Japanese soldiers and sailors were indoctrinated to chose death before the dishonor of surrender, but 35,000 had been taken prisoner before Japan surrendered. Thanks to the language skills and cultural understanding of Japanese-Americans as well as trained Caucasian intelligence personnel, we gained valuable intelligence that shortened the war. POWs had expected to be executed after repatriation, but once the war ended, as many Japanese said, "We had all become prisoners." For the most part, the Allies treated Japanese prisoners decently, a fact that contributed to the successful occupation of Japan that followed.

Rick Straus was born in Germany and lived seven years in prewar Japan. After the war ended he became a Japanese Language Officer and served in the Occupation at GHQ, Tokyo. This included selecting and translating German documents into English and Japanese for the Prosecution Staff at the Tokyo Trial.

While on a Fulbright grant at Keio University, Straus passed the Foreign Service examination. Half of his 30-year career was in Japan (Embassy Tokyo and Consul General on Okinawa). His last assignment was faculty member at the National War College. After "retiring", Straus taught adult education courses on Japan at Washington area universities and ran the Japanese Language Program at the Foreign Service Institute.

Since moving to northern Michigan a decade ago, Straus wrote The Anguish of Surrender (University of Washington Press, February 2004) based on U.S. and Japanese sources. A Japanese language version appeared last fall. He is on the board of the World Affairs Council of Traverse City, responsible for securing most of the speakers. He also does two commentaries a month on international affairs for the local PBS radio station. Straus' undergraduate and graduate training was at the University of Michigan.

Josef Joffe is the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution and is publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit.

Joffe's areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, international security policy, European-American relations, Europe and Germany, and the Middle East.

His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide number of publications including the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Weekly Standard, and the Prospect. Additionally, his scholarly work has appeared in many books and in journals such as Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, International Security, and Foreign Policy as well as in professional journals in Germany, Britain, and France.

Joffe is currently an adjunct professor of political science at Stanford, where he was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer in 1999-2000. He also is a distinguished fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. In 1990-91, he taught at Harvard, where he is also an associate of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. He was a visiting lecturer in 2002 at Dartmouth College and in 1998 at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He was a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins (School of Advanced International Studies) in 1982-1984. He has taught at the University of Munich and the Salzburg Seminar.

His most recent book is Überpower: The Imperial Temptation in American Foreign Policy.

Reared in Berlin, Joffe obtained his Ph.D. degree in government from Harvard.

http://www.hoover.org/bios/joffe

Event Synopsis:

Professor Joffe opens his talk with two movie quotes, "With great power comes great responsibility" from Spiderman, and "If you build it, they will come" from Field of Dreams. Both quotes, he explains, relate to the idea of modern American hegemony. The United States must concern itself with policies and institutions that promote its own interests and those of others, and by doing so will attract international support and cooperation as it did in the "golden age" of American-led institutions such as NATO. This era ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, following which the United States has seen its legitimacy decline lower than ever, even while accumulating unprecedented military power. The void left by the Soviet Union has unbalanced the global power structure and caused other countries to turn against the aggressive policies of the new single hegemon, the United States, in situations like the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush.  Professor Joffe describes the role that America's "imperial temptation" played in its invasion of Iraq, causing a further decline in America’s global legitimacy, a crumbling of international support, and an unwitting boon to Ahmadinejad's regime in Iran, which Joffe considers to be the real threat and which essentially had its "dirty work" of removing Saddam Hussein from power done for it by the United States. Joffe urges the U.S. to think strategically about how collaboration with other countries can help rebuild mutually beneficial institutions and bolster U.S. legitimacy, rather than approaching its role in the world ideologically, treating other nations with contempt and turning them against the U.S.

A discussion session included such questions as: What has the role of American exceptionalism played in the events of the last decade? Was the outcome of the most recent Iraq war inevitable, or was it a result of bad policies and poor handling by the U.S. government? How can a country go so wrong as the US has (in pursuing the "wrong war, in the wrong country, at wrong time" as Joffe describes)? To what extent has the de-legitimization of the US been caused by its policy toward Israel? What should the U.S. approach now be toward Iran?

Akbar Ganji will speak about the status of the Iranian democratic movement as well as the coherency of the Iranian regime. He will speculate about the implications of Iranian domestic politics for international security issues.

Akbar Ganji is Iran's most celebrated dissident and investigative journalist. He has won numerous prestigious awards in Europe and North America. His fifty-six day hunger strike turned him into a figure of international fame, with many heads of states and hundreds of the world's most renowned public intellectuals demanding his safety and freedom. Ganji first gained prominence in Iran as an investigative journalist when he helped uncover a government conspiracy to murder Iranian intellectuals. In response, the regime put him in prison for six years. Behind bars, Ganji continued to write and produced his famous Republican Manifesto where he argued in favor of a secular liberal democracy for Iran. Mr. Ganji is making his visit to the United States since being released from prison. He will speak in Farsi with consecutive translation in English.

Lawrence F. Kaplan is senior editor at The New Republic, where he writes about U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. At this seminar, he will discuss military operations in Iraq, the implications for politics here at home, and competing explanations for what went wrong. On this last point, the speaker hopes to engage in a dialogue with the audience.

