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Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

In March 2000, the release of Sony's new PlayStation2 hit a snag. The Japanese government classified the game console as a "general purpose product related to conventional weapons" on the grounds that it was powerful enough to be used as an actual missile guidance system. Accordingly, the government applied export controls on PlayStation2 requiring that distributors obtain a special license. Illustrating the coinage of such terms as "military-industrial-entertainment complex," the incident marked one of numerous collusions between military and commercial uses of video games in Japan and elsewhere.

It is against this backdrop that Frühstück traces the rules and conventions of war games from the fields of rural Japan in the nineteenth century to cyberspace in the twenty-first century. Her examination of the varying configurations of militarism and infantilism, the production of "child soldiers," and the competing roles of state agencies and entertainment industries suggest that war has been leaving its mark on the social body, and on children in particular, not only in the form of injury or death. Rather, through military institutions, pedagogy, technology, popular culture, and other intermediaries, war continues to have general effects on Japanese society and the global order as a whole.

Sabine Frühstück is a professor of modern Japanese cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Employing historical and sociocultural methodologies, Frühstück's research focuses on militarization and war, gender and sexuality, and Japan in a global context from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Her book Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) was translated into Japanese as Fuan na heishitachi: Nippon Jieitai Kenkyû (2008). She is also the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) and Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft, 1908-1941 (1997), and co-editor of the volumes The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998), Neue Geschichten der Sexualität in Zentraleuropa und Ostasien (1999), and Recreating Japanese Men (in press, 2011). Committed to engaging the humanities and the social sciences, she has written essays in English, Japanese and German that have been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, American Ethnologist, Jinbun Gakuho, and Zeitschrift für angewandte Sozialforschung, among other scholarly journals.

Since joining the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Frühstück has been serving as the executive board director of the UC-wide Pacific Rim Research Program and as a member of the editorial boards of the University of California Press and the Journal of Japanese Studies. She also has been a member of the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation, the executive board of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan, and the Board of Trustees of the Society for Japanese Studies. At UCSB, she has dry appointments with the departments of history, anthropology, and feminist studies, and the Cold War Center.

Water is scarce, costly, and contaminated in Kibera, Nairobi -- one of Africa's largest urban slums. On good days, the women and children spend just under an hour finding clean water in their community. On bad days, the price of water increases tenfold and the search takes all day. Often, people ask jokingly whether it is water or cholera they are buying.

Many slums like Kibera lack access to clean drinking water, but they don't lack access to mobile phones. This is the insight behind M-Maji, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. This seminar will introduce the M-Maji system, and describe some of the challenges to designing for such a complex social environment.Background: M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course in the Stanford d.school, which focused on using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera. M-Maji has since received funding to run a pilot from the Program on Liberation Technologies and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford

Sunny Jeon is the principal investigator to M-Maji research, and is currently making frequent trips to Kenya to prepare for a randomized impact evaluation of their water program. He is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science, where he is working on a dissertation project that studies the economic and political returns to ethnic diversity.

Katherine Hoffman is a co-terminal student completing a B.A. in International Relations and Economics and an M.A. in International Policy Studies with a focus on Global Health. She has been involved with M-Maji since it began in Spring quarter, and has just returned from a trip to Kenya in December to begin laying the groundwork for the project implementation. 
Her primary interests include economic development and health improvement in low-resource settings. Past experience includes internships at the Bonn International Center for Conversion in Bonn, Germany and at the Institute for Financial Management in Chennai, India; she has also volunteered at the Center for the Working Girl in Quito, Ecuador and studied abroad for a quarter in Moscow.

From 2007 to 2010, a financial and economic crisis gripped the United States, Europe and the world. 7 million Americans lost their jobs, 10 million were pushed below the poverty line, thousands of families lost their homes, and many lost their savings. Somewhat lower numbers were reported from Europe, although the structural mechanisms behind the crisis were seemingly similar, eventually affecting not only the West, but the whole world. It is foreseen that the effects of the crisis will last for years, and it is still uncertain if a full recovery will be possible.

