Stanford scholars are urging Japan to take advantage of an upcoming opportunity to show clear, heartfelt remorse for its actions surrounding World War II.

Making such amends will give Japan credibility as it seeks to assume a global leadership role well into the future, they say.

On Aug. 15, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will publish a short statement to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which follows similar practices of his predecessors.

Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), which has long advocated wartime reconciliation in Asia, recently issued a 15-page report in English and Japanese featuring eight hypothetical statements suggesting what the Japanese prime minister might say in his August address. The report, which is available in both English and Japanese, was recently made available to academics, media and the general public and has already received interest from the Japanese media.

The wording of Abe's statement will be scrutinized by governments and experts in Asia and around the world, the Stanford scholars say. During WWII, China and Korea, as well as other Asian nations, endured brutal Japanese military occupations.

"Many have been speculating what the (Abe) statement will be like," wrote Takeo Hoshi, director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Center, and APARC associate director for research Daniel Sneider in the report.

For example, Hoshi and Sneider asked, will Abe follow the direction set by prior Japanese prime ministers by expressing remorse for the suffering of Japan's Asian neighbors while apologizing for past aggression and colonization? Future collaboration in world affairs is also important, they added.

"We asked our colleagues what they would say in the 70th anniversary statement if they were the prime minister of Japan, and to write their own version of the statement," Hoshi and Sneider wrote.

"Our goal is to understand the diversity of reasonable views on the issue of Japan's responsibility for the cruel and violent war and Japan's role in building a peaceful and prosperous world," Hoshi and Sneider said.

The Stanford experts who wrote the statements included Hoshi and Sneider as well as Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Peter Duus, a professor emeritus of Japanese history; Thomas Fingar, a distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; David Holloway, a professor of international history and of political science; Yong Suk Lee, the SK Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and Harry Rowen, a professor emeritus of public policy and management.

For example, Fingar said in his version, "Let us also resolve to make the 80th anniversary of World War II the 10th anniversary of a more cooperative, more inclusive, and more secure region," and Hoshi wrote in his version, "To avoid any potential misunderstandings, Japan needs to recall past failures, remember the suffering of neighboring Asian peoples, and reaffirm the commitment to world peace more than ever."

On the subject of women, Lee's version noted, "The war and Japan's colonial rule created much suffering, but I would like to especially ask forgiveness to the women from many nations who suffered under colonial rule."

In August 2014, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center issued a report on a Stanford-hosted dialogue on World War II memories in northeast Asia. Heightened tensions the last few years among the governments of China, Japan and South Korea have revolved around territorial disputes and the way WWII is portrayed in speeches and educational materials.

"Each nation in northeast Asia and even the U.S. has selective or divided memories of the past, and does not really understand the views of the other side," said Stanford's Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Shorenstein center, in a 2014 Stanford news release.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

Responses to the project

Toyo Keizai, a leading Japanese business weekly, published all eight verisons in English and Japanese stating, "we hope this will provide an opportunity to bring about a wide range of discussion."

University of Tokyo professor Tetsuji Okazaki wrote about the project in the Asahi Shimbun (the article is in Japanese and also attached as a PDF below).

It’s been 29 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but two nuclear security experts affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) say there are still lessons to be learned from the worst nuclear accident of the 20th century.

In a new book by Sonja Schmid, the former CISAC science fellow argues that the consensus in the West about the cause of the disaster – that it was an inevitable result of a deeply flawed, backward Soviet system –  has precluded Western nuclear industries and policymakers from meaningfully incorporating the Soviet experience into their own practices.

The book, “Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry”, is being praised by leading experts in the nuclear security field, including Freeman-Spogli Institute (FSI) Senior Fellow David Holloway who wrote: "[Schmid's] argument that the Soviet experience has to be incorporated into our broader understanding of the nuclear industry is both convincing and important."

Schmid was a social science research associate at Stanford University, a science fellow at CISAC, and a lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Stanford from 2005-2007. She is now an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s STS Department.

Schmid credits CISAC with providing resources crucial to the conception, research, and completion of “Producing Power,” including multiple travel grants to conduct research for the book, help with editing preliminary drafts, and a final book edit.

Schmid also tapped CISAC’s stable of nuclear experts. Along with Holloway, CISAC Associate Director for Research Lynn Eden mentored and supported her project. Siegfried Hecker, an FSI senior fellow, connected her with multiple Russian interviewees.

“Mentoring Sonja was a great pleasure. She came to CISAC with deep insight about the close connection between Soviet state bureaucracies and the reactor design choices that those bureaucrats made. It was an amazingly interesting and ambitious project,” Eden said.

“CISAC is a scholarly community that encourages and supports outstanding research and writing that is in some way policy-relevant,” she said. “For our pre- and post-doctoral fellows especially, we want to encourage them and help them to think deeply and/or broadly about a question that affects people’s lives, and to write clearly about it.”

Edward Geist, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, said Schmid’s book is the first to grapple with the institutional history of Soviet nuclear power.

