Special Panel | Reports from CULCON: Cultural and Educational Interchanges between Japan and the U.S.

This roundtable session is supported by CULCON.

Abstract

The U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON) is the binational advisory group established in 1961 to further deepen the dialogue among cultural, educational and intellectual spheres, and it has been serving to submit the policy recommendations to both heads of the states in the past 60 years. As CULCON closes two sub-committees, Arts Dialogue Committee (ADC) and Educational Exchange Review Committee (ERC) in 2020, one on Japanese arts experts in the United States and another on student mobility between the United States and Japan, we will present the two reports to discuss what CULCON found important in these two areas and can be shared in the AAS community.

Speakers

Masako Egawa, Hitotsubashi University, Japan
Fumiaki Kubo, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Anne Nishimura Morse, The Museum of Fine Arts, United States
Sheila A. Smith, Council on Foreign Relations, Japan

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Masako Egawa

Hitotsubashi University, Japan

Masako Egawa is Specially Appointed Professor, Graduate School of Commerce and Management, Hitotsubashi University since April 2020. She is also an independent board director for Mitsui & Co., Ltd., Mitsui Fudosan Co., Ltd. and Tokio Marine Holdings, Inc. Prior to joining Hitotsubashi University as Professor in 2015, she served as Executive Vice President of the University of Tokyo from 2009 through 2015, overseeing international affairs, public relations, alumni relations and development.

In 2001, Dr Egawa founded the Japan Research Center of the Harvard Business School and served as its Executive Director until 2009. Prior to joining Harvard Business School, she worked in the investment banking industry for 15 years in New York and Tokyo, advising clients on M&A and capital raising transactions. She has served on the Tax Council (advisory body for the Prime Minister); the Financial System Council (advisory body for the Ministry of Finance); Council for Policy Evaluation of the Ministry of Education; and numerous councils. From 2014 to 2015, she served as the chair of the U.S.-Japan Research Institute. She received a BA in international relations from the University of Tokyo, an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (Harvard Business School), and a PhD in management from Hitotsubashi University.

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Fumiaki Kubo

The University of Tokyo, Japan

Fumiaki Kubo has been the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of American Government and History at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo since 2003. He is affiliated with the Nakasone Peace Institute as Executive Research Director, as well as the Japan Institute for International Affairs as a Visiting Scholar, as well as with the Tokyo Foundation as a Senior Research Scholar.

He studied at Cornell University in 1984-1986, at the Johns Hopkins University in 1991-1993, and at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland in 1998-1999. In addition, he was an Invited Professor at SciencesPo in Paris in the spring of 2009, and a Japan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2014. Kubo attended the Faculty of Law, the University of Tokyo, and received his BA in 1979 and PhD in 1989 from the University of Tokyo. He is the author of many books which include: Modern American Politics (with ABE Hitoshi), Ideology and Foreign Policy After Iraq in the United States (editor), A Study on the Infrastructure of American Politics (editor). In 1989, he received the Sakurada-Kai Gold Award for the Study of Politics and the Keio Gijuku Award.

In 2001 and 2002, Kubo served on the Prime Minister's Commission on the Study of Direct Election System of Prime Minister. Since 2007, Kubo is a member of the U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON). In February 2015, he became a member of the Japan-U.S. Educational Commission. From June 2016 to June 2018, he was the President of the Japanese Association for American Studies.

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Anne Nishimura Morse

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, United States

Anne Nishimura Morse is the William and Helen Pounds Senior Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A graduate of Radcliffe College (’78), she received her Masters degree from Harvard University (’80) in East Asian Regional Studies and Ph.D. (’09) in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard. During her twenty-five year tenure at the Museum, Ms. Morse has organized many critically-acclaimed exhibitions including Courtly Splendor: Twelve Centuries of Treasures from Japan (1990), Object as Insight: Japanese Buddhist Art and Ritual Practice (1996), Okakura Tenshin and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Nagoya/Boston Museum, 1999), The Dawn of the Floating World 1650-1765: Early Ukiyoe Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Royal Academy of London, 2001) and Drama and Desire: Japanese Paintings from the Floating World 1690 – 1850 (2006). She was also responsible for The Art of the Japanese Postcard: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at the MFA (2004) and The Much-Recorded War: The Russo-Japanese War in History and Imagery (2005). The catalogues for both the Dawn of the Floating World and The Art of the Japanese Postcard were cited by the New York Times in its annual list of the best art books of the year.

From 1992 through 2006 in collaboration with teams of scholars from Japan, Ms. Morse completed a fourteen-year project to recatalogue the Museum’s renowned collections of Japanese painting and sculpture—the largest of such holdings outside Japan. The surveys have resulted in numerous publications and exhibitions, including one devoted to masterpieces from the MFA’ s Japanese collections at the Tokyo National Museum in 2012.

Ms Morse has been a visiting professor at Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College and lectured for three summers for the Teaching East Asia program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Sheila A. Smith

Council on Foreign Relations, Japan

Sheila A. Smith, an expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, is senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Dr Smith currently directs the project on Japan’s Political Transition and the U.S.-Japan Alliance. She successfully completed CFR’s New Regional Security Architecture for Asia Program and the project on China and India as Emerging Powers: Challenge or Opportunity for the United States and Japan? She also writes for the blog, “Asia Unbound.”

Dr Smith joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she specialised in Asia-Pacific international relations and U.S. policy toward Asia. She was also recently affiliated with Keio University in Tokyo, where she researched and wrote on Japan’s foreign policy toward China and the Northeast Asian region on an Abe Fellowship. From 2004 to 2007, she directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Prior to joining the East-West Center, Dr Smith was on the faculty of the Department of International Relations at Boston University (1994-2000), and on the staff of the Social Science Research Council (1992-1993). She has been a visiting researcher at two leading Japanese foreign and security policy think tanks, the Japan Institute of International Affairs and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, and at the University of Tokyo and the University of the Ryukyus. Sheila A. Smith earned her MA and PhD degrees from the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.

Among Sheila A. Smith’s publications are Shifting Terrain: The Domestic Politics of the U.S. Military in Asia, East-West Center Special Report No. 8 (East-West Center, 2006), “A Place Apart: Okinawa in Japan’s Postwar Peace” in Partnership: The United States and Japan, 1951-2001 (Kodansha International, 2001); and Local Voices, National Issues: Local Initiative in Japanese Policymaking (University of Michigan Press, 2000). She previously served on the editorial board of the Contemporary Issues of Asia Pacific, a book series published by Stanford University Press and the East-West Center. She is a trustee for Japan America Society of Washington, DC, and an executive committee member for the National Association of Japan-America Societies.

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