Conventional wisdom says that relations between China and Japan are fated always to be exceptionally wary, if not openly hostile -- and Japanese leaders' visits to the notorious Yasukuni have done nothing to undermine this view. Nor have Sino-Japanese standoffs over the disputed Senkaku islands. Meanwhile Beijing's opposition has been widely credited as the reason why Japan has failed in its reported aspiration to join the United Nations Security Council. Author and long-time Tokyo-based East Asia watcher Eamonn Fingleton argues that these issues have been grossly misunderstood in the West and that on closer inspection they say little if anything about the true state of Sino-Japanese relations. He insists that on a host of substantive issues overlooked by the press, Japan and China have been cooperating closely for decades. So much so that Japanese help has been one of the most powerful factors in China's rise.

A former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, Eamonn Fingleton has been monitoring East Asian economics since 1985. He met China's supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986 as a member of a New York Stock Exchange delegation. The following year he predicted the Tokyo banking crash and went on in Blindside, a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by J.K. Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted leadership in advanced manufacturing to Japan.

His 1999 book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity anticipated the American Internet stock crash of 2000. In his 2008 book In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony, he issues a strong challenge to the conventional view among Washington policymakers and think tank analysts that China is converging to Western economic and political forms and attitudes. His books have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com.

He was born in Ireland in 1948 and is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. He was the recipient of the American Values Award from the United States Business and Industry Council in 2001.

Copies of Fingleton's newest book In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony - due March 4 by St. Martin's Press - will be for sale during the event.

In the past decade, academia has experienced a remarkable revival of interest in India. This is largely based on the perception of India emerging as a significant global economic power.

However, there is a non-economic reason as well. The sons and daughters of America's highly educated and prosperous Indian-American community drive this second reason. These students are eager to learn about the culture, religion, literature, and the languages of their parents' and grandparents' homeland.

Goldman will discuss these interesting trends in an effort to contextualize the state of Indian Studies in American higher education today.

Professor Goldman is professor of Sanskrit at UC-Berkeley. His areas of scholarly interest include Sanskrit literature and literary theory, Indian epic studies, and psychoanalytically oriented cultural studies. Goldman's work has been recognized widely, having been awarded several fellowships and research awards. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rapid population aging in many Asian countries poses an increased burden of care for elderly people with disabilities. Traditionally, care for the disabled elderly was provided by family members co-residing or living nearby. However, declining fertility rates, eroding social norms, and growing rates of labor force participation among females have changed the overall picture of informal care. 

One important policy question is whether informal caregiving affects caregivers' labor force participation. This question is particularly relevant for rapidly developing economies including newly industrialized countries, because a shrinking working-age population is another major concern with population aging. Providing different answers to this question leads to different policy implications for long-term care policy and labor market policy. 

Most of the existing literature on this issue comes from the United States and Europe. Using data from the first wave of the "Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging", Do's research not only provides results from a less-studied Asian society, but also takes into account different patterns of living arrangements and labor force participation. His talk will deal with the methodological issue of endogeneity between informal caregiving and labor force participation, and explore gender and age group differences.

Young Kyung Do is currently completing his PhD in health policy and administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. He has also earned both an MD and a master of public health degrees from Seoul National University (in 1997 and 2003, respectively). Young earned board certification in preventive medicine from the Korean Medical Association in 2004.

Some observers of Japan have pointed to a dangerous rise in Japanese nationalism. Advocates of that idea claim that this is evident in a number of events, such as, the visits of former Prime Minister Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine; former Prime Minister Abe's plan for constitutional reforms and his statements regarding the comfort women; the adoption of "revisionist" history textbooks; the territorial disputes with countries such as China and South Korea; and Japan's efforts to strengthen the Japan-U.S. security arrangements.

However, such observations invite the following questions:

• If there are such signs in Japan, do they reflect Japanese society as a whole? Japan has been strongly pacifistic since the war, avoiding any entanglement in military conflict. This seems to be deeply rooted in the minds of the Japanese people. Just what is the relationship between the purported rise in nationalism and these pacifistic tendencies?
• Most commentators who warn of rising nationalism in Japan fear a return of the extreme nationalism of prewar Japan. However, are not today's political regime, economic institutions and social conditions, all vastly different from those of prewar Japan?
• Even though a trend toward nationalism can be witnessed in some quarters of Japan, it doesn't necessarily mean that Japan has become a country that would take dangerous actions. Nationalistic emotions and movements are not directly linked to the actions of a country. Rather, are there not some intervening factors between them?

Mitsuru Kitano currently serves as minister for public affairs at the Embassy of Japan to the United States in Washington, D.C. where he is in charge of outreach to press/media, intellectual exchanges, art and cultural exchanges as well as support for Japanese language education. Kitano has written a number of op-ed articles, including ones analyzing U.S. opinions about Japan in such papers as the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the International Herald Tribune.

Minister Kitano is a career diplomat and has been posted in Tokyo, France, Geneva, China and Vietnam since joining Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1980. He has been professionally engaged in Japan's bilateral relationship with the U.S., China and Southeast Asian countries, and Japan's policies regarding the United Nations and other international organizations. He was active also in such areas as economic cooperation and nuclear energy issues.

His academic achievements include being a lecturer at Sophia University (Tokyo) and a senior visiting fellow at RIETI (Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry) in Japan. In 2007, he co-authored a book, Paburikku Dipuromashi: Seron no Jidai no Gaiko Senryaku (Public Diplomacy: Diplomatic Strategy in the Age of Public Opinion) (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyujo).

Minister Kitano received a B.A. from the University of Tokyo in 1980 and a M.A. in international relations from the University of Geneva in 1996.

In the pursuit to assess high-tech regions' performance in and capability for innovation and entrepreneurship, a bewildering variety of data is published, including:

• employment
• total corporate sales
• wages
• venture capital funding
• new company formation and growth of small firms
• R&D spending
• patents, and many more

However, on the basis of such heterogeneous indicators, it can be difficult or even impossible to compare regions. Some of this is inevitable given different perceived data needs in each region. However, perhaps a common core of data might be supplied.

To this end, the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship is bringing together scholars and researchers from the United States, Europe and Asia to present data from their own regions that would help with comparisons between regions and linkages among them, and to make the case for what they consider the most useful set of indicators.

There will be four workshop sessions: the first will be devoted to discussing a framework for looking at entrepreneurship and innovation regional indicators, and the remaining three will take a regional focus, proposing indicators closely related to innovative regions in the United States, Europe and Asia.

This event is part of the "The Shape of Things to Come" conference at the Fisher Conference Center at Stanford University, January 17-18, 2007.

» Presentations/Papers from the event