“The traditional accounts have tended to organize events around a ‘what went wrong’ narrative,” said Geist, whose article “Political Fallout: The Failure of the Emergency Management at Chernobyl”, appeared in the spring issue of Slavic Review. ”There’s a school of thought that emerged in the Soviet Union and was readily picked up abroad that says the Chernobyl disaster was the ultimate example of everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union,” Geist said.

This worries Geist, who specializes in nuclear power, Soviet history, and emergency management.

“As a result of having lived through the worst, Russian and Ukrainian nuclear energy industry leaders, to my mind, actually have a more realistic mindset regarding the hazards of nuclear energy than their Western counterparts,” Geist said.  “While a catastrophic nuclear accident in the United States is really unlikely, the nuclear industry claims to have made nuclear power safe through superior methods and procedures–and that attitude can forestall effective emergency planning.”

The Chernobyl disaster hurt popular trust in nuclear energy, including in the United States. The still-popular narrative that Chernobyl was a problem purely of Soviet making was spun by representatives of nuclear industries in other countries to protect their interests from popular backlash.

By detailing the decision processes and procedures behind the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactor choice, design and commercialization, Schmid aims to show that the Soviet process was rational and the product of expert input rather than an irrational byproduct of the Communist regime. Chernobyl, in short, was an accident of history rather than a byproduct of an illegitimate system and should therefore be studied by members of the Western nuclear industry and policymakers.

“The Western nuclear field has more to learn from the Soviet experience than they care to admit. The bureaucratic practices of the Soviets are not really that unique to them and can be repeated by our bureaucracies,” said Geist.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan was a case in point. Fukushima’s reactors were designed and built by Americans.

It’s Schmid’s hope that by putting Chernobyl in the context of what was a sophisticated nuclear energy bureaucracy that had many more successes than failures, much like its American counterpart, that lessons of caution can be drawn by the latter.

“What Chernobyl has demonstrated (and Fukushima has only confirmed),” writes Schmid, “is that organizing a civilian nuclear industry remains at best a high-stakes process of trial and error.”

Geist, with an eye on his field of emergency management, agrees.

“The lesson from Chernobyl and Fukushima is accidents happen no matter what procedures or levels of sophistication, but accidents need not be catastrophes if you’re willing to learn from others’ errors and incorporate them into planning.”

Japan must transform its economy in a way that mirrors the innovation ethos in places like Silicon Valley and Stanford University, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday during a speech on campus.

As an example of how to encourage such creativity, Abe hailed a new partnership starting this fall with Stanford that will train the next generation of biomedical experts. In doing so, he urged a "fundamental change" in how Japanese society views the process of innovation, from how ideas originate to competition in the marketplace.

Japan Biodesign will be launched in collaboration with the Stanford Biodesign program and five higher education and research institutions in Japan. Faculty members will work together to create new interdisciplinary systems based on Stanford Biodesign. Stanford leaders will train and mentor their Japanese colleagues.

Abe, who is the first Japanese prime minister to visit Stanford, marveled at how the tech sector in the United States has "consistently evolved at top speed."

He said, "I want the best and brightest Japanese talent" to learn about Silicon Valley.

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Abe shared the Bing Concert Hall stage with Stanford President John Hennessy and George Shultz, the former U.S. Secretary of State and distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution. Abe's talk, titled "Innovation, Japan and Silicon Valley Symposium," included an introduction and remarks by Hennessy and Shultz. The event drew a full house of invited guests and members of the Stanford community.

"It is a great honor" to be at Stanford, Abe said in beginning his remarks.

He noted that Japan is revisiting its regulatory and tax systems in order to encourage more economic dynamism and competition. "The Japanese people will benefit from innovation," he said.

The challenge, he acknowledged, has been the slow pace of innovation in Japan. Today, however, the Internet economy and big data are creating "enormous changes" in his country's economic approach, he said. "We have to catch up, or otherwise Japan will lose vitality," Abe added.

Cultural connections

In his introduction of Abe, Hennessy chronicled Stanford's long history and friendship with Japan and its people.

Japan, he said, is home to more Stanford alumni than any other Asian country, and when the university's doors first opened in 1891, the pioneer class included a Japanese student. Currently, 139 students from Japan are enrolled at Stanford.

Hennessey described Abe as focused on revitalizing Japan's economy and stewarding it toward a greater global role.

Shultz, who knew Abe's parents, shared recollections of poignant moments between Abe's politically prominent family and his own.

Abe joined a roundtable discussion after his speech with Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Stanford Board of Trustees Chair Steve Denning; Stanford School of Medicine Dean Lloyd Minor; Stanford political science Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto; Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang; and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, among other scholars and dignitaries. He also met with Stanford students before leaving campus.

Afterward, McFaul wrote in an email, "I think it is fantastic that Prime Minister Abe came to Stanford and Silicon Valley after his very successful visit to Washington. He demonstrated that deepening U.S.-Japanese relations requires not only strong government-to-government ties, but also deepening ties between our societies, including educational institutions like Stanford."

