Japan Brown Bag seminar.

Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies.

Seth Faison spent 12 years living in and writing about China. He went to China as a 25-year-old looking for adventure. He spent two years studying Chinese in Xian, attaining fluency. He became a reporter in Hong Kong, and then a correspondent in Beijing, where he covered the events at Tiananmen in 1989. He joined the New York Times in 1991, covering New York City. He opened the newspapers bureau in Shanghai in 1995 and wrote about social and economic change, earning a reputation as a writer with a knack for capturing the moods and flavors of China.

China Brown Bag seminar

Co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies

C. Kenneth Quinones has been involved with Northeast Asia since 1962 as a soldier, scholar and diplomat. He has lived and worked in South and North Korea; ten years in the South and nearly one year in the North, and in Japan for three years. As a U.S. dip-lomat, he witnessed South Koreas struggle to democratize during the 1980s and then, during the 1990s, played a role in the opening of North Korea to the outside world. After retiring from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1997, he worked with U.S. humanitarian organizations to arrange educational and agricultural exchanges between the United States and North Korea.

Dr. Quinones is the director of Korean Peninsula Programs at the recently organized International Action (successor to International Center), a non-profit Washington, D.C. research institute. He recently organized a new forum on the internet, the International Forum for Innovative Northeast Strategy, to encourage international dialogue about innovative strategies to promote a durable peace in Northeast Asia.

A buffet lunch will be available to those who RSVP by 5:00 p.m., Monday, November 1 to Debbie Warren at dawarren@stanford.edu or at 650-723-8387.

Dr. Kiyoshi Kurokawa received his MD degree in 1962 from the University of Tokyo Faculty of Medicine. Currently, Dr. Kurokawa serves as president of both the Science Council of Japan and the Pacific Science Association. He is also adjunct professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Tokyo and of the Institute of Medical Sciences of Tokai University. He is professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo and serves as a member of the Committee for Science and Technology Policy of the Cabinet Office and several committees for Prime Minister Koizumi's office.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research.

Charles Pritchard has had a distinguished career in government. He was the Ambassador and Special Envoy for Negotiations with North Korea, and the U.S. Representative to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, State Department. He has also served as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Asian Affairs, and Director for Asian Affairs in the National Security Council.

Japan Brown Bag Series

Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies and the Stanford Society of Fellows in Japanese Studies. A light lunch will be served.

China Brown Bag Seminar

Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Japanese "nationalism" (if such a term is even applicable) depended less on imagined similarities among Japanese than it did on their contrived customary differences from foreign peoples such as the Ainu. The boundaries of the early modern Japanese realm were ethno-geographical, and Ainu identity and difference was critical in constructing the borders of Japan.

After 1799, the Tokugawa shogunate and, later, the Meiji state, undertook policies of deculturation and assimilation toward the Ainu, because the Meiji strategy toward state building relied less on difference than on myths of internal homogeneity. The Meiji state conscripted Ainu into the myth of Japanese homogeneity through assimilation; but earlier forms of Ainu autonomy and difference first had to be destroyed.

Interestingly, wolf eradication offers one vantage point from which to view the process of Ainu deculturation and assimilation in the context of the colonization of Hokkaido and the creation of the modern myths that provided the foundation for Japan's ethnic nationalism. Ainu origin mythology held that the Ainu people were born from a union of a wolf and a goddess, and so when Ainu tracked and killed wolves and wild dogs under state bounty programs legitimized as "imperial grants," they committed mythological patricide, replacing their origin myths with Japanese ones that, over the course of the late Meiji period, served as the foundation of Japan's modern nation.

Japan Brown Bag Series

Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies