Professor Hidehiko Ichimura of the University of Tokyo will share recent results from his research on the health of older adults and the retirement process in Japan. His research draws upon a unique data source, the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement (JSTAR). This rich dataset provides information on how middle-aged and elderly Japanese live in terms of economic, social, and health outcomes, and how these interact with their family status. The JSTAR project aims to provide longitudinal data enabling detailed policy-relevant comparisons to other industrialized countries (e.g. the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, the English Longitudinal Study on Aging, and similar surveys now launched in Korea, China, and India).

Professor Ichimura received his BA in economics from Osaka University in 1981 and his PhD in economics for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and University College London. He is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo. 

Why are Japan and China perpetually at odds?  In this talk, Christian Collet will discuss the growing role of public opinion in bilateral tensions and the conflicting images that are held by Chinese and Japanese of one another.  While there has long been a mixture of affection, anger and rivalry at the diplomatic level, Collet will explain that the roots of contemporary discontent lie, in part, in contradistinctive citizen impressions: in China, perceptions of threat borne of history and new media; in Japan, discontent manifest in domestic political culture, including eroding trust and right-wing ideology.  Collet will examine the potential of soft power for ameliorating the relationship, providing some evidence to suggest that pop cultural exchanges may have a desired impact on segments of both publics.  But soft power can only go so far to soften a negative image; concerted efforts, Collet will argue, also need to be made by opinion leaders to reassure citizens and restore trust in governmental decision-making.

Christian Collet (PhD, University of California, Irvine) joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2012–13 academic year from International Christian University, Tokyo, where he serves as senior associate professor of American politics and international relations.

His research interests focus on public opinion in Asian Pacific/American contexts and the influence of race, ethnicity and nationalism on political mobilization. During his time at Shorenstein APARC, he is working on a project that uses comparative survey data to examine the dynamics of Japanese opinion toward domestic politics, China and Southeast Asia. He is also finishing up a project concerning the role of Vietnam in the political incorporation of first generation Vietnamese Americans. In 2004–05, he held a visiting appointment at Viet Nam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, under the U.S. Fulbright Program.

Collet's work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, The Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Japanese Journal of Political Science, PS, Amerasia Journal and Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts. He is the co-editor, with Pei-te Lien, of The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans (Temple University Press, 2009).

Over a year and a half has passed since the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster that began with the earthquake and tsunami disaster that hit Japan’s Tohoku region on March 11, 2011. Much has been written about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but a cohesive, objective, readable English language narrative of what exactly transpired as the disaster unfolded has yet to widely circulated. An understanding of how events unfolded in the Fukushima disaster is critical to deriving valuable lessons about nuclear power governance, politics, and societal preparedness. As countries such as China, India, and Brazil move to build new nuclear reactors to serve the energy needs of ever increasing numbers of ever-wealthier populations, lessons from Japan’s experience will only increase in significance.

The talk focuses on a narrative of the chaotic political and corporate responses as events developed rapidly at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant. It also puts the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in comparative perspective among the three other nuclear power plants hit by the tsunami. Many of the details are likely to come as a surprise even to a well-informed audience: the absence of the power operator’s president and chairman for almost a full day as the crisis unfolded; chaos magnified by the emergency nuclear response headquarters set up in the Prime Minister’s office initially unable to receive cell phone signals or faxes; the dozens of emergency backup battery trucks arriving at the plant only to discover they could not connect to the reactors in crisis, and the like. The talk is based on the following report:  “Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Narrative, Analysis, and Recommendations".

Kenji Kushida is the Takahashi Research Associate in Japanese Studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a graduate research associate at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Kushida has an MA in East Asian studies and BAs in economics and East Asian studies, all from Stanford University.

Kushida’s research interests are in the fields of comparative politics, political economy, and information technology. He focuses mainly on Japan with comparisons to Korea, China, and the United States. He has four streams of academic research and publication: institutional and governance structures of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster; political economy issues surrounding information technology; political strategies of foreign multinational corporations in Japan; and Japan’s political economic transformation since the 1990s.

The talk , based on a recent paper, will describe and examine the social understanding of selling sex for a visa among migrant Filipina hostesses in Tokyo. The paper examines the different constitutions of love in Japan and the Philippines to understand the making of love in the marriages of Filipina hostesses and their Japanese customers. The paper will attempt to argue why the act of selling sex for a visa does not necessarily reduce marriage to prostitution while at the same time questioning the assumption that marriage is ever free of rational motivation.

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include the sociology of gender and labor, the family, and globalization. Her latest book Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo received the 2012 Distinguished Book Award in the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.

The U.S.-Japan relationship is not much in the headlines these days—and when it is the stories seem to focus on issues, such as Okinawa and beef, that have bedeviled ties seemingly for decades. But, in the midst of seismic shifts in Asia-Pacific security and global economic relations, shouldn’t the two countries be talking about something else?

Many in American industry have thought so and in 2009 the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan released a white paper calling for a new set of discussions with Japan directed at capturing the innovation and growth potential of the emerging global Internet economy. Accompanying the call were a set of over 70 specific recommendations for discussion in areas ranging from privacy, security, intellectual property, spectrum management, cyber security to competition—an agenda for the future not the past.

The paper found resonance with the new Democratic Party government in Japan and the Obama administration that were searching for a new direction and vocabulary for U.S.-Japan economic relations and were mindful that partnership with Japan in this area strengthened the U.S. hand in dealing with preemptive attempts elsewhere to define rule of the road for the Internet and “cloud computing.” 

The Dialogue was formally launched in the fall of 2010 and its third plenary session is taking place in Washington, D.C. October 16 to 19, 2012. Professor Jim Foster is participating in the Dialogue as a leading member of the U.S. private sector delegation to the talks. He will be coming to Stanford immediately following the joint industry-government meeting on October 18 (the governments will continue in closed-door session through the 19th) and will offer his analysis and insight into the discussions in Washington and their implications for future cooperation between Japan and the U.S. industry in the cloud computing field and for the two governments on challenging issues of broader Internet governance.

Jim Foster is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, where he teaches and researches on U.S. foreign policy issues and global Internet policy. He is the co-director of Keio’s Internet and Society Institute. Foster worked as a U.S. diplomat from 1981 to 2006, serving in Japan, Korea, the Philippines and at the U.S. Mission to the EU. He was director for corporate affairs at Microsoft Japan from 2006 to 2011. He is a former vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and a co-author of the ACCJ White Paper on the Internet Economy.

Why are transfers from younger to older generations generous in some societies and not in others? For example, people in northeast Japan tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents and invest more in their children's education than those in the southwest. Communities in the northeast tend to be small and isolated compared to those in the southwest. This paper argues that differences in intergenerational dependence are due to demographic variation in community networks. This analysis of sustainability of intergenerational transfers posits a game theoretical model of overlapping generations in which breadwinners make transfers to their parents and children. A novel feature of the model is that there is a local community that may supply information about its members' past behaviors. I demonstrate that an efficient level of intergenerational transfers can be sustained if neighbors "gossip" about each other. As an implication, my theory suggests that individuals in a close-knit community prefer lower levels of social protection. Empirical results from Japan support this argument: Individuals who interact with their neighbors tend to provide better nursing care to their aged parents, spend more on their children’s education, and demand less from the government than those who do not interact with their neighbors.