More than six decades after the end of World War II, the Japanese government has yet to release an estimated ¥200 billion worth of unpaid wages owed to Korean forced laborers who were brought to wartime Japan. Nor has the government disbursed an additional ¥200 billion worth of financial benefits owed to Korean and Taiwanese military servicemen. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, American authorities directed Japanese officials to compensate these Asian victims of the war effort, setting up a custody account for labor conscripts in 1946 and a foreign creditor's account for military conscripts in 1949. However, the outbreak of the Korean War destroyed any chance of monetary compensation, as the U.S. preoccupation over the new cold-war conflict effectively froze up bank accounts relating to Japan's former colonial subjects. Clarifying the historical record of American involvement in this unresolved issue of war compensation can contribute towards resurrecting efforts to reach regional reconciliation between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia.

Matthew Augustine is the 2009-2010 Northeast Asia History Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the History Department at Columbia University and his B.A. from the Politics Department at Princeton University. His research interests include military occupations, especially the U.S. occupations in Japan, Korea, and Okinawa after World War II; transnational migrations and border controls; Japan's colonial empire in the Asia-Pacific; and the history and politics of war reparations in Northeast Asia.

Over the years, Kim Jong Il has pursued four inter-related goals that together might be considered as an implicit national security strategy:

1. reviving the economy; 
2. buttressing domestic support at a time of leadership transition; 
3. widening North Korea's "diplomatic space" through 360-degree diplomacy; and
4. shoring up the country´s aging military.  

These goals are tightly linked but also involve significant trade-offs that may offer greater possibilities than ususally supposed for solving the issue of its nuclear weapons program.

Dr. John Merrill is the head of the Northeast Asia Division of U.S. State Department´s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and Adjunct Professor in the School of International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University.  He is the author of Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War, 1945-50 and The Cheju-do Rebellion as well as numerous journal articles.

Under what conditions are autocratic regimes apt to break down when popular protests against them break out?  Prof. Lee will showcase and explain the decisive role of armed forces in reinforcing or undermining the prolongation of authoritarian rule.  He will offer a theoretical framework and illustrate it with two contrasting cases:  the June 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese military suppressed protesters and safeguarded the regime; and the People Power revolt in Manila in February 1986, when the Philippine military swung its weight in favor of liberalization.

Terence Lee is associate editor of Armed Forces and Society.  His writings have appeared in Asian Survey, Armed Forces and Society, Comparative Political Studies, and Foreign Policy.  He studies civil-military relations, military organizations, and international security; other interests include Southeast Asian politics and political science theories.  He was formerly an assistant professor in the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and a postdoctoral fellow in the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard.  His PhD and MA are in political science from the University of Washington, Seattle.  Other degrees include a master’s in strategic studies from NTU and a University of Wisconsin-Madison BA (with Distinction) in political science and Southeast Asian Studies.

North Korea’s nuclear weapon test in October 2006 and the subsequent “debate” in Japan about whether or not to ponder its own nuclear future brought renewed attention to the subject of Japan and nuclear weapons.  Pundits and policy makers in both the United States and Japan contemplated the implications of Pyongyang’s nuclear breakout, and many wondered if this marked the beginning of fundamental change in Japanese thinking on these issues.  Just as North Korea’s long-range missile test over Japanese airspace in 1998 was a major catalyst leading to Japan’s full-fledged embrace of America’s missile defense (MD) development program a few years later, might the 2006 nuclear test eventually prove to be a similar watershed moment in Japanese defense policy?  Would there be a rising tide of Japanese sentiment in favor of reexamining the three non-nuclear principles of non-possession, non-manufacture, and non-introduction? 

In pursuit of answers to these questions, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA) conducted an extended research effort over the past two years to examine not only Japan’s propensity and capacity to “go nuclear,” but also to explore the overarching issue of how deterrence is functioning and changing in the context of the U.S.-Japan alliance.  It is these latter questions in particular regarding deterrence and extended deterrence that proved most interesting and, we think, particularly important to U.S. policy makers, given the dramatic changes underway in the regional security environment in East Asia and relevant proposals in the areas of non-proliferation and arms control.  Mr. Schoff's presentation will describe the results of IFPA's study and offer steps that the allies can take to reshape extended deterrence for the twenty-first century in ways that strengthen and diversify the bilateral relationship, and ultimately contribute to regional stability and prosperity.

