Comparative, policy-oriented research aimed at improving health care and the overall quality of life across the Asia-Pacific region is at the heart of AHPP’s mission and activities. As a research program within a world-class university, focusing exclusively on comparative health policy in Asia, it is unique. AHPP aims to provide evidence for addressing key health policy challenges in the Asia-Pacific, from links between poverty and ill health, to improving “value for money” and defining appropriate government and market roles in health systems. The program brings researchers to Stanford for on-site collaboration, and creates opportunities for Stanford students to conduct research in and about Asia.
The study of comparative health policy at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) dates back almost a quarter century, with its roots in the Comparative Health Care Policy Research Project inaugurated in 1990. Starting with pioneering research on health economics in Japan, the program has expanded since then to encompass research on health policy and demographic change throughout the region, albeit with a continuing focus on East Asia in comparative perspective.
Collaborative initiatives and global researchers
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AHPP’s leading-edge research involves experts on both sides of the Pacific. Among its current core research initiatives, AHPP is investigating the economic and social implications of Asia’s unprecedented demographic change, especially population aging and gender imbalance in China, as well as examining the determinants of health and health disparities among Asian populations.
AHPP is also analyzing evidence on health service delivery and financing in the Asia-Pacific region, such as the impact of expanding insurance coverage, reforming provider payment incentives, and contracting with the private sector. In addition, the program is conducting a comparative analysis of the historical development of health care institutions — like physician drug dispensing and recent reforms to separate prescribing from dispensing. AHPP also sponsors collaborative initiatives to address critical global health issues, including tobacco control, promotion of child health, and control of infectious diseases.
Preparing future health care policy experts
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The program is dedicated to training the next generation of health policy experts: undergraduate and graduate students gain crucial research experience by their involvement in AHPP’s research initiatives, as well as invaluable mentoring for their own projects. A postdoctoral fellowship was initiated in 2008, followed three years later by a fellowship for young health policy experts from low-income countries of Asia.
In addition to numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, recent AHPP publications include Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea and Prescribing Cultures and Pharmaceutical Policy in the Asia-Pacific. AHPP also runs its own working paper series that is open to scholars and health policy experts around the world.
Annual workshops and engaging seminars
Each year, AHPP assembles some of the world’s greatest health policy minds at Stanford to examine focused topics at conferences and workshops, resulting in special issues of journals, edited volumes, and ongoing collaborative research. In this thirtieth anniversary year of Shorenstein APARC, director Karen Eggleston organized a conference on “Economic Aspects of Population Aging in China and India,” co-sponsored by several related research programs at Harvard University.
In addition, AHPP organizes numerous public seminars throughout the academic year. Recent topics have included the battle against HIV/AIDS in Cambodia; immunizations and child health in Bangladesh; population aging in Japan; Vietnam’s health policy challenges; tobacco control in China; air pollution in South Asia; private health insurance in South Korea; and many other important health policy-related issues.
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AHPP director Karen Eggleston with physicians and nurses of Shandong
Provincial Hospital's Endocrinology department.
Although the Japan Studies Program (JSP) was formally established in 2011, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center’s (Shorenstein APARC) newest addition has a rich history that equals or even exceeds that of the Center itself. The archives—through dozens of occasional and working papers, studies, photographs of landmark events, and books—reveal three vibrant decades of research on Japanese economics, industry, government, and international relations.
Japan studies took root when the Center was founded in 1983 and has evolved with the political, economic, and social changes in Japan, and with developments in U.S.-Japan relations. Under the leadership of co-founding Center director Daniel I. Okimoto, one of the earliest projects explored U.S.-Japan competition and collaboration in high-tech industries during the 1980s and 1990s. Other initiatives led to a definitive three volume comparative study of Japan’s political economy, and an exploration of the United States’ evolving ties with its Northeast Asia allies, including Japan.
Director emeritus Daniel Okimoto receives Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in recognition of decades of work, 2007.
Early Center activities brought together distinguished scholars, practitioners, and policymakers from Japan and the United States for fruitful interdisciplinary academic collaboration and meaningful policy dialogue, and laid the groundwork for many enduring relationships with Japanese universities, ministries, and other organizations. One of the first of such activities was the U.S.-Japan Congressional Seminar series, through which members of the U.S. Senate and the Japanese Diet met for candid, in-depth discussion on issues of mutual significance related to trade, international economic policy, industrial policy, and security.
After Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, the country underwent a range of political, economic, and social transformations. Even amidst challenges, Japan has adapted, as its firms continue to be globally competitive in many areas, and it persists as an Asian economic powerhouse; on the security front, Japan remains one of the closest allies of the United States. Emerging out of these transformations is a new Japan that offers quite a different picture from the old rapid-growth era.
The newly instituted Japan Studies Program aims to make Stanford a U.S. leader in the field of contemporary Japan studies. As an integral component of the Center, JSP facilitates multidisciplinary, social science–oriented research on contemporary Japan, emphasizing both academic scholarship and policy-relevant research. The program aims to become a central platform for Stanford students and the broader community for understanding and engaging with Japan.
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JSP actively collaborates with other organizations on campus, such as the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), the US-Asia Technology Management Center, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. During the one-year anniversary of the March 11 Great Tohoku Disaster, JSP co-sponsored a lecture series with CEAS examining Japan’s growth and recovery, and it held a major conference focused on restructuring Japan’s energy industry. Since 2011, its popular lunchtime seminar series has brought numerous high-caliber guest speakers to Stanford for insightful talks on subjects ranging from cloud computing in Japan and the United States to the comeback of Japan’s conservative party and the new era of “Abenomics.”
JSP experts actively contribute to Shorenstein APARC’s publishing program of timely, policy-oriented edited volumes and working papers, and regularly contribute op-eds and journal articles to numerous leading newspapers and scholarly journals, including the Journal of East Asian Studies, Socio-Economic Review, and Energy Policy.
Looking ahead, Takeo Hoshi, who joined the Center as JSP’s director in December 2012, says, “I want to make Shorenstein APARC the first place that researchers, policymakers, business practitioners, and students visit to understand more about the Japanese economy and politics—I look forward to working with everyone at Shorenstein APARC (and beyond) to achieve this goal.” With a strong, growing core of affiliated faculty, researchers, and staff, the future for Japan studies at Stanford looks bright.
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In 2007, Daniel Okimoto, Shorenstein APARC director emeritus, received Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in recognition of decades of work. (Credit: courtesy Daniel Okimoto)
(l-r) Kenji Kushida, Masahiko Aoki, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, and Takeo Hoshi ( JSP director). Kurokawa, chair of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, spoke at JSP on how the scientific community can help policymakers respond to change in a globalized world. (Credit: Wena Rosario)
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A view of Tokyo Tower and the city's vibrant skyline, September 2012.
We consider the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to a disaster like the one that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi. Examination of Japanese nuclear plants affected by the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 shows that three variables were crucial at the early stages of the crisis: plant elevation, sea wall elevation, and location and status of backup generators. Higher elevations for these variables, or waterproof protection of backup generators, could have mitigated or prevented the disaster. We collected information on these variables, along with historical data on run-up heights, for 89 coastal nuclear power plants in the world. The data shows that 1. Japanese plants were relatively unprotected against potential inundation in international comparison, but there was considerable variation for power plants within and outside of Japan; 2. Older power plants and plants owned by the largest utility companies appear to have been particularly unprotected.
Sensitive wartime memories continue to resurface in Japan-South Korea relations, impeding important security collaboration efforts in Northeast Asia. Daniel Sneider describes the historical context and discusses recent events.
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Ships from the USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and the Republic of Korea navy conduct a trilateral exercise, June 2012.
U.S. Navy / Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Kaitlyn R. Breitkreutz / Released
This multiyear project, coordinated by Thomas Fingar, Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, looks sequentially and systematically at China’s interactions with countries in all regions and across many issue areas. The project seeks to clarify China’s objectives and policies to achieve them, but it also seeks to identify and explain the goals and policy calculations of other countries that see opportunities and perils associated with China’s greater activism on the world stage.
Phase one of the project examined China’s engagement with Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Scholars and foreign policy practitioners from China, Japan, the ROK, Russia, and the United Stated discussed these questions at a two-day workshop in Beijing in March 2012. Participants from several Southeast Asian countries also attended the workshop to ensure that questions explored were broad enough to facilitate comparisons and the search for patterns and learning across issues and areas at the follow-on regional workshop held in Singapore in November 2012.
The Singapore workshop, phase 2, discussed China's objectives and policies with respect to Southeast Asia, but focused primarily on the ways in which China's approach and actions are perceived by individual countries in the region and what regional countries seek to achieve with respect to China. Implicit in some of the presentations was the notion that China was trying to restore its traditional primacy in the region and to prevent any country inside or outside of Southeast Asia from exercising greater regional influence. Other participants emphasized material goals, including access to resources, markets for Chinese goods, and fostering economic dependence on China. Participants agreed that China's influence and impact are large and growing, and that states in the region are pursuing different strategies to advance their own interests and maximize their own freedom of action.
