Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki first entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1969 and served in the Ministry of Finance Jakarta, Paris (delegation of OECD) and London.  He was made Deputy Director-General, Asian Affairs Bureau in 1994 and Political Minister of the Embassy of Japan to the United States in 1995.  In 1999 he was assigned as Director-General of North American Affairs Bureau and in 2002 was made Deputy Minister for foreign Affairs (including Prime Minister’s personal representative (Sherpa) to the G8 Summit, Japan’s chief negotiator for FTA).

In 2005 he was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of Japan to the International Organizations in Geneva and in 2008 was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to the United States of America. 

On the eve of President Obama's reported first meeting with President Lee Myung-bak, the "New Beginnings" policy study group will release its recommendations to the Obama administration for strengthening U.S.-South Korean relations, and a panel of New Beginnings members will discuss the report. 

The Korea Society and Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center established the New Beginnings project last year to support an updating and expansion of the alliance based on the election of new leaderships in both countries.

Panelists include former Under Secretary of State Michael H. Armacost, former Ambassador to Korea Thomas Hubbard, Korea Society President Evans J. R. Revere, Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin, Korea Economic Institute President Charles "Jack" L. Pritchard, and US-Korea Institute at SAIS Chairman Don Oberdorfer.

Major change seems virtually certain to occur eventually in North Korea. The regime, already under great stress from the collapse of its economy and continuing international isolation, is being further tested by the apparently serious medical condition of top leader Kim Jong Il. North Korea’s neighbors, the PRC and South Korea, are concerned about the possibility of instability in North Korea resulting from the succession issue and other issues. The United States fears that chaos in North Korea could endanger the security of nuclear materials and technology that North Korea possesses. ROK General (RET) Byung Kwan Kim will analyze patterns of possible change in North Korea and how its neighbors and the United States are likely to respond.

General (RET) Byung Kwan Kim is the inaugural Koret Fellow for 2008-09 academic year. He was the Deputy Commander of the ROK-US Combined Forces Command and the Commander of the Ground Component Command.

The Koret Fellowship was established with generous support from the Koret Foundation to bring leading professionals in Asia and the United States to Stanford to study United States-Korea relations. Fellows conduct their own research on the bilateral relationship, with an emphasis on contemporary relations, with the broad aim of fostering greater understanding and closer ties between the two countries.

This event is supported by a generous grant from the Koret Foundation.

In 2009, buffeted by the global economic slowdown, Malaysia’s economy is predicted to shrink.  Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak is expected to replace unpopular Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi as Malaysia’s top leader early in April.  On 23 March the government banned the two main opposition newspapers, Suara Keadilan and Harakah.  Earlier in March an opposition lawmaker was forced out of the national parliament after demanding that Najib answer allegations of involvement in the gruesome murder of a Mongolian model, Altantuya Shaaribuu, in 2006.  The killing has been linked to a 110-million-euro “commission” paid to a close confidante of Najib by a French firm for the sale of submarines to Malaysia.  In February Najib used local parliamentary defections to take over Perak, one of the five states won in March 2008 by the opposition in elections whose results embarrassed the government.  An independent poll shows that Najib is even less popular than Badawi.  Prof. Chin will address the implications of these and other aspects of current political turbulence in Malaysia.

James Chin has written widely on Malaysian politics and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, among other topics.  Minority rights, ethnic politics, and good governance are among his current interests.  Before his Monash appointment he headed a business school.  Before that he worked as a financial journalist.  He has a doctorate from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Susan V. Lawrence is Head of China Programs at the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids, a Washington, DC-based non-governmental organization that works to reduce tobacco use and its devastating health and economic consequences in the United States and around the world. She divides her time between Washington, DC and China.

The Campaign is a partner organization in the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, launched in 2005 with funding from New York Mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg. The initiative’s work is focused on low- and medium-income countries that together account for two thirds of the world’s smokers. Other partners in the initiative are the Centers for Disease Control Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, the World Health Organization, and the World Lung Foundation.

Before joining the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids, Ms. Lawrence worked for 16 years as a journalist, including a cumulative 11 years between 1990 and 2003 as a staff correspondent in China. She served as China bureau chief and later Washington correspondent for the Hong Kong-based newsweekly Far Eastern Economic Review, as a Beijing-based staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, and as China bureau chief for the newsmagazine US News & World Report. A fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker, she holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and was a Harvard-Yenching Institute Scholar in the History Department at Peking University from 1985-87. 

Her talk is the third in the colloquium series on tobacco control in East Asia, sponsored by the Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in coordination with FSI’s Global Tobacco Prevention Research Initiative.

The stated purpose of the Trade Act of 1974 was to promote free trade. Section 301 authorized the U.S. President to impose retaliatory trade sanctions if negotiations were unsuccessful in reducing unreasonable limits on trade. The Act was reinforced in 1984, became known as “Super 301”, and made annual assessment and retaliatory measures mandatory.

Because of trade imbalances, four emerging Asian countries gave the US firms access to cigarette markets: Japan (1987), Taiwan (1987), South Korea (1989) and Thailand (1990). These forced market opennings were called the “Second Opium War” by local protestors in these countries, challenging U.S. export of unwelcome and unhealthy products.

A sea change occurred in the decades that followed the cigarette market opening in Taiwan. Of particular interest are changes in areas marketing skills and market share; lower cigarette prices; paradoxical increased smuggling; increased youth consumption; evolution of the powerful tobacco industry lobby; and a sharp increase in tobacco-related cancer deaths. Accompanying the increased cigarette consumption, a special, unusual habit of chewing betel quid started and grew into a mainstream practice among adult males (nearly one out of four). Oral and esophageal cancer increased sharply soon after the market opened. At the same time, the patriotic protectionists, NGOs, and government galvanized an anti-smoking movement, which gradually transformed Taiwan's culture so that smoking in public is no longer socially acceptable. A new term, “de-normalization,” was coined about the favorable effect of market opening.

 The ironic outcome of Super 301 is that while the market was forced open solely by the US, in only ten years, US market share, once leading, shrunk to a distant fifth, after Japan, UK, Germany and domestic producers. The trade imbalance was little affected by the opening of the cigarette market.

Dr. Wen's colloquium continues the colloquium series on tobacco control in East Asia, sponsored by the Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in coordination with FSI’s Global Tobacco Prevention Research Initiative.