In cooperation with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and other organizations, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and its partners--Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, the LSE Cities program of the London School of Economics and Cisco--will be presenting the Global Green Cities of the 21st Century International Symposium in San Francisco, CA, from February 23-25, 2011.

Cities are at the epicenter of the global economy, and of the dramatic shift of population from rural to urban settings in many countries around the world. They are also at the heart of the transition to new, more sustainable economic models, as energy and other resources are used more efficiently, emissions are reduced, and the quality of life of their residents is enhanced.

This Symposium is a high-level, invitation-only exchange among a select group of the world's most innovative elected officials, planners, architects, academics and business leaders around the theme of sustainable urban development and the evolution of green cities. Its objective is to advance the state of the art in green urban design, based on the vision and shared experience of some of the world's most innovative leaders and places.

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Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

In March 2000, the release of Sony's new PlayStation2 hit a snag. The Japanese government classified the game console as a "general purpose product related to conventional weapons" on the grounds that it was powerful enough to be used as an actual missile guidance system. Accordingly, the government applied export controls on PlayStation2 requiring that distributors obtain a special license. Illustrating the coinage of such terms as "military-industrial-entertainment complex," the incident marked one of numerous collusions between military and commercial uses of video games in Japan and elsewhere.

It is against this backdrop that Frühstück traces the rules and conventions of war games from the fields of rural Japan in the nineteenth century to cyberspace in the twenty-first century. Her examination of the varying configurations of militarism and infantilism, the production of "child soldiers," and the competing roles of state agencies and entertainment industries suggest that war has been leaving its mark on the social body, and on children in particular, not only in the form of injury or death. Rather, through military institutions, pedagogy, technology, popular culture, and other intermediaries, war continues to have general effects on Japanese society and the global order as a whole.

Sabine Frühstück is a professor of modern Japanese cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Employing historical and sociocultural methodologies, Frühstück's research focuses on militarization and war, gender and sexuality, and Japan in a global context from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Her book Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) was translated into Japanese as Fuan na heishitachi: Nippon Jieitai Kenkyû (2008). She is also the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) and Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft, 1908-1941 (1997), and co-editor of the volumes The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998), Neue Geschichten der Sexualität in Zentraleuropa und Ostasien (1999), and Recreating Japanese Men (in press, 2011). Committed to engaging the humanities and the social sciences, she has written essays in English, Japanese and German that have been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, American Ethnologist, Jinbun Gakuho, and Zeitschrift für angewandte Sozialforschung, among other scholarly journals.

Since joining the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Frühstück has been serving as the executive board director of the UC-wide Pacific Rim Research Program and as a member of the editorial boards of the University of California Press and the Journal of Japanese Studies. She also has been a member of the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation, the executive board of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan, and the Board of Trustees of the Society for Japanese Studies. At UCSB, she has dry appointments with the departments of history, anthropology, and feminist studies, and the Cold War Center.

China and the World: The Stanford China Program, in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies, will host a special series of seminars to examine China as a major political and economic actor on the world stage. Over the course of the autumn and winter terms, leading scholars will examine China's actions and policies in the new global political economy. What is China's role in global governance? What is the state of China's relations with its Asian neighbors? Is China being more assertive both diplomatically as well as militarily? Are economic interests shaping its foreign policies? What role does China play amidst international conflicts?

M. Taylor Fravel is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science and member of the Security Studies Program at MIT. He studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia.  His current projects examine the evolution of China's military strategy since 1949 and the relationship between material capabilities and political influence in China's rise as a great power.

This event is part of the China and the World series.

Despite growing evidence that China's success in taking advantage of the global system is a function of its willingness to accede to existing norms, pundits, and many academics, continue to predict that China's rise will transform the international system, usually for the worse.  Indeed, one can make a stronger case that China's participation in the US-led global system has transformed China far more than it has changed the institutions and norms that support globalization and facilitate China's rise.

Dr. Thomas Fingar is the Oksenberg/Rohlen Distinguished Fellow. In 2009, he was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and, concurrently, as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

This event is part of the China and the World series.

Professor Ogawa will present recent work on declining fertility and the rising cost of children in East Asian countries, using measures of investment per child from the National Transfer Accounts analysis of public and private investments in children's education and health. He and his co-authors also study whether the amount of resources allocated to children has been crowded out by the increasing amount of resources needed for support of the elderly in Japan and other aging societies.

Naohiro Ogawa is professor of population economics at the Nihon University College of Economics and Advanced Research Institute for Sciences and Humanities (ARISH), Tokyo. He is also Director of the Nihon University Population Research Institute (NUPRI). Over the past thirty years he has written extensively on population and development in Japan and other Asian countries. More specifically, his research has focused on issues such as socioeconomic impacts of low fertility and rapid aging, modeling demographics and social security-related variables, as well as policies related to fertility, employment, marriage, child care, retirement and care for the elderly. His recent work includes measuring intergenerational transfers. He has published numerous academic papers in internationally recognized journals. In collaboration with other scholars he has also edited several journals and books among which the most recent one is Population Aging, Intergenerational Transfers and the Macroeconomy (2007). Naohiro Ogawa has served on a number of councils, committees and advisory boards set up by the Japanese government and international organizations such as the Asian Population Association, the IUSSP and the WHO. He is currently an associate member of the Science Council of Japan.