His Excellency Sir David Manning, British Ambassador to the United States, will deliver the 2006 Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecture.

The Payne Professorship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. Their descendants endowed the annual lecture series at FSI in order to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation.

The Payne Distinguished Professor is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.

This talk addresses a set of intimately intertwined contradictions that characterize military-societal relations in present-day Japan: the contradiction between Article 9 of Japan's constitution, which forbids a standing army and the existence of its armed forces; the contradiction between the civilian prohibition of violence and the military's training for and potential demand of violent acts; and the dilemma of representing a profession that must negotiate between societal mores and the demands associated with military service. More specifically, Professor Frühstück will untangle the Self-Defense Forces' public relations strategies, ranging from comics to live firing exercises. She argues that these strategies are deeply embedded in Japanese culture and affecy various segments of the Japanese public in radically different ways.

Sabine Frühstück focuses her research on the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society include problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military-societal relations. Frühstück is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern and present-day Japan, Avant-garde: The Army of the Future. Her book, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, is a history of sexual knowledge in Japan and the different uses made of that knowledge. Based on a wide variety of sources including military data on soldiers' health, sex education treatises for youth, and pronatalist and expansionist propaganda that fought frigidity in women and impotence in men, the book analyzes the techniques at work in conflicts and negotiations that aimed at the creation of a normative sexuality. Frühstück has co-edited Neue Geschichten der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien and Zentraleuropa 1700-2000 and The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure.

In Japan, the 20th century renaissance of poetry by women is associated most closely with Yosano Akiko, who first came to prominence at the turn of the century. But there was another renaissance, part of the general flowering of culture that characterized the immediate postwar period. It was then that Ishigaki Rin first achieved fame. Comparatively unknown outside Japan, like most contemporary Japanese poets, Ishigaki, who died last year at the age of 84, had an enthusiastic following in her own country. By introducing her life and her poetry, Professor Beichman will show why.

Janine Beichman has been living in Japan for more than thirty years, where she is a professor in the Department of Japanese Literature at Daito Bunka University. She took her PhD at Columbia University under the guidance of Donald Keene. Her publications in English include two critical biographies, Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Works, and Embracing the Firebird: Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry, and the original Noh play Drifting Fires, which has been performed in Japan and the United States. Beichman has also published numerous translations, including Ooka Makoto's Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems 1972-1989 ,Poems for All Seasons/Oriori no Uta ; and Setouchi Jakucho's The End of Summer . Her current research centers around two topics: Japanese women poets, in particular Yosano Akiko and Ishigaki Rin; and the tradition of ekphrasis in Japanese art and literature.

In the past two years, Professor Xueguang Zhou conducted ethnographic research through participatory observations in villages and the township government and in-depth interviews/daily interactions with cadres and villagers. His presentation focuses on the episode of implementing state-sponsored Reforestation Project in the villages and related events to illustrate interactions between villages and the township government, corporatist bases in resource mobilization, and shifting group boundaries and identities.

His research shows that, in rural areas of northern China today, corporatist institutions are still a major organizing basis for resource redistribution and mobilization. In recent years, however, major changes have been underway that put the corporatist institutions under severe strain. As a result, these institutions are becoming fragile, truncated, and marginalized, with great variations among villages and townships. These observations lead him to argue that rural China today is at the crossroads of profound institutional changes, with significant implications for the role of local governments, patterns of social inequality, and collective action.

The rise of women's liberation movement in 1970 marked the beginning of a radical feminist politics that emerged in response to the New Left in Japan. In 1972, the mass media televised a political conflict between the state and a sect called the United Red Army. The production of this televised spectacle constituted a crises for the New Left in that it de-legitimized the use of "revolutionary violence." Shigematsu's talk will discuss how members of the women's liberation movement responded to this crises as an example of their radical feminist politics. This response involved a re-articulation of a woman's role in "revolutionary violence" and a radical notion of relationality.