FUAT KEYMAN is professor of International Relations at Koç University/Istanbul. He did his Ph.D in Carleton University, Canada, and pursued his study as a post-doctoral fellow in Wellesley College and Harvard University. He is the author of several books and articles on globalization, democratic theory and Turkish Politics. Among them are Globalization, State,Identity/Difference: Towards a Critical Social Theory of International Relations (Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1997), Turkey and Radical Democracy (Alfa, Istanbul, 2001) and State Problem in Turkey: Globalization, Nationalism and Democratization (Everest, Istanbul, 2003).

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 recent years, "anti-American" sentiments and protests - what some observers regard as the "wildcard" in the US-Korea alliance-- have created tensions in the management of the bilateral relationship. Analysts have pointed to nationalism, the South's newfound "love" for the North, and generational change among South Koreans as key explanations for the anti-Americanism. Katharine Moon offers a different kind of analysis, focusing on the rapid changes in democratization and decentralization of government that have fostered a new identity and activist role for local governments and citizens. Local autonomy, especially in the areas housing the U.S. military bases, has come to challenge the monopoly of the central government in managing the alliance relationship and a powerful force shaping the politics of anti-Americanism.

Katharine H.S. Moon, associate professor and chairperson, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College, and a non-resident scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University.

She is the author of Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (Columbia University, 1997; Korean edition by Sam-in Publishing Co., 2002) and other work on women and international relations, migrant workers, and social movements in East Asia. Currently, she is writing a book on "anti-Americanism" in Korea-U.S. relations from the perspective of Korea's democratization and the politics of social movements. Moon received a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in 2002 to conduct research in Korea and was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the George Washington University in 2002-03.

Katharine Moon has served in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Women's Issues in the U.S. Department of State and as a trustee of Smith College. She serves on the editorial board of several journals of international relations and consults for NGOs in the U.S. and Korea. She also serves on policy task forces designed to examine current U.S. - Korea relations.

Alexander Downes is assistant professor of political science at Duke University specializing in international security. Before coming to Duke, Downes held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies (Harvard University) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (Stanford University). His current research focuses on why states attack enemy noncombatants in warfare, a subject on which he is revising a book manuscript that includes case studies of strategic bombing, blockade, counterinsurgency, and ethnic cleansing. His previous research on the relative efficacy of partition versus negotiated settlements as solutions to ethnic wars has appeared in the journal Security Studies.

The profile of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong has changed in significant ways since Hong Kong's reunification with the People's Republic of China in 1997, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the SARS outbreak of 2003. Several changes have also appears, the most striking of which is the influx of about 90,000 Indonesian domestic workers and the relative decrease in the number of Filipinas. Another change is the tenor and scope of the workers' activism.

Drawing from recent migrant worker protests (including the anti-WTO protests of December 2005,) Dr. Constable considers the increasingly global and transnational aspects of foreign domestic worker activism and the increased breadth of their networks and affiliations, as well as the implications of such activism in relation to newly generated and displaced meanings of citizenship and human rights within and beyond the context of the self-ascribed "Asian World City" of Hong Kong.

Nicole Constable received her MA and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose interests include the anthropology of work; ethnicity, nationalism, and history; gender, migration, and transnationalism; folklore; and ethnographic writing and power.

Her geographical areas of specialization are Hong Kong, China and the Philippines. She has conducted fieldwork in Hong Kong on constructions of Hakka Chinese Christian identity and on resistance and discipline among Filipina domestic workers.

Her current research involves Chinese and Filipino immigrants to the U.S. and U.S.-Asian correspondence marriages.