YOKOSUKA COUNCIL ON ASIA-PACIFIC STUDIES

Join YCAPS for the next iteration of our webinar series exploring interesting and contemporary topics relevant to our base communities and beyond. Our featured guest will be Tobias Harris, author of The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan.

To join, please go to: meet.google.com/gkr-fved-tqp

As an Alliance modernizer, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo drove controversial defense legislation, legalized Japan's option to provide collective self-defense for its U.S. ally, approved Japan's first National Security Strategy and organized a National Security Council. However, his story is not one unblemished by failures. In 2007, seemingly overwhelmed, he resigned after only a year as prime minister. Then, following five years of reinvention, he masterfully regained the premiership in 2012 proceeded to dominate Japanese politics for eight years and achieve status as Japan's longest serving Prime Minister. He staked out a global leadership role for Japan in a region being rapidly transformed by the rise of China and India, while carefully preserving an ironclad relationship with the United States. In The Iconoclast, the only English-language biography of Abe, Harris tells the story of Abe's meteoric rise and stunning fall, his remarkable comeback and his emergence as a world-class statesman. During this webinar, Harris will provide an overview of Abe’s biography and take your questions.

Tobias S. Harris is a leading expert on Japanese politics, widely quoted in leading world publications and a regular guest on television and radio programs. After working on the staff of a Japanese legislator from 2006 to 2007, he ran the popular blog “Observing Japan,” contributed to the Wall Street Journal Asia and Far Eastern Economic Review, and conducted graduate research at MIT and the University of Tokyo. Since 2013, he has been the Japan analyst at Teneo Intelligence, the political risk division of Teneo, a leading CEO advisory firm. He was Economy, Trade, and Business Fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, a Washington, DC-based think tank focused on U.S.-Japan relations, from 2014 to 2020. He was born in Chicago and currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife, their two sons and their two cats. He has an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Politics and History from Brandeis University.

Webinar price: Free
Co-sponsors: Japan-US Military Program (JUMP), Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS).
Moderator: Caitlin Doornbos
Please register by RSVP to info@ycaps.org. RSVP not required, but helpful for organizers.

This Indo-Pacific Maritime Hour will feature Dr. Olli Suorsa discussing the decisions that smaller powers make when approaching multilateral naval exercises. He argues that participation in the exercises is inherently a political question. Specifically, he will discuss smaller powers’ considerations (with special reference to Southeast Asia) in taking part in naval exercises involving various sets of actors and the participation’s significance for conveying strategic signals. Olli will underline and contrast the different utilities reaped from inclusive and exclusive arrangements, and smaller powers’ agency in accepting/declining invitations, or initiating exercise routines of their own, to signal engagement, deterrence, and/or neutrality.

To join please go to https://meet.google.com/gkr-fved-tqp

Dr Olli Pekka Suorsa is a Research Fellow in the Maritime Security Programme of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS) at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). Before joining RSIS he lectured at the Department of Asian and International Studies in the City University of Hong Kong. Dr Suorsa holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the City University of Hong Kong and a Master’s degree in Asian Politics from SOAS, University of London, UK, and Bachelor’s in International Relations from the Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. Dr Suorsa has also work experience in defence industry in Finland.

Moderator: John Bradford, YCAPS Executive Director and Senior Fellow, RSIS Maritime Security Programme
Webinar Cost: Free of charge

Co-sponsor: Japan-US Military Program (JUMP)
Please register by RSVP to info@ycaps.org. RSVP not required, but helpful for organizers.

From Sri Lanka to the shipyards of Greece, Eyck Freymann takes readers inside China’s One Belt One Road initiative. He argues that OBOR is not a centralized and systematic policy. Rather, it is a largely aspirational and sometimes ad hoc campaign to export an ancient Chinese model of patronage and tribute.

Inside China, propaganda depicts President Xi restoring the nation’s lost imperial glory. Overseas, China uses massive investments to cultivate relationships with local politicians and political parties. The strategy is working. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, numerous interviews, and on-the-ground case studies, Freymann shows that China is more often successfully attracting willing partners than preying on victims.

To join please go to https://temple.zoom.us/j/92943085505?pwd=ODBEZlU3NHMwKzljQjZ1b1VDNEpjUT09

Meeting ID: 929 4308 5505
Passcode: 651052

Eyck is a DPhil candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford. He has worked as a research assistant to Graham Allison at Harvard, to Niall Ferguson at the Hoover Institution, to Paul Haenle at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and to Shi Zhiqin at Tsinghua University. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Henry Scholar; an AM in Asian Studies from Harvard, where he won the Joseph Fletcher Memorial Prize for the top thesis on Asia; and an AB in East Asian History with highest honors, also from Harvard. His work has been published or cited in the press. His book One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World has just been published by Harvard University Press.

Webinar price: Free
Co-sponsors: Japan-US Military Program (JUMP), Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS).
Moderator: Robert Dujarric (Co-Director of ICAS Temple University Japan)

RSVP not required.