Abe's state visit to the United States this week included the first address by a Japanese leader to a joint session of Congress. Abe served as prime minister of Japan in 2006-07 and returned to the position in 2012.

'Working together'

On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama said after a meeting with Abe that the two countries had made progress in trade talks on a massive 12-nation trade deal that would open markets around the Pacific Rim to U.S. exports. Both nations face domestic political obstacles to concluding the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

"This agreement would expand the coverage of the free trade agreements for both Japan and the U.S. substantially," said Stanford economist Takeo Hoshi, director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in an interview. "The U.S. and Japan have been working together to maintain peace and sustain economic growth in the Pacific Asia."

Hoshi said that Abe's visit to the Silicon Valley confirms that Japan is serious about transforming its economy from one based on exports to one focused on innovations.

"Going forward, we can learn a lot from Japanese experience and their reform attempts," said Hoshi, who is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Hoshi spoke with The Associated Press just before Abe’s arrival to California, citing Silicon Valley as the ideal place for Japan to learn about innovation. He also joined KQED’s Forum to discuss the current state of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Later, he was interviewed by BBC Business about Abe's visit to Stanford.

Stanford Biodesign

Founded in 2001, Stanford Biodesign has pioneered a new training methodology in which interdisciplinary teams of engineers and physicians go through a rigorous process of carefully characterizing unsolved clinical needs before jumping to technology solutions.

For the Japan Biodesign program, the bulk of the educational activities will take place at the campuses of the partner Japanese universities.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

In conversation with Shorenstein APARC, Takeo Hoshi, Stanford professor and director of the Japan Program, discusses his intial draw to studying the Japanese economy, and its intersections with finance and public policy. Hoshi highlights some of his recent research and the Japan Program's upcoming activities, including a new student course focused on innovation-based economic growth in Silicon Valley and Japan.

What led you to study the Japanese economy?

I majored in social sciences as an undergrad at the University of Tokyo. I was especially intrigued by macroeconomics – the study of the aggregate economy (GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, etc.).  I came to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. In the 1980s, Japan’s economy was growing relatively fast and performing better than the United States and other advanced economies. Japan was boring for a macroeconomist. But soon after I got my doctorate in economics, Japan started to encounter some economic problems and became interesting, so this is what I started to investigate. I shifted my focus from theoretical work to empirical work, and began to look at the Japanese economy, especially its financial aspects.

Can you tell us more about your current research focus?

I have continued to do research on Japan’s financial system. I have just completed two papers on this subject. One examines financial regulatory changes in Japan after the global financial crisis, and the second studies the development of capital market regulations in Japan, again focusing on the period after the global financial crisis. I also have a research project on institutional foundations for innovation-based economic growth. I work with Kenji Kushida, also at Shorenstein APARC, and Richard Dasher, at the U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center, for this project. We study the economy seen in Silicon Valley, perhaps the best example of innovation-based economic growth, and examine what Japan needs to do to achieve similar growth. For example, here in Silicon Valley, venture capital plays a very important role in providing capital to startups. In Japan, the role and size of venture capital is much smaller. We’ve been researching to find out why this is. Good ideas always exist in a society, but depending on the condition of the economy and policies created, entrepreneurs may find barriers to getting them anywhere without access to capital. It’s about connecting capital to the right ideas at the right time.

What’s ahead for the Japan Program this year?

The Japan Program has several events coming up. In April, an event will focus on international terrorism and how Japan faces newer security threats such as the Islamic State. Given the recent killings of the Japanese hostages, the threat of international terrorism is evident to people in Japan. For U.S. citizens, it’s been apparent for awhile, but for Japanese citizens it is a more recent realization. The Japan Program also has an upcoming project that highlights the 70^th anniversary of World War II, which is being commemorated this year. At the 50^th and 60^th anniversaries of the War, the prime minister of Japan gave a short statement reflecting on Japan’s past actions and reinforcing its pacifist vision for the future. The current leader Shinzo Abe will also do this. Colleagues from Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies have been asked to write a short statement that they would give if they were in the Prime Minister’s shoes. A broad cross section of faculty authors coming from different disciplines are participating and will provide diverse views. The collection of statements will be compiled into a report (in both English and Japanese).

This spring, you’re teaching a new course Innovation Based Economic Growth. What makes this course unique?

I’m very excited to be back teaching again. Since arriving at Stanford in 2011, I haven’t yet taught a course, so it’s a great opportunity. It’s a project-based course focused on innovation policy in Japan. Students will form groups and perform research on several policies aimed at encouraging innovations in Japanese businesses. Students will then analyze those policies once they are implemented. In the process, students will develop a framework for policy evaluation. And for some of those policies, we may be able to collaborate with a part of the Japanese government to implement a policy evaluation framework.

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

I am a devote San Diego Chargers fan. And, as a child, my dream job was to own a hardware store.