Given that a variety of highly speculative practices put into place by the banking and finance sector during the "neoliberal“ decades between the early 1990s and 2007 allegedly played a role in triggering the crisis, the request for more down-to-earth and sustainable ways of dealing with money and finance has surfaced to international attention. Particularly in Europe, social banks were among the most successful financial institutions during the crisis years, with annual growth rates of up to 30%, factually doubling their assets between 2007-10. This unprecedented success was supposedly due to the fact that many European savers shifted their assets from mainstream banks to social banks, driven by the hope that the latter would handle their money in less abstract and egoistic, and more realistic and community oriented ways. In recent years, social banks have forged influential global networks such as the Global Alliance of Banking on Values and the International Association of Investors in the Social Economy, which pursue the ambitious strategy of reaching out to 1 billion people by 2020.

Given that, not least as a result of the crisis, increasing numbers of people are improving their financial literacy and are taking a growingly critical stance towards the mainstream international banking and finance sector as we knew it before the crisis, the seminar poses the questions of whether (and how) social banking and social finance may concretely contribute to improving the current financial system, and how they might help to restore confidence in capitalism by providing “best practice” examples in selected fields.

The seminar will try to provide some answers to these questions by examining the pros and cons of contemporary social finance and by outlining perspectives of structural complimentarity and cooperation between speculative and sustainable finance.

Audio Synopsis:

In his seminar, Professor Roland Benedikter argues that too little has been done to reform the banking and financial sectors in the wake of the recent crisis, then presents social banking and social finance as an alternative system. First, he argues that the widespread bank bailouts of the past few years have "saved the wrong system" and points out that many of the largest US banks, for example, have actually grown since the crisis despite calls by the Obama administration for these banks to downsize or break in to smaller pieces. He acknowledges that new measures initiated by both the Obama administration (establishing a consumer protection bureau; imposing limits on fees by financial intermediaries) and by European countries (banning high-risk transactions in Germany; reducing public liability for private bank bailouts) are steps in the right direction. He adds his own suggestions, including increased regulation, better international agreements on regulating capital flows, a fee on high-risk speculative transactions, and a preventative tax on banks to protect against future crises. Many of these reforms, however, have faced enormous opposition from the major players in the banking and finance sectors in Britain, the United States, and China.  Progress seems to have stalled, with popular figures like Niall Ferguson, who once led calls for dramatic reform, now insisting that the system is too resistant to change, and that simpler goals such as a new hippocratic oath for the financial sector will suffice.

Benedikter then presents social banking and social finance as an answer to the seemingly intractable problems of the traditional system.  He first describes the industry in terms of what it is not. Traditional banks, he argues, made three major mistakes leading up to the crisis: irresponsibility (loans that were too high, too much derivative investment); lack of transparency; and unsustainability (by participating in speculation and contributing to market bubbles). The current economy, he explains, is based on a tripolar system: a "real" economy of manufacturing and tangible goods; and two "side economies" of real estate and financial derivatives, which have steadily drawn capital away from the real economy since 1989. A breakdown of this unsustainable system was predicted by multiple think tanks before 2007, based partly on the frantic growth of the derivatives market (from  $100 trillion to $516 trillion annually between 2001 and 2006 - for perspective, Benedikter cites the annual world GDP figure of approximately $50 trillion).

Social banks, on the other hand, invest 100% of their capital toward responsible, transparent, and sustainable ventures such as green technology and social initiatives. Banks emphasize knowing their customers, which requires them to operate on a smaller scale than traditional banks, and conversely customers know where their money is invested and can even participate in making investment decisions. These decisions  are meant to take the potential social as well as financial return on an investment into account. Benedikter describes this as a "Triple Bottom Line" approach, emphasizing profit, people, and the planet.

A discussion period following the presentation addressed questions including:  What are the mechanisms available to enforcing the triple bottom line approach in social banking and social finance? Are social banks guided by a common charter? What are the details of the proposed high-risk transaction fee? Why have some US social banks been successful while others have struggled?

Larry May is a political philosopher who has written on conceptual issues in collective and shared responsibility, as