East-West Center Special Asian Security Luncheon Seminar

Where: East-West Center in Washington, 1819 L St. NW, 2nd Floor Conference Room
When: May 30, 2008, 12:30-2:30PM
Who: Yoshihisa Komori, Editor-at-Large, The Sankei Shimbun; Robert Sutter, Professor, Georgetown University; Ming Wan, Professor, George Mason University

This event is free and open to the public.
A light lunch will be served at 12:30pm.

The China-Japan-U.S. trilateral relationship remains one of the most complex and significant in the post-Cold War era. While U.S.-Japan political and military cooperation remains strong, Japan's slowed economy, alongside China's continued growth, has brought China and Japan closer economically. The recent meeting between PRC President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda hinted at the possibility of warming relations between China and Japan that have been evolving since the departure of Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi, even if the summit failed to address more substantive issues such as historical territorial disputes over the East China Sea.

What do these trends tell us about the future course of Sino-Japanese relations, and what might this mean for U.S. engagement in the region? Is this "warm spring" in Sino-Japanese relations sustainable, and if so, how will China and Japan cope with critical structural and perceptual issues such as territorial disputes and history textbooks? How should U.S. policy shift to accommodate a strengthened Sino-Japanese partnership?

Yoshihisa Komori is the Washington correspondent and Editor-at-Large of the Japanese daily The Sankei Shimbun, where he has worked since 1987. Prior to that he was the senior political correspondent for the Mainichi Shimbun, reporting from Washington, DC, and Saigon. He has been a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow and a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and was the recipient of a number of national and international journalism awards, including the Japanese National Press Club's Award for International Reporting in 1993 and United Press International's Vaughn Prize for International Reporting. He has authored over 35 books on Japan, including The Fallacy of China's Anti-Japanesism (Bungei Shunju Publishing, 2007), Failing Japanese Diplomacy (Bungei Shunju Publishing, 2007), and Japan and China: Illusion of Friendship (Shogakkan, 2002), and has contributed articles to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe. He appears periodically on CNN and PBS as well as Fuji Television. Komori earned his B.A. in economics from Keio University and also studied journalism at the University of Washington.

Robert Sutter specialized in Asian and Pacific Affairs and U.S. foreign policy in a U.S. government career of 33 years involving the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was for many years the Senior Specialist and Director of the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division of the Congressional Research Service. He also was the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and the Pacific at the US Government's National Intelligence Council, and the China Division Director at the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. A Ph.D. graduate in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University, Robert Sutter taught part-time for over thirty years at Georgetown, George Washington, Johns Hopkins Universities, or the University of Virginia. His current full-time position is Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He has published 16 books, numerous articles and several hundred government reports dealing with contemporary East Asian and Pacific countries and their relations with the United States. His most recent book is Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy since the Cold War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

Ming Wan, an expert on Sino-Japanese relations and East Asian political economy, is Professor of Government and Politics and Director of the Global Affairs Program at George Mason University. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard from the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Pacific Basin Research Center, and has been a visiting research scholar at Tsukuba University in Japan. He has published four books: The Political Economy of East Asia: Striving for Wealth and Power (CQ Press, 2007), Sino-Japanese Relations: Interaction, Logic, and Transformation (Stanford University Press, 2006), Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Relations: Defining and Defending National Interests (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Japan Between Asia and the West: Economic Power and Strategic Balance (M.E. Sharpe, 2001). He has also published in journals such as Asian Survey, Orbis, Pacific Affairs, and International Studies Quarterly, and in edited volumes. His current research interests include political economy of East Asia and Sino-Japanese relations. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University.

Primary Contact Info:
Name: Alison Hazell
Email: HazellA@eastwestcenter.org
Phone: 202-293-3995

Please RSVP by Wednesday, May 28, to ensure your seat.