From his journalistic point of view, Jaekwon Son will discuss competitiveness and weaknesses of Samsung and Psy that have recently made top news stories.

Son is a 2012-2013 visiting scholar with the Korean Studies Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Son, a reporter at the Maeil Business Newspaper in Korea, conducts research on the impact of new media journalism, such as social networking through smart devices. He has co-authored several books including The Appstore Economics (2010), Mobile Changes the World (2010), and The Naver Republic (2007). He has been awarded Jounalist of the Month from the Korea Jounalist Association (2012) and Jounalist of the Year from the Hanvit Culture Foundation (2008).

Son holds a BA in classical Chinese from Korea University.

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In this session of the Shorenstein APARC Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellows Research Presentations, the following will be presented:

Yasuaki Hanai, "Are Japanese Electric Companies Becoming Obsolete? –  Rethinking Strong Points for Japanese Electric Companies

In recent years, it has become very common to take pictures using a smart phone or tablet, such as an iPad, and to share this information via social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  Japanese electric companies and products have been noticeably absent from this area, except for the single-lens reflex camera.  How has this happened?  Why have Japanese electric companies suffered a decline?  In his research, Hanai tries to answer these questions by analyzing the financial reports of various Japanese companies after the bubble economy collapse.  Hanai also considers strong points for Japanese electric companies and what the next actions should be to reverse the decline.

Saiko Nakagawa,  "Systemic Risks in the Japanese Banking Sector"

“Systemic risk” has become a buzzword after the global financial crisis in 2007-08.  Due to its elusive nature, there have been active discussions among scholars, international organizations and national regulators on how to measure and address the risk in order to prevent the next crisis.  In her presentation, Nakagawa will introduce these recent discussions and argue the implications to Japan’s financial sector.

Masashi Suzuki, "Dismal Software Industry in Japan – Will It Be Disrupted or Will It Discover Its Own Way like U.S. Players?"

In his research, Suzuki provides an historical analysis of the software market in Japan and the United States as well as a comprehensive analysis of the status quo of these two countries. Are there ways to improve the unfavorable situation in Japan?  Suzuki attempts to provide an answer to this question in his research presentation. 

Bin Wang, "Innovation and New Venture Strategies in China"

In recent years, entrepreneurship has played an increasing role in promoting economic growth in China.  The Chinese government began to pay more attention to encourage entrepreneurship in order to reform the economic structure.  Wang’s research examines the characteristics of the emerging industry and reveals a positive relationship between innovation capabilities and growth of new venture.  He developed a framework to classify new venture strategies based on market characteristics and innovation capabilities, identified ten strategic types, and reviewed their impact on performance in new ventures in China.  Wang’s research attempts to provide important guidelines for venture capital to identify potential investment opportunities.  These guidelines will also help entrepreneurs to identify an appropriate strategy to pursue business opportunities in given situations. 

In the wake of the V-J Day on August 14, 1945, eleven nations that had been at war with Japan established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in the capital city, Tokyo, in order to hold wartime leaders of Japan accountable for the commission of aggression and atrocities against the people of China and other nations in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to the Tokyo Tribunal, the Allied Powers set up additional war crimes courts at some 50 separate locations across the former theaters of war—in British Southeast Asia, China, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, the Philippines, and other Allied-controlled Central and South Pacific Islands. More than 2,240 trials involving some 5,700 suspected war criminals were carried out between 1945 and 1951.

Dr. Totani is currently working on a book project that explores a cross-section of these trials in order to assess their historical significance in our understanding of war, war crimes, war guilt, and issues of individual responsibility, justice, and the rule of law. In this talk, she will discuss the general trends of war crimes studies for the last seven decades or so in order to consider what present-day relevance there is, if any, in exploring the records of these historical trials for the further advancement of Asia-Pacific studies and, especially, in relation to the fields of law, history, international relations, and human rights.

Yuma Totani earned her Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005. She authored The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008) and produced its expanded Japanese-language edition, Tōkyō saiban: dai niji taisen go no hō to seigi no tsuikyū (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 2008). As a recepient of the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars (of ACLS) for 2012-2013, she is presently working on her new book project while based for residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Grant Miller will discuss the results of his SAPARC-funded research in rural China, supplementing a large NIH-funded project about pay-for-performance to improve health. The research was designed to test the effect of offering school principals small incentives for anemia reduction on the health and academic performance of primary school students – potentially leading to substantially more cost-effective health policies.

Grant Miller, PHD, MPP, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Stanford Center for International Development and a Faculty Affiliate of the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies. His primary areas of interest are health and development economics and economic demography.

Miller's current research focuses broadly on behavioral obstacles to health improvement in developing countries. One line of studies investigates household decision-making underlying puzzlingly low adoption rates of highly efficacious health technologies (like point-of-use drinking water disinfectants and improved cookstoves) in many poor countries. Another vein of research investigates misaligned macro- and micro-level incentives governing the supply of health technologies and services. He has conducted these and other research projects at institutions including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Urban Institute, and the University of California-San Francisco's Institute for Health Policy Studies. He received a BA in psychology from Yale College, a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a PhD in health policy/economics also from Harvard.

Officials, scholars, and activists have long believed in improving environmental policy in developing countries by fostering desirable values and practices through networks of experts. Tim Forsyth will question this faith by arguing that all too often such networks ignore the limitations of global environmental assessments and the politics involved in producing and using expert opinion. Using preliminary evidence from Indonesia and Thailand, he will show how Procrustean advice and local agendas affect efforts to mitigate climate change, and what that can mean for the generation of greenhouse gas (through energy use) and its absorption in sinks (through forest conservation). Forsyth argues that more deliberative institutions of environmental information, judgment, and decision can better accommodate local knowledge and vulnerabilities, strike productive balances between mitigation and adaptation, and thereby address climate change in Southeast Asia in more timely and effective ways.

Tim Forsyth is Reader in Environment and Development in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has published widely on matters of politics of environmental science and policy in Southeast Asia including Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science (Routledge, 2003); Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand (with A. Walker, Washington University Press, 2008); and International Investment and Climate Change: Energy Technologies for Developing Countries (Earthscan, 1999). He was a co-author of the chapter on climate change in the international Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005).