the same phenomenon, you are able to avoid “tunnel vision.” I acquired that kind of reflex. Without a doubt, having a variety of ways of looking at things is valuable in various situations. Having studied in three academic disciplines may not have provided any direct benefit to my career, but indirectly, by training my brain to look at things in different ways, that background has certainly aided my career.
From a career standpoint, I would eventually get bored with one path and so I groped around for alternatives. When I felt myself wanting to do something different, that’s when I would change paths. So does the word “career” in the standard sense really apply to that? My case is an outlier, I feel. So, from the standpoint of whether switching fields was useful to my career or not, my answer is that I don’t know. What I do know is that it served me well in finding ways of thinking about all kinds of issues I encountered. The logic of mathematics provides a level-headed way of looking at phenomena when on-the-spot decisions have to be made. And that is valuable to me to this day.

Leadership

Matsuo: How would you define a good leader?

Harayama: I knew you’d ask that! (laughter)

Matsuo: I'm sure the professors you worked with at the University of Geneva, Prof. Aoki, and other people who were instrumental in your career were supportive in their own ways, and you too must have your own leadership style. What makes a good leader in your eyes?

Harayama: When I applied for the OECD job in Paris, on the basis of my written application, I was selected for an interview. The interview was done remotely, with me in the OECD Tokyo office and about six people in the OECD Paris office. I was asked, “Please tell us what leadership experience you have.” But to be honest, I did not feel that I had actually done much “leadership” per se. Nevertheless, I had to come up with a reply to the question on the spot. And what popped into my mind was the Japanese language supplementary school that my children went to when we lived in Geneva. You see, my three children attended Geneva public schools on weekdays, but on Saturdays they went to a special Japanese-language school. At that Japanese Saturday school they learned, in Japanese, subjects including the Japanese language, arithmetic, mathematics, and so on. That Japanese school was run by the efforts of parents. Because my own three children went there, I served on the school’s managing board for several years; maybe you could call it a way of giving back. In that capacity, I was involved in the running of a parent-organized school with around 150 students. And the reality was, that had been the most significant leadership experience in my life.
In a formal organization, people basically exercise leadership based on their job title—their place in the organizational chart, and things would go well. But since the Japanese Saturday school in Geneva was parent-run, although it employed actual teachers to teach, and an actual principal over them, the managing board made up of parents was ultimately in charge of the school. The board members were doing their best with various members saying, “This won’t work. No, that won’t work either,” and it was hard to form a consensus. On top of that, the school’s budget didn’t come from government funding, so we had to raise the funds ourselves. My experience running that Japanese school was my starting point for understanding how to get an organization functioning. It was stressful at the time, but the process of working to achieve consensus among a group of parents who were working hard for the sake of their children and bringing them together was a totally worthwhile experience.
Nowadays, I am asked to speak at many universities and institutions like RIKEN about leadership and related topics. What I bring to those is not leadership theories learned in a classroom, but leadership built on the basis of personal experience. With that, plus having observed how various organizations function from various vantage points, I have accumulated a practical intuition about ways of doing things that work, and that is the foundation for my theory of leadership. Consequently, I am well aware of the importance of leadership that is highly pragmatic and suited to organizations without a rigid formal structure. Even if there is no formal organization in existence, whenever a number of people gather together in order to collectively pursue some action, situations will emerge in which there is a need for someone to get people in gear. In such situations, it is absolutely crucial to be able to take certain actions. Exercising leadership is not a matter of having a job title, it is knowing what actions to take based on an understanding of what will get the organization functioning properly.

The situation of female researchers in Japan

Matsuo: You were studying and teaching at the University of Geneva and raising children while you were there. Later you returned to Japan, and spent a year in the U.S., and so on. Based on your global exposure in Japan, the U.S. and Europe, you must have observations about how easy or difficult it is to be a female researcher. What would be your analysis of the situation that female researchers in Japan currently face?

Harayama: I think that researchers of my generation faced a completely different environment than researchers who are now in their 20s or 30s. In Japan there have been dramatic improvements to the situation. The barriers to carrying on one’s career as a researcher are much lower than they used to be. It might be a matter of acknowledging the need for more sharing of roles. It’s true that if we are talking about the range of choices, in some ways they are still lacking, and there are many improvements that could still be made. But I consider that creating an environment where anyone who is attracted to the path of a research career can embark on that path is the most important thing, before bringing in the gender issue. For example, we need to establish a system that provides a baseline level of support for people who have children, or various other life circumstances like that. Beyond that, we need to talk about issues like unconscious bias and so on that have not yet been resolved, and work consciously to bring about change, even if it is gradual change.

Matsuo: Since you yourself balanced a career with raising a family, what advice would you have for other women who are now struggling to do that, based on your own experience?

Harayama: I feel that it’s not really about “balancing” or “having both” career and family, but rather integrating everything within your identity. Having children is a part of my own personal identity. There is also a version of “me” that is not a parent. When I lived in Geneva, I re-enrolled in the university because it was what I wanted to do for myself. I didn’t do it for anyone else. I wanted my own time and space where no one else could disturb me. That is how I ended up attending the university. I was not trying to “balance” two different things, I was only trying to be one whole me. I was glad if I had people who supported me, people in my life who had helped me. But would I have not gone back to school if I had lacked those factors? I believe that I would have.

Matsuo: Thank you very much.

Happiest and unhappiest moments since receiving Ph.D.s

Adachi: What was your happiest moment since receiving your Ph.D.?