The third workshop, to be held at Stanford University on June 20-21, 2013, will examine China’s relationship with South and Central Asia. While there is a focus on the bilateral relationship between China and India, the largest and most powerful regional actor, the conference will also look at other key bilateral relationships, such as with Pakistan, and at interactions on a regional level, including in the economic sphere. The workshop will explore the management of cross border issues such as migration flows, water, and energy resource development. The sessions on Central Asia will offer broader understanding of China’s intersection with other powers such as Russia and India in that region.
Planners of United States postwar occupations in Japan and Korea anticipated the possibility of violence from overzealous Japanese who might refuse to accept their country’s defeat and revenge-seeking Koreans who might retaliate for colonial-era oppression. Though violence was evident in both Japan and Korea, it was far more intense on the peninsula than the archipelago. This paper examines this danger as one important dreg of Japanese colonial rule that divided the Korean people and disrupted their immediate post-liberation history. Its primary focus is on ramifications that these divisions and disruptions had on Korean politics and society in the period leading up to the Korean War.
A small group of Asia specialists at Stanford met for a retreat in the Wilbur Hall dorm complex in 1978, at the dawn of what later proved to be an era of transformative regional change, marked by the rise of Japan as an economic superpower and the early moments of China’s opening to the world.
By the end of the day, the seven scholars had set the groundwork for one of the university’s earliest interdisciplinary research organizations. Those early discussions led to the creation of the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford–now the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC)–an institution dedicated to exploring the dramatic changes in the world’s most dynamic region. This month the center, part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), celebrated 30 years of connecting Asia and Stanford and helping to guide American policy towards the region.
The Center’s founders were among those gathered to reflect on this history of interdisciplinary cooperation among the university’s scholars. “We respected one another’s areas of expertise—we wanted to learn from one another,” recalled co-founder Daniel I. Okimoto, former Shorenstein APARC director and a professor of political science emeritus. “There was a kind of dynamic learning curve that we all moved along.” Okimoto, a Japan specialist, co-founded the center with John W. Lewis, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics Emeritus and a FSI senior fellow.
Shorenstein APARC has evolved into a flourishing research center with five active research programs focusing on China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and comparative health policy in the Asia-Pacific. It also boasts a South Asia Initiative and a vibrant Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellows Program, which has grown alongside the center.
Shorenstein APARC has brought hundreds of visitors to Stanford from Asia over the years for academic exchange and policy dialogue, and it sponsors an increasing number of activities in Asia, such as conferences at the Stanford Center at Peking University, the Kyoto International Community House, and the National University of Singapore.
“If Shorenstein APARC did not now exist, Stanford would need to create it to keep abreast of today’s critical international issues,” said Walter Falcon, a former FSI director and a senior fellow at the institute.
The center kicked off its celebrations with a Jan. 17 talk by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and commemorated its anniversary with a May 2 symposium about the historic changes in the Asia-Pacific region over the past three decades.
"Shorenstein APARC's History," Directors' Panel, May 2
Originally established as the Northeast Asia-United States Forum on International Policy, Shorenstein APARC counts its “official” beginning as 1983, the year it came under the administration of Stanford’s International Strategic Institute, which is now FSI. The Center for International Security and Arms Control, its sister organization and today the Center for International Security and Cooperation, joined the institute at the same time.
In 1992, the Forum became the Asia/Pacific Research Center in recognition of the growing scope of U.S. interests in Asia. The center was renamed in September 2005 after Walter H. Shorenstein, a prominent San Francisco-area businessman and philanthropist, who helped insure the center’s long-term success by establishing a permanent endowment.
Speaking during the May 2 symposium, Okimoto said the founding group realized the benefits of looking at issues from a multidisciplinary perspective, and understood the need for their own views to remain flexible.
In the twilight of the Cold War, Shorenstein APARC’s earliest research focused on Northeast Asia, then one of the most strategically and economically important regions for the United States. The center initially explored such issues as high-tech competition and security collaboration with Japan and the emergence of China’s budding economic reforms.
