Aqil Shah is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.  While at CDDRL, he will write his dissertation entitled "Controlling Coercion:  The Military and Politics in Pakistan and India."  His broad research interests include comparative democratization, civil-military relations, religion and politics and South Asian politics with a focus on Pakistan. His work has appeared in the Journal of Democracy and edited volumes.  

Reckoning with the Past:  Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Asia

Is it possible to come to terms with the violent past and foster reconciliation with former foes, what are the obstacles and how can they be overcome? These are some of the questions we are asking in the "Divided Memories and Reconciliation" project. This colloquia will bring several scholars to Stanford to discuss the ‘history problem' in a series of lectures analyzing the ways in which past conflict has or has not been addressed and resolved in contemporary Asia. Examining issues of memory and forgetting, guilt and innocence, apology and restitution from diverse social science perspectives, our speakers investigate the handling of the violent past both within and between countries in contexts ranging from international diplomacy to the broadcast media to mass education.

In November of 2008, the head of the Japanese air self defense force, General Tamogami Toshio, resigned in a swirl of controversy over an essay he wrote entitled "Was Japan An Aggressor Nation?" The essay argued that Japan's seizure of Korea and of northern China was a legal act and that it had pursued a moderate policy of modernization in its colonial rule of Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, superior to the colonial rule of the Western imperial  powers. General Tamogami also argued, in his published essay, that Japan's war with the United States was a result of being "ensnared in a trap that was carefully laid by the United States to draw Japan into a war." What is the story behind this controversial incident? What does it mean when a senior Japanese military officer holds such views of the wartime past? What are the implications of this for Japan's security relations with its neighbors and the United States?

Marcus Mietzner is currently Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University. Between 1998 and 2008, he lived, worked and researched in Indonesia. He has published extensively on Indonesian politics, among others in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Research and Contemporary Southeast Asia. His most recent book is Military Politics, Islam, and the State in Indonesia: From Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation, published by ISEAS in Singapore in December 2008.

This event - the final in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion with director Clint Eastwood - is part of the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

Letters From Iwo Jima Synopsis

Sixty-one years ago, US and Japanese armies met on Iwo Jima. Decades later, several hundred letters are unearthed from that stark island's soil. The letters give faces and voices to the men who fought there, as well as the extraordinary general who led them.

The Japanese soldiers are sent to Iwo Jima knowing that in all probability they will not come back. Among them are Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who wants only to live to see the face of his newborn daughter; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian champion known around the world for his skill and his honor; Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a young former military policeman whose idealism has not yet been tested by war; and Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), a strict military man who would rather accept suicide than surrender.

Leading the defense is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), whose travels in America have revealed to him the hopeless nature of the war but also given him strategic insight into how to take on the vast American armada streaming in from across the Pacific.

With little defense other than sheer will and the volcanic rock of the island itself, Gen. Kuribayashi's unprecedented tactics transform what was predicted to be a quick and bloody defeat into nearly 40 days of heroic and resourceful combat.

Almost 7,000 American soldiers were killed on Iwo Jima; more than 20,000 Japanese troops perished. The black sands of Iwo Jima are stained with their blood, but their sacrifices, their struggles, their courage and their compassion live on in the letters they sent home.

Haggay is interested in Middle Eastern historical and contemporary economies, as well as in labor and family economics. This year he is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford's CDDRL, and he also teaches a course on Middle Eastern economic history at the Stanford's economics department.

During this year Haggay will examine the causes and implications of a major socio-economic transformation, which took place in the Gaza Strip during the second half of the twentieth century: The refugees who initially were less educated than the urbanites became by the 1980s better educated. Haggay suggests that the institution of the Palestinian family and ironically the refugees lack of access to credit market played a key role in the rise of the refugees to educational primacy. One plausible result of this transformation is the growth of the Hamas, whose Gazan leadership includes many highly educated men of refugee origin.

Last year, Haggay finished his Ph.D. in the economics department at the Hebrew University. His dissertation used the case of Ottoman Gaza for examining how the proximity of a semi-arid eco-system ­ a common characteriistic of wide regions of the Middle East ­ affected the demographic,, economic, and political development of an early modern Middle Eastern economy. His job market paper, analyzes a unique micro-dataset on protection payments, which villages made to armed nomadic tribes, for evaluating the interaction of this widespread but usually hidden institution with taxation, economic growth, and military technology. It demonstrates that strong predatory state could enhance economic development in an economy with multiple predators.

http://www.stanford.edu/~haggay/