A memorial event will be held to pay tribute to the life of Walter H. Shorenstein and his legacy to contemporary Asian studies at Stanford University.

Mr. Shorenstein, a prominent San Francisco real estate developer and a long-time supporter of the Democratic Party, passed away peacefully on June 24, 2010, at the age of 95. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) described him as a "man of extraordinary vision, leadership and wisdom." A firm believer in the importance of strong ties between the United States and Asia, Mr. Shorenstein endowed the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in his name in 2005. He had been a strong supporter of the center since 1998. Mr. Shorenstein had also been a member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Advisory Board or its predecessor organization since 1992.

During the memorial program, faculty, friends, and family will share memories and offer remarks about Mr. Shorenstein's important early and steadfast support of Shorenstein APARC, and his continuing legacy. A reception with light refreshments will follow immediately afterward.

As a sociologist who works on the conjunction and conflicts between political, economic and cultural-cognitive networks, Eiko Ikegami has been conducting research on long-term social processes that underlie and perpetuate modern Japanese social
relations with a number of different topics. It is from this long-term view point, that Ikegami offers a distinctive angle to articulate the grave difficulties that contemporary Japanese capitalism is facing. She expresses the social significance of the current radical transformation of Japanese capitalism as a historic turning point in redirecting institutions of Japanese trust and justification. For example, she investigates developments in popular consciousness of egalitarian views that clung to the myth that "we all are in the middle strata" and of distinctive gender roles closely linked to the particular style of Japanese capitalism. Ikegami considers these institutional transformations not only as a postwar product, but in a critical way as the result of path dependent developments of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization for more than a century. Using keywords such as uncertainty, networks, trust, and justification, her talk will present a bold synthesis that outlines the long-term process of institutionalization that produces mutually connected socio-cultural-cognitive systems in which the distinctive Japanese style of capitalism has been embedded.

Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Ikegami was a journalist for the Japan Economic Journal (Nikkei or Nihonkeizai Shinbun) before she moved to the US. Ikegami is currently Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the New School for Social Research in New York. Ikegami's book, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1995), has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Japanese, and is widely considered the definitive statement on the subject. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005), won five book awards in various fields including the Distinguished Contribution Book award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the John Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, which cited the work as "the most important book on Japan to have appeared in recent years." In 2003, Ikegami was elected Chair of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the ASA.

Her core research interest has been related to the question: How did a non-Western society such as Japan achieve its own version of modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries? More recently, Ikegami has been working on three distinct areas of research: a project on trust and uncertainty in Japanese capitalism; the completion of a book project on the Gion Festival, Community, Gender, and Shrine in Kyoto; and, funded by the National Science Foundation, Ikegami currently leads a team of one dozen graduate students in conducting ethnographic research of online communities using 3-D virtual worlds in Japan and in the U.S. Ikegami’s theoretical interests uniquely combine culture and network concepts with the literature of civil society, which has prompted an initiative in the form of a series of workshops in Paris (Sciences Po) and New York, to study the trajectories of civil societies in non-western settings.

It takes guts to lead. Technical skill requirements vary across the private, public, and social sectors, but the essentials of good leadership needed to move any organization forward are the same. In all three sectors, Gita Wirjawan has exercised leadership and achieved results. Based on his knowledge and experience, he will offer advice on how to survive and be effective in one, two, or all three of these dynamic environments--how to succeed wherever your passion takes you.

Gita Wirjawan has been closely and causally linked to Indonesia's rising profile as a dynamic emerging-market economy. As head of his country's Investment Coordinating Board since 2009, he has traveled the world stimulating capital inflows. At home he has worked to improve the policy climate for productive investment. His efforts have contributed to boosting Indonesia's ratings as a place to invest and its current six-percent annual rate of economic growth. His own career in business has included founding and managing a successful private equity fund, Ancora Capital, and serving as a former lead executive in the Indonesian affiliates of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. In the social sector he has championed education through his Ancora Foundation, whose grants have enabled talented young Indonesians to study at the world's leading universities. A graduate of Harvard's JFK School of Government, he is a classically trained pianist and a jazz buff proficient on several instruments. Another company he founded, Omega Pacific, has produced more than a dozen albums by young Indonesian musicians.

This event is co-sponsored with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Center for Global Business and the Economy

Professor Chong Wook Chung will discuss Sino-Korean relations based on his experience working for the Korean government in Seoul and in Beijing. He will also interpret current developments in the trianglular relationship between Pyongyang, Seoul, and Beijing.

Professor Chung, a former ambassador to the People's Republic of China, is a distinguished professor at Dong-A University in Korea, and is currently teaching a course on Korea and East Asia in the Department of Government at Harvard University as the inaugural Kim Koo Visiting Professor. He has taught at many universities including American University, Claremont McKenna College, George Washington University, and Seoul National University. His book-length English publications include the book Maoism and Development (Seoul National University Press, 1980), and the co-edited volume Korea's Options in a Changing World (UC Berkeley Press, 1992).

Professor Chung holds a B.A. in International Relations from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. He was awarded the Yale Alumni Award in 2007.

This seminar is made possible by the generous support from the Koret Foundation.

Analyzing official economic and demographic data of China, Japan, and Korea, Aoki identifies the four phases of economic development that these economies have been passing through and are expected to face. Each phase is characterized by a particular pattern of relationships between demographic factors, such as labor participation rates and rural-urban migration on one hand, and economic performances measured by per capita GDP and labor productivity on the other. There is expected to be a remarkable commonality in this demographic-economic dynamic among those economies, stemming from the common historical legacy of monsoon agriculture dominated by small family-managed farms in pre-industrialization time. Together with this commonality, however, there are differences in the timing of transitions from one phase to the next, conditioned by political events and so on, as well as in institutional arrangements facilitating the transitions. Aoki characterizes these patterns of demographic-economic-institutional dynamics as "Flying Geese Paradigm Version 2.0," distinguishing it from the original Flying Geese Paradigm, once popular in the development economics literature, that focused on the historical pattern of technological transfer in Asia from the 1930s to the 1960s. Aoki then goes on to discuss its policy implications in terms of possible strategic complementarities

In this event, Dr. Jaeun Shin will discuss the historical and policy background of expanded private health insurance in South Korea. Looking at the public-private mix of health care financing and its impacts, Shin conducted a comparative study of thirty member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) during the period 1980 to 2007 to ask whether private health insurance can counterbalance limited government financing, high out-of-pocket payments, and the persistent financial deficit of South Korea’s National Health Insurance system.

The panel analyses of OECD Health Data from 2009 suggest that private health insurance financing is unlikely to reduce government spending on health care and social security. Also, Shin found little evidence that out-of-pocket payments will be replaced by private health insurance payments. Private health insurance payments, however, are found to have a statistically significant positive association with total spending on health care, which indicates that the coverage effect of private health insurance—in addition to national health insurance—may exceed the efficiency gain through the market competition that private insurers may deliver to the health care sector. These findings leave it unclear whether private initiatives in health care financing will be as effective as the policy advocates hope for, in dealing with the challenges of national health insurance in South Korea. Shin suggests that further studies of how public and private insurers, and providers and consumers interplay in response to  a given structure of private-public mix in financing are warranted to decide the right balance between private coverage and publicly provided universal coverage.