Center research has responded to the impact of developments in the region on U.S. foreign policy, ranging from the growth of regional integration and a counter rise of nationalism, to the spread of democracy, the torrid pace of economic growth and the explosion of cross border movement of people, culture and ideas in Asia. Current initiatives are dedicated to understanding the implications of Asia’s unprecedented demographic change, reconciling the unresolved legacy of World War II memories in Northeast Asia, and finding solutions to the challenges posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Shorenstein APARC maintains its own active publishing program, with books distributed through Brookings Institution Press, and a contemporary Asia series published in collaboration with Stanford University Press. Some of its most recent leading-edge publications have dealt with political and economic reform in China, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the issue of aging in Northeast Asia.
Center research initiatives come to life through talks and conferences, offering members of the Stanford community and public the opportunity to hear from prominent government figures, scholars, authors, journalists, business people and non-governmental workers. Its popular, long-running annual event series include in the Oksenberg lecture on U.S.-Asia relations, the Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum on critical regional issues and the Shorenstein Journalism Award, granted to journalists on both sides of the Pacific who are at the forefront of promoting mutual understanding.
In the past decade, Shorenstein APARC has hosted engaging talks by speakers ranging from top politicians such as President Jimmy Carter and South Korea’s first female president, Park Geun-hye, to key cultural figures including Clint Eastwood and Chinese independent media pioneer Hu Shuli.
Since its earliest days, the center has also regularly convened important policy-focused dialogues on a wide range of issues, bringing together scholars and government officials. Such closed-session dialogues include the early U.S.-Japan Congressional Seminars, which brought together members of the U.S. Senate and Japanese Diet, the current series of Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogues, convened each year to address key issues in the Asia-Pacific region with global implications, and a long-running policy dialogue with South Korean scholars and policy makers.
Shorenstein APARC remains deeply committed to teaching and outreach. In collaboration with the School of Humanities and Science’s Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies, it supports a summer East Asia internship program for Stanford undergraduate and graduate students. It also regularly partners with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education on innovative Asia curriculum units for K-14 classrooms.
“The key to Shorenstein APARC’s success is its well-focused mission and ability to look to the future, enabled by the extraordinary people who take part in its research, publishing, and outreach activities,” said Gi-Wook Shin, the center’s current director and a senior fellow at FSI. “As we celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, we honor a vision turned into successful reality, and head toward a bright future of possibilities for continuing our work to foster lasting, cooperative relations with the countries of the Asia-Pacific region.”
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Shorenstein APARC directors past and present during the May 2 "Asia’s Rise" symposium (from l.): John W. Lewis, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics Emeritus; Daniel I. Okimoto, professor of political science emeritus; Henry S. Rowen, co-director, Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Andrew G. Walder, Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor; and Gi-Wook Shin, current Shorenstein APARC director.
On December 16, 2012, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which was swept from power in 2009 by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) after more than half a century of dominance, roared back with a landslide of its own. Entering the election with only 118 of 480 seats in the House of Representatives, the lower house of the National Diet, the LDP emerged with a whopping 294 seats, more than a third of them captured by first-time candidates. Moreover, the LDP and its long-time coalition partner, the Komeito, jointly surpassed the two-thirds threshold needed to override vetoes from the upper house, the House of Councillors, where the coalition lacks a majority—at least until the upper house election this July. The incumbent DPJ, which had taken power with an even more impressive 308 seats in 2009, retained just 57 seats this time, barely managing second place after three difficult years in government.
How did the LDP do it? In this presentation, Smith will highlight the key findings of two chapters on the LDP’s candidate selection and election results from the forthcoming volume, Japan Decides 2012 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), edited by Robert Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, and Ethan Scheiner.
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall, Room C331
616 Serra St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
(650) 724-5656
(650) 723-6530
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dmsmith@stanford.edu
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow
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PhD
Daniel M. Smith was a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2012–13 academic year.
He is an expert on Japanese politics whose research interests include political parties, elections and electoral systems, candidate recruitment and selection, and coalition government. During his time at Shorenstein APARC, he will be completing a book manuscript about the causes and consequences of political dynasties in developed democracies, with a particular focus on Japan.
Smith earned his PhD and MA in political science from the University of California, San Diego, and his BA in political science and Italian from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has conducted research in Japan as a Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology research scholar at Chuo University (2006–2007), and as a Fulbright IIE dissertation research fellow at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo (2010–2011). After completing his fellowship at Shorenstein APARC, he will join the Department of Government at Harvard University as an assistant professor.
The structure of the Chinese economy changed dramatically between 2005 and 2009. It changed from an export-investment leading economy to a domestic-demand leading economy. Before 2004 China was a huge factory because of its cheap and abundant labor. After 2010 it has become a huge market because of the rapid increase of their income level.