About the Speaker:

James L. Schoff is the Associate Director of Asia-Pacific Studies at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA) in Cambridge, MA, where he specializes in East Asian security issues, U.S. alliance relations, international crisis management cooperation, and regional efforts to stem WMD proliferation. He also contributes to IFPA’s U.S. government and military contract work relating to East Asia. Some of his recent publications include Realigning Priorities: The U.S.-Japan Alliance and the Future of Extended Deterrence (IFPA 2009); Nuclear Matters in North Korea: Building a Multilateral Response for Future Stability in Northeast Asia (Potomac Books 2008) (co-author); In Times of Crisis: Global and Local Civil-Military Disaster Relief Coordination in the United States and Japan (IFPA, 2007); “Transformation of the U.S.-Japan Alliance,” in The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs (Winter 2007); Political Fences and Bad Neighbors: North Korea Policy Making in Japan and Implications for the United States (IFPA, 2006); and Tools for Trilateralism: Improving U.S.-Japan-Korea Cooperation to Manage Complex Contingencies (Potomac Books, 2005).

Mr. Schoff joined IFPA in 2003, after serving as the program officer in charge of policy studies at the United States-Japan Foundation. Prior to that he was the business manager for Bovis Japan and Bovis Asia Pacific, and international construction and project management firm. Mr. Schoff graduated from Duke University and earned an M.A. in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He also studied for one year at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Japan, and he lectured at Boston University in 2007.

Reckoning with the Past:  Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Asia

Is it possible to come to terms with the violent past and foster reconciliation with former foes, what are the obstacles and how can they be overcome? These are some of the questions we are asking in the "Divided Memories and Reconciliation" project. This colloquia will bring several scholars to Stanford to discuss the ‘history problem' in a series of lectures analyzing the ways in which past conflict has or has not been addressed and resolved in contemporary Asia. Examining issues of memory and forgetting, guilt and innocence, apology and restitution from diverse social science perspectives, our speakers investigate the handling of the violent past both within and between countries in contexts ranging from international diplomacy to the broadcast media to mass education.

In November of 2008, the head of the Japanese air self defense force, General Tamogami Toshio, resigned in a swirl of controversy over an essay he wrote entitled "Was Japan An Aggressor Nation?" The essay argued that Japan's seizure of Korea and of northern China was a legal act and that it had pursued a moderate policy of modernization in its colonial rule of Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, superior to the colonial rule of the Western imperial  powers. General Tamogami also argued, in his published essay, that Japan's war with the United States was a result of being "ensnared in a trap that was carefully laid by the United States to draw Japan into a war." What is the story behind this controversial incident? What does it mean when a senior Japanese military officer holds such views of the wartime past? What are the implications of this for Japan's security relations with its neighbors and the United States?

What is the role of apologies in international reconciliation? Jennifer Lind finds that while denying or glorifying past violence is indeed inimical to reconciliation, apologies that prove to be domestically polarizing may be diplomatically counterproductive.  Moreover, apologies were not necessary in many cases of successful reconciliation.  What then is the relationship between historical memory and international reconciliation?

Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Dartmouth College. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master's in Pacific International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Lind is the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics, a book that examines the effect of war memory on international reconciliation (Cornell University Press, 2008). She has also authored scholarly articles in International Security and Security Studies, and has written for wider audiences within the Atlantic and Foreign Policy. Professor Lind has worked as a consultant for RAND and for the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense, and has lived and worked in Japan. Her current research interests include the resilience of the North Korean regime, planning for U.S. military missions in the event of North Korean collapse, energy competition and its security implications for East Asia, and democratization and stability in East Asia.

Marcus Mietzner is currently Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University. Between 1998 and 2008, he lived, worked and researched in Indonesia. He has published extensively on Indonesian politics, among others in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Research and Contemporary Southeast Asia. His most recent book is Military Politics, Islam, and the State in Indonesia: From Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation, published by ISEAS in Singapore in December 2008.