This lecture will discuss the re-creation of public spaces in contemporary Seoul, analyzed as a long-term and contested process of decolonization in the wake of 35 years of Japanese rule (1910–45). Through an opening discussion of Namsan (South Mountain), Dr. Henry will show that the recreation of the city’s colonial spaces began quickly after liberation with the erasure of Chōsen Shrine, perhaps the most violent symbol of wartime "imperialization" (1937–1945), and its subsequent replacement with various nationalist monuments, including a memorial to the turn-of-the-century martyr Ahn Chung-gŭn (1879–1910).  "Chosŏn renaissance" is the term that he has coined to capture the most recent manifestations of a decolonizing project that re-imagines Korea's last dynasty as national glory. Dr. Henry’s discussion of the ongoing restoration of Kyŏngbok Palace, once the site of the Government-General building and various colonial period expositions, will demonstrate how this monument has come to serve as Seoul's showpiece for promoting South Korean patriotism and "tradition," albeit without directly referencing the country’s tumultuous modern history. Like the newly restored Chŏnggye Stream and the recent installation of a plaza and statue memorializing King Sejong (r. 1418–50), the restoration of Kyŏngbok Palace, a project that will not be completed until 2030, aims to remind South Korean citizens and international visitors of the illustrious and independent history of the peninsula before the onset of Japanese rule and four decades of post-colonial authoritarianism.

Dr. Henry (Ph.D., UCLA, 2006) is a specialist on modern Korea with a focus on the period of Japanese rule (1910–1945). He works on the comparative and transnational study of imperialism/colonialism, gender/sexuality, and critical urban studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript which examines the intersection of space and power in the city of colonial Seoul. 

Today is the last day of the Year of the Tiger in Vietnam. Tomorrow is the Year of the Cat (while in China it is Year of the Rabbit).

There was so much talk about Vietnam being an Asian Tiger in the past. Now, there is a growing concern about the country getting into the "middle-income trap." There is a real risk that the country might turn out to be just a cat and not a tiger.

The Party is aware of that threat and is struggling to find the right path to accelerated prosperity for the people while maintaining political monopoly.

This talk will be from the perspective of a man on the ground and will try to separate the smoke from the fire and find the heat.

Mr. Kien Duk Trung Pham is currently the Chairman of Red Bricks Group, a private investment firm. He is the founder of the Vietnam Foundation and the Vice Chairman of the VietNamNet Media Group, the leading multi-channel media company in Vietnam. Prior to VietNamNet he was the founding executive director of the Vietnam Education Foundation.

In business, Mr. Pham was a market development executive in Fortune 500 companies as well as an entrepreneur in technology and consulting startups. In government, he served in the executive branch under Presidents Reagan and Bush, as well as in the U.S. Senate. He has established nonprofit foundations to assist college students, orphans, and the handicapped in Vietnam. Mr. Pham is publicly recognized for his leadership and management abilities.

Mr. Pham is active in international affairs. In 1986, he was chosen a Young Leader by the American Council on Germany, and in 1992 a U.S.-Japan Leadership Fellow by the Japan Society. In 1993, he was elected as a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a participant in the American Assembly. Mr. Pham was the founder and chairman of the Vietnam Forum Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit organization that provides college scholarships, schools, and orphanage support in Vietnam. He was also a Board member of the Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped, a leading humanitarian program to help war victims. In 1996, Mr. Pham was a recipient of the "Never Fear, Never Quit" Award.

Mr. Pham grew up in Saigon, Vietnam. In 1977, at the age of 19, he led his family on a high sea escape and came to the United States where they settled in Colorado. Mr. Pham became a factory worker, learned English, and later attended college on scholarship. He received a BS in marketing and international business from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and won a scholarship to study in England. His graduate degrees, earned concurrently at Stanford University, include an MBA in international and organizational management, an MA in international economics, and a special diploma in public policy management. In 1990, Stanford University named Mr. Pham among of the "Most Outstanding Alumni" in the school's 100 years of history. Mr. Pham is former White House Fellow and a recipient an honorary JD degree from Pfeiffer University.

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.

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