Harayama: After I obtained my doctorate in educational sciences, and was getting my doctorate in economics, you know there's a thesis defense? And defense committee members do not go easy on you. But once you've successfully defended your thesis and you receive your doctorate, there is a tradition at the University of Geneva that the recipient of the doctorate invites the committee members and other people involved in the process to a social event called an “apéro” where you have drinks and chat. When I held my apéro, what made me the happiest was that my daughter, who was a university student by then, organized it for me! She made hors d’oeuvres and pastries herself! Even though I had gone and done the doctoral program for my own sake, it was wonderful to have my daughter and others share the joy of completing it with me.

Adachi: In contrast, what was your unhappiest moment?

Harayama: I went through plenty of tough times when I was working on both doctoral theses in parallel. I was working weekdays as a teaching assistant in the Department of Political Economy. On weekends, I worked on my educational sciences thesis, mainly. Meanwhile, there were various things I needed to do for my children, so I had hardly a moment’s rest. Cutting back on my hours of sleep was the only option. Somehow I got through it, but it was brutal. I feel like I did all that I could, and it felt like surviving an ordeal. But if I allowed myself to think, “This is just too much,” then I might have said, “I don’t have to put myself through this!”

Doctorate as a tool to change careers

Adachi: Is there any advice that you would give to young people thinking about changing careers by getting a doctorate?

Harayama: Of course, it depends on each person’s individual circumstances, but I do not believe that having entered a certain line of work limits you to that path forever. People may have potential to do other things, so the question is how to effectively draw on that potential when an opportunity presents itself. A doctorate is one tool for unlocking your potential, perhaps, but there may be other options available to you as well. It’s critically important to keep alert for other potential paths, other options. The process of obtaining a doctorate is a very demanding one and takes a number of years. Not only will you have to write the doctoral thesis itself, but also develop your own ways of learning and also teaching, of defining research questions. Because you will be learning so many different things along the way, I absolutely don’t believe that the years are wasted even if you don’t end up crossing the finish line. The doctoral program itself is a form of training. In that sense, it is a life experience with the potential to catapult you to new heights. Therefore, since I believe in trying many things if you have the chance, I say it is a worthy goal to go after a doctorate—or even two doctorates! (laughter)

Engaging in the foundation of an interdisciplinary graduate school

Adachi: Finally, I have a question truly just out of my personal curiosity. You talked about the discussions at Tohoku University among faculty from engineering, economics, management science and other backgrounds. If I recall correctly, that was in an era when many universities in Japan were establishing MBA programs, and other degrees in management, such as MOT (Management of Technology).

Harayama: Good point. And an MOT program is what Tohoku University established.

Adachi: Leading up to that decision, could you tell us what discussions were held to try to identify Tohoku University’s unique strengths? I ask because at RIKEN, there is a discussion happening now about expanding into the humanities and social sciences.

Harayama: From what I heard later, initially the idea at Tohoku University was that the Graduate School of Engineering would found an MOT program and the Graduate School of Economics would found an MBA program. The MOT program ended up being founded first and the MBA program never came to fruition after all. In the case of Tohoku University, the orientation of the university as a whole tilts heavily towards engineering. And everyone acknowledged the need to embed economics concepts within engineering. The president of the university at the time, Dr. Hiroyuki Abe, had been an engineering professor originally, and he was conscious that the style of teaching engineering at the time was lacking in some ways. That’s why he backed the creation of the Department of Management Science and Technology. In that sense, and in a very natural way considering Tohoku University’s existing identity, the MOT program was established and began to admit students. In fact, Tohoku University was the first university in Japan to grant master’s and doctoral degrees in Management of Technology. Right now, there are all kinds of initiatives such as the Science Park and university-industry collaboration of other kinds that have flowed from the impetus of founding the MOT program.

Adachi: What are the positives of taking a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary position at Tohoku University instead of a standard faculty job in economics or education at some other school in Japan?

Harayama: Within Japan’s many universities, there are all kinds of faculties and departments, each doing education and research along their own track. But, by bringing in elements of other disciplines, or finding points of convergence between them, all kinds of interesting things can happen. Stanford University, which I talked about, is one of the examples I have seen firsthand. I felt that Tohoku University was a promising terrain to try doing similar things in Japan. It’s important not to be closed off. Of course, there are crucial aspects of a discipline that should not change, but those can be preserved while reaching out for points of convergence and trying to make new things happen there. And catches the interest of students and draws them in, which becomes a new launchpad. It’s one way in which organizations can renew themselves. The same is true of RIKEN, which is an organization with multiple research centers. If we push a little bit further in that direction, we may see new convergence points, new catalysts emerge and give birth to fascinating things. That is something that is just beginning to flower, and perhaps we might see one of these centers become independent. What we need to do is sow and water those seeds.

Adachi: Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective.

Harayama: Thank you very much.

This interview took place on July 25, 2023, in Wako, Japan, at the Main Research Building 3F Relaxing Space 305.

RIKEN Elsevier Foundation Partnership Project
Camera and editor: Tomoko Nishiyama (Center for Brain Science)
Aiko Onoda (Center for Brain Science)
Assistant camera: Masataka Sasabe (International Affairs Division)
Interviewer and assistant: Hiroko Matsuo (Diversity Promotion Office)
Interviewer and producer: Emiko Adachi (Diversity Promotion Office)

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