Dr. Hakjoon Kim has been President and Publisher of Dong-A Ilbo (East Asia Daily) since 2001. His career has spanned the fields of journalism, public policy and academia. After earning his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1972, Kim spend a year as a research associate as the university's Asian Studies Program in the University Center for International Studies and as a research assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. In 1973 he returned to Korea and spent the next 16 years as a professor and a visiting scholar at various universities in Korea and then in Japan, the United States, Germany, Austria, and London.

In 1989, Kim was elected to the Korean National Assembly and became the chief policy assistant, press secretary, and spokesperson for the president of Korea. In 1993 he rejoined the academic world as chairperson of the board of directors and professor at Dankook University while still keeping one foot in the policy world as advisor to the Korean Ministry of Unification and then to the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Affairs.

During this time, Dr. Kim was also publishing books in English on Korean politics, books in Korean on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, and publishing articles in numerous journals, such as Asian Survey (UC Berkeley), Journal of Northeast Asian Studies (Washington, D.C.), Japan Review of International Affairs (Tokyo), Korea and World Affairs (Seoul), Security Dialogue (Oslo), Far Eastern Affairs (Moscow) and other professional journals. In 1983 he won the Best Book Prize, which was awarded by the Korean Political Science Association for his book Han'guk Chongch'i Ron (On Korean Politics,) Seoul, 1983.

Against the backdrop of export-led growth of some economies -- most notably China and India -- human development issues in Asia tend to be overlooked. The 2006 report Trade on Human Terms, produced by the United Nations Development Programme, finds that trade has contributed to further increasing the inequality both between and within countries. In addition, it warns that many of the region's open economies, particularly the East Asian success stories, are creating far fewer jobs, especially for youth and women, and experiencing "jobless growth." Many of the developing countries in the Asia-Pacific are now net importers of agricultural products; food security has thus become an emerging issue.

While Asia and the Pacific have embraced globalization, the regions poor are being left behind and will be so without determined action by governments. The report recommends that those countries adopt bold new policies that harness trade and economic growth, suggesting an "eight-point agenda" that includes investing for competitiveness; adopting strategic trade policies; restoring a focus on agriculture; combating jobless growth; and others.

Dr. Hafiz A. Pasha will discuss the findings and recommendations of this ground-breaking and thoughtful report which can be viewed at:

Asia - Pacific Human Development Report 2006

Dr. Hafiz A. Pasha is UN assistant secretary-general and UNDP assistant administrator and director of the Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific. He has served as the commerce and trade minister, minister for finance and economic affairs, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, and education minister in three government administrations in Pakistan.

Prior to his government work, Dr. Pasha was the vice chancellor/president of the University of Karachi and dean and director of the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, Pakistan.

Dr. Pasha has published extensively in the fields of trade, public finance, social development, and poverty reduction. He has an M.A. from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Pasha was recently awarded the Congressional Medal of Achievement by the Philippines Congress in recognition of his work on poverty reduction, achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the Asia-Pacific countries and his role in leading UNDP's response to the 2004 tsunami tragedy.

Recently, former senior officials of South Korean President Roh's own administration have expressed serious concern about his approach to North Korea and to the alliance with the U.S. Mr. Straub will examine the prospects for the U.S.-South Korean alliance, especially in light of major differences between the two governments over how to deal with North Korea. He will also explain the origins and the nature of anti-Americanism in South Korea today, and offer his views on how the U.S. and South Korea could put their alliance on a sounder footing.

David Straub retired from the U.S. Department of State in 2006 as a Senior Foreign Service Officer after a 30-year career focused on Northeast Asian affairs. He worked over 12 years on Korean affairs, first arriving in Seoul in 1979, just months before the assassination of President Park Chung Hee. He served as head of the political section at the U.S. embassy in Seoul from 1999 to 2002 during popular protests against the U.S., and played a key working-level role in the Six-Party Talks on North Korea's nuclear program as the State Department's Korea country desk director from 2002 to 2004.

Straub's final assignment was as the State Department's Japan country desk director in 2004, when he was co-leader of the U.S. delegation to talks with Japan on the realignment of the U.S.-Japan alliance and of U.S. military bases in Japan. He currently works as a consultant with Northeast Asia Associates, and lectures on U.S.-Korean relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is fluent in Korean, Japanese, and German.

For over a decade, policymakers in Washington and other capitals have predicted the imminent collapse of North Korea's political, economic, and social systems. In the last 15 years, however, the regime has survived the loss of its patron states, the death of founding leader Kim Il Sung, massive agricultural failure, and a nuclear weapons dispute with the U.S.

In this public seminar hosted by Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and Brookings' Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies (CNAPS), leading experts on North Korea will discuss the most recent developments in its grand strategy, economic, politics, and foreign relations.

This seminar is based on the book North Korea: 2005 and Beyond, edited by Philip Yun and Gi-Wook Shin and published in January 2006 by Shorenstein APARC and the Brookings Institution Press. Several speakers in this event contributed to the volume, copies of which will be available for purchase.