Despite early talk of being able to “decouple” itself from the U.S. financial crisis and accompanying credit crunch, the damage has spread to Asia. Collapsing export markets, currency instability and stock market collapses are plaguing all of Asia, not least China, Japan and South Korea. At the same time, China and Japan are major financiers of the United States federal government and newly nationalized financial firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Two leading economic experts on Japan and China will discuss the impact of the U.S. financial crisis on Asia. Does Japan’s experience with banking collapse bear any lessons for the United States today? Will China continue to finance the United States government? How will a U.S. recession affect the prospects for economic growth in Asia?

Richard Katz has taught about Japan’s economy as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. Previously, and as a Visiting Lecturer in Economics at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook.  Mr. Katz is the author of two books on Japan's economic trvails; The System That Soured--The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle (M.E. Sharpe 1998) and Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (M.E. Sharpe 2002).  He has twice testified about Japan and Asia before Congress, in 1998 and 2005. Both times the hearings were held by the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee. In the year 2000, he served on the Council of Foreign Relations' Task Force on the Japanese economy.  Having received his B.A. degree in History from Columbia University in 1973, Mr. Katz went on to obtain his M.A. in Economics at New York University (NYU) in 1996.
 
Mark Spiegel served as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at New York University.  He has served as a visiting professor in the Economics Department of U.C. Berkeley, as well as a lecturer at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley.  He has also served as a consultant at the World Bank, as a visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan, and as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Committee on International Economic Analysis.  Dr. Spiegel received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles and his B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.  Dr. Spiegel has published numerous articles in both academic and policy-oriented journals on international financial issues and on economic issues associated

About the speaker
George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. A leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, he is the former editor of Diplomatic History and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, among other books.

Dr. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 is the twelfth and latest book in the Oxford History of the United States, and the first book in the series to focus on a single subject, U.S. foreign policy.

Dr. Herring earned a PhD in history from the University of Virginia, and has been a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

About the moderator
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and co-director of The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Professor Kennedy is the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American Studies).

About From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

Image

From the American Revolution to the fifty-year struggle with communism and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 tells the dramatic story of America’s emergence as a superpower—its birth in revolution, its troubled present, its uncertain future.

» Buy it from Oxford University Press: "From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776" (Oxford University Press, 2008)

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation in print. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winner of prestigious Bancroft and Parkman prizes. From Colony to Superpower is the only thematic volume commissioned for the series.  Here, George C. Herring uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America’s dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world’s greatest superpower.

Quotes in praise of From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

“George Herring’s well-paced, readable, and up-to-date history of U.S. foreign relations will be the authoritative account for this generation.”
- Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine
“In this splendidly detailed account, George Herring expertly guides us through the rich and fascinating story of America’s foreign relations. This is history on a grand scale, clearly and elegantly rendered. Anyone who wants to understand how the Untied States has come to occupy its current place on the world stage should read this magisterial book."
- Fredrik Logevall, co-author of A People and a Nation

This event - the final in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion with director Clint Eastwood - is part of the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

Letters From Iwo Jima Synopsis

Sixty-one years ago, US and Japanese armies met on Iwo Jima. Decades later, several hundred letters are unearthed from that stark island's soil. The letters give faces and voices to the men who fought there, as well as the extraordinary general who led them.

The Japanese soldiers are sent to Iwo Jima knowing that in all probability they will not come back. Among them are Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who wants only to live to see the face of his newborn daughter; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian champion known around the world for his skill and his honor; Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a young former military policeman whose idealism has not yet been tested by war; and Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), a strict military man who would rather accept suicide than surrender.

Leading the defense is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), whose travels in America have revealed to him the hopeless nature of the war but also given him strategic insight into how to take on the vast American armada streaming in from across the Pacific.

With little defense other than sheer will and the volcanic rock of the island itself, Gen. Kuribayashi's unprecedented tactics transform what was predicted to be a quick and bloody defeat into nearly 40 days of heroic and resourceful combat.

Almost 7,000 American soldiers were killed on Iwo Jima; more than 20,000 Japanese troops perished. The black sands of Iwo Jima are stained with their blood, but their sacrifices, their struggles, their courage and their compassion live on in the letters they sent home.

This is the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.  We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

This is the third in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion of the audience.

Yamato Synopsis

During late World War II, the Japanese army starts loosing the battle.  Special junior officers including Kamio (Kenichi Matsuyama) board Yamato and meet officer Moriwaki (Takashi Sorimachi) and Uchia (Shidou Nakamura).  However, this battle marks the virtual end of the combined fleet of the ikmperial Japanese Navy.  Then in April 1945. Yamato is ordered to carry out a suicide mission and sets out tot he waters of Okinawa...

This is the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.  We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

This is the first in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion of the audience.

Devils on the Doorstep synopsis

Renowned actor Jiang Wen directs this sweeping look at a small Chinese village located near the Great Wall during the closing days of WWII. As Japanese soldiers march up and down the village's main thoroughfare, Ma Dasan (Wen) is making love with his widowed lover Yu'er (Jiang Hongbo). Suddenly, there is a knock at the door and a gun at Ma's head. He is informed that for the next week he is to house two gagged and bound prisoners, one a fanatical Japanese soldier, the other a Chinese translator -- and to interrogate the pair. The village elders uneasily question the two, while the translator intentionally mistranslates the epithets and insults from the soldier. When the Chinese resistance fighters do not return to pick up the prisoners, the villagers panic and order Ma to execute them. Ma, in turn, panics and tries to hide the cantankerous duo in the Great Wall -- that is until the villagers discover his ruse and almost lynch him, despite a strongly worded defense by Yu'er. Six months later, the villagers become increasingly worried about boarding these prisoners, lest they all be branded collaborators. This film won the prestigious Grand Prix at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.