About the series: The year 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the end of Pacific War and Japan's unconditional surrender. Post-war Japan has embraced a new constitution that renounced war as a right of the nation and for the past six decades pursued economic growth under democratic government. Ironically, the years leading to this anniversary were filled with various disputes over territorial and historical issues with China and Korea and questions from neighboring countries whether Japanese society is shifting towards the right. Triggered by Prime Minister Koizumi's official visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines "A" class war criminals, anti-Japan sentiment is widely spreading among its neighboring countries, accompanied by strong nationalism, and is posing a potential threat to the political stability of the region.

This colloquium series will focus on Japan's relationship with China and Korea and the historical controversies that are central to their deteriorating political relationship. The series speakers will address the following questions: What are the historical roots of these controversies? How did post-war Japanese foreign policy effect and was effected by Japan's handling of its militaristic past? What is the nature of domestic politics of these three countries that politicizes these historical issues and influences their responses to one another?

Each of the speakers in this series has been asked to address a specific aspect of Japan's relations. Ambassador Kitaoka will address the diplomatic challenges facing Japan today.

Trygve Olson is a political and public affairs professional who brings nearly twenty years of experience, working on five continents, to his profession. He has served in his present capacity since January 2001, and also served as IRI's Resident Program Officer in Lithuania in 1997.

Prior to rejoining IRI in 2001, Mr. Olson was a founding partner in the grassroots lobbying, political consulting and public affairs firm Public Issue Management, LLP. While a partner at Public Issue Management, Trygve managed a number of high profile grassroots lobbying campaigns for clients in the aviation, technology, and healthcare sectors. For two years he co-managed the grassroots side of a national campaign on behalf of several of America's largest technology companies and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Also during this prior Mr. Olson served as the primary campaign consultant to a coalition that was victorious in the 2000 Lithuanian Parliamentary elections.

A native of Wisconsin, Trygve worked in the Administration of then-Governor Tommy Thompson and also ran a number of Congressional, State Senatorial and State Legislative campaigns during the early and mid 1990's. Over the course of his career in politics, Mr. Olson has worked on in excess of 100 campaigns for all levels of public office from the local to national level. Since first volunteering for IRI in 1995 -- when he went to Poland to run a get out the vote campaign for young people -- Mr. Olson has helped advise political parties and candidates in numerous countries throughout the world including nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Serbia.

Trygve is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He currently makes his home in Vilnius, Lithuania with his wife, Erika Veberyte, who serves as the Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to the Speaker of the Lithuanian Parliament.

Brian Jenkins is a senior advisor to the president of the RAND Corporation and one of the world's leading authorities on terrorism. He founded the RAND Corporation's terrorism research program in 1972, has written frequently on terrorism, and has served as an advisor to the federal government and the private sector on the subject. A former Army captain who served with Special Forces in Vietnam, he is also a former deputy chairman of Kroll Associates. He served as a captain in the Green Berets in the Dominican Republic and later in Vietnam (1966-1970). In 1996, he was appointed by President Clinton to be a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. He has served as an advisor to the National Commission on Terrorism (1999-2000) and in 2000 was appointed as a member of the U.S. Comptroller General's Advisory Board. He is Is also a special advisor to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and a member of the board of directors of the ICC's Commercial Crime Services. He is the author of International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict, the editor and coauthor of Terrorism and Personal Protection, coeditor and coauthor of Aviation Terrorism and Security, and coauthor of The Fall of South Vietnam.

Since 2004, Dominic Martin has been Counsellor at the British Embassy Washington, responsible for Political and Public Affairs. Mr. Martin was educated at Oriel College, Oxford and joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1987. He has twice served in New Delhi, India (at the end of the 1980s and from 2001 until 2004), and also served in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the mid-1990s. Prior to this last posting in India, Mr. Martin co-coordinated the UK position in the negotiations on the enlargement of the European Union to include the countries from Central and Eastern Europe.

FUAT KEYMAN is professor of International Relations at Koç University/Istanbul. He did his Ph.D in Carleton University, Canada, and pursued his study as a post-doctoral fellow in Wellesley College and Harvard University. He is the author of several books and articles on globalization, democratic theory and Turkish Politics. Among them are Globalization, State,Identity/Difference: Towards a Critical Social Theory of International Relations (Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1997), Turkey and Radical Democracy (Alfa, Istanbul, 2001) and State Problem in Turkey: Globalization, Nationalism and Democratization (Everest, Istanbul, 2003).

Frontiers of Freedom: U.S. - European cooperation on Iran, NATO in Afghanistan, and other issues the United States and Europe are tackling in the region.

Co-Sponsored with the Hoover Institution

Yun-han Chu is President of the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Political Science of the Academia Sinica. He is one of Taiwan's most distinguished and widely quoted political scientists. He is also the author of Crafting Democracy in Taiwan, the lead coordinator of the East Asia Democracy Barometer, and author of numerous articles on Taiwan's democracy, politics, political economy and cross strait relations.

Studies of China's inequality almost universally report that the gap between urban and rural household incomes in China is large, has increased over time, and contributes substantially to overall inequality. Whether or not concerns about the urban-rural income gap are justified depends, among other things, on the true magnitude of the gap and also on the factors that underlie the gap. Using a new and rich data, this study investigates the size of China's urban-rural income gap, the contribution of that gap to overall inequality, and the factors underlying the gap in 1995 and 2002. The analysis improves on past estimates by adjusting for spatial price differences and including migrants. It also measures the extent to which the urban-rural income gap is due to differences in household and individual characteristics, rather than the advantages of location of residence. Professor Sicular will present the key findings of this research undertaken with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, University of Goteburg, and Beijing Normal University.

Terry Sicular received her PhD from Yale University in 1983 and has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University. Her publications include Food Price Policy in Asia: A Comparative Study. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, What Can We Learn from the Chinese Revolution? Homo Oeconomicus (2004), and Moving toward Markets? Labor Allocation in Rural China Journal of Development Economics (2003). She is currently working on The Political Economy of the Chinese Revolution and Rural Labour and Employment in China (with Yaohui Zhao)

This series is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

Professor Andrew Mack is the Director of the Human Security Centre at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia. Prior to establishing the Human Security Centre, he was a Visiting Professor at the Program on Humanitarian Policy at Harvard University (2001) and spent two and a half years as the Director of Strategic Planning in the Executive Office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the United Nations (1998-2001).

Professor Mack has held the Chair in International Relations at the Institute of Advanced Study at the Australian National University (1991-1998), was the Director of the ANU's Peace Research Centre (1985-91) and was the ANU's Senior Research Fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (1984-85).

He has held research and teaching positions at Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia) the London School of Economics, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, the Richardson Institute for Peace and Conflict Research, University of California at Berkeley, Irvine and San Diego, the University of Hawaii, Fudan University in Shanghai and the International University of Japan.

His pre-academic career included six years in the Royal Air Force (engineer and pilot); two and a half years in Antarctica as meteorologist and Deputy Base Commander; a year as a diamond prospector in Sierra Leone and two years with the BBC's World Service producing the current affairs program "The World Today".