Not only the rapid growth of China’s GDP, but the rapid increase of the number of middle-class-income people in China whose GDP per capita surpass 10 thousand USD gave Japanese companies many business chances since 2010. Even under the worst political condition between Japan and China after Senkaku territorial dispute most of Japanese companies keep increasing their investment in China because Chinese local governments are so eager to invite the investment of Japanese companies. If Japan and China can realize the normalization of Sino-Japan relations, their win-win relationship should be accelerated.
The Xi Jinping’s administration started officially in March. Chinese ordinary people’s complaint against the Chinese government seems very strong mainly because the former administration put off the resolution of many important problems including the corruption of governmental officials, environmental deterioration, economic inequality. Xi Jinping’s administration should work on these difficult problems. In such a situation it is important for China to normalize Sino-Japan relations to enhance the economic stability.
Kiyoyuki Seguchi is the Research Director of the Canon Institute for the Global Studies. His research focuses on the Chinese economy and relations between the United States, China and Japan. He worked for the Bank of Japan from 1982 to 2009. He was the Chief Representative of the Representative Office of BOJ in Beijing from 2006 to 2008, the international visiting fellow at RAND Corporation (Los Angeles, CA) from 2004 to 2005. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Tokyo.
Philippines Conference Room
Kiyoyuki Seguchi
Research Director
Speaker
Canon Institute for the Global Studies
For more than thirty years, Shorenstein APARC’s Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellows Program has offered a unique opportunity for affiliate organizations to nominate personnel to spend an academic year at the Center. Since 1982 — one year before the Center even existed — visiting fellows in the program have been sharing ideas, forming connections, and broadening perspectives, from the early years when a handful of visiting fellows were hosted at Galvez House to recent groups of close to twenty visitors each year meeting in Encina Hall’s Okimoto conference room. As a recent visiting fellow observed, “Academically, professionally, and personally, the different perceptions I have now will change the way I approach and understand my future work.”
The present cohort of visiting fellows represents organizations in China, India, Japan, and Korea, and each fellow brings years of practical experience and an international perspective that informs and enriches the intellectual exchange at the Center and at Stanford University. A majority of the current affiliate organizations have participated continuously in the program for the past five years, or even longer.
The program — ideal for mid-career managers who wish to deepen their knowledge on topics relevant to their work — has fellows participating in a structured program, which includes creating an individual research project; auditing classes; attending exclusive seminars; and visiting local companies and institutions. In addition to broadening their views through interaction with world-class scholars, visiting fellows can network with managers from different countries and corporations.
With such an array of activities, every day in the life of a visiting fellow is different, and every year differs as well. The core research goal remains constant, but the changing composition of each group — more female fellows, varied professional backgrounds, and new countries joining the mix — keeps the program exciting and unique. One of the earliest visiting fellows from one of the longest-standing affiliate organizations put it best: “Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University and, more broadly, the Silicon Valley are culturally unique, and this program offers a great opportunity to understand some of the ins and outs and different mindsets that make the region so successful.”
The wide variety of participants has possessed an equally broad range of interests. Over the past three decades, visiting fellows have pursued research on topics ranging from “The Deregulation of Telecommunications Industries in Japan and the United States” to “Northeast Asian Interdependence;” from “Corporate Governance & Energy Management” to “Advanced Tools for Complete Characterization of Biopharmaceutical Products” to “Risk Management in Large Commercial Banks in China.”
Once visiting fellows return to their home institutions, the Corporate Affiliates Program stays connected with alumni, allowing it to maintain close partnerships with not only its affiliate organizations, but also with all of the people who have passed through the program. The alumni network has grown to more than 350, with many individuals holding prominent positions in both the corporate and governmental sectors, working in countries around the world including Russia, France, Indonesia, and Australia. Recent alumni events held in locations like Seoul and Tokyo have kept the program in close contact even with those visiting fellows who came through the Center during the early years.
The Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellows Program thrives by bringing together a diverse international group, and through the shared experiences of research and study at Stanford University. It creates long-lasting bonds and a new community — one that enriches the university and finds within itself new, constructive perspectives. Ultimately, the hope is that these experiences will over time contribute to stronger U.S.-Asia relations.
Over the course of a year, Corporate Affiliates visiting fellows learn about the United States, but also learn a lot from each other. Fellows from the 2011-12 academic year show their Stanford pride. Corporate Affiliates is Shorenstein APARC's longest-running program.
Director emeritus Daniel Okimoto receives Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in recognition of decades of work, 2007.
