Is Japan Adrift?

The political drift in Japanese politics and the meteoric rise of China have led many analysts to begin discounting Japan as a major player in the international system. However, beneath the frustration caused by Prime Minister Taro Aso's abysmal poll ratings and opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa's campaign finance scandal, Japan continues moving steadily forwrd in pursuit of a more active national security strategy. While Japanese poliics are in structural paralysis, Japanese political thought is not. Indeed, a consensus is apparent in a series of unofficial strategic documents issued by scholars and politicians this last year. Meanwhile, the Japan Self Defense Forces have recently stood up their first fully independent and joint operational commands to deal with the North Korean missile launch and Somali pirates.

Japan has always been a conservative society, slow to change well established institutions and patterns of behavior in the face of new strategic circumstances. But Japan has also historically been finely attuned to three strategic coordinates:the power of the world's leading hegemon, the power of China, and the threat from the Korean peninsula. All three are in flux, and so too is Japan's future strategic trajectory

About the Speaker

Michael Green is a senior adviser and holds the Japan Chair at CSIS, as well as being an associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University. He served as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC) from January 2004 to December 2005. He joined the NSC in April 2001 as director of Asian affairs with responsibility for Japan, Korea, and Australia/New Zealand. From 1997 to 2000, he was senior fellow for Asian security at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed the Independent Task Force on Korea and study groups on Japan and security policy in Asia. He served as senior adviser in the Office of Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of Defense in 1997 and as consultant to the same office until 2000. From 1995 to 1997, he was a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, and from 1994 to 1995, he was an assistant professor of Asian studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he remained a professorial lecturer until 2001.

Green speaks fluent Japanese and spent over five years in Japan working as a staff member of the National Diet, as a journalist for Japanese and American newspapers, and as a consultant for U.S. business. He graduated from Kenyon College with highest honors in history in 1983 and received his M.A. from Johns Hopkins SAIS in 1987 and his Ph.D. in 1994. He also did graduate work at Tokyo University as a Fulbright fellow and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research associate of the MIT-Japan Program. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, The International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Aspen Strategy Group and is vice chair of the congressionally mandated Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. He serves on the advisory boards of the Center for a New American Security and Australian American Leadership Dialogue.

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. 

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.

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.

A Workshop in honor of Professor Michel Oksenberg
Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Stanford China Program

We continue to honor the legacy of Professor Michel Oksenberg (1938-2001), a core faculty member of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and one of the country's leading authorities on China and on U.S.-China relations. Professor Oksenberg was one of the most powerful voices advocating a consistent and thoughtful policy of American engagement with China, and with Asia more broadly. The annual Shorenstein APARC Oksenberg Lecture has recognized distinguished individuals who have carried on this legacy of advancing understanding between the United States and China, and the nations of the Asia-Pacific region.

This year, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China and a time of global economic crisis, Shorenstein APARC is broadening the Oksenberg Lecture to a full afternoon workshop to examine the future of US-China relations and China's new role in this turbulent world.  Invited speakers are experts who have had deep experience in the academic, business, and policy worlds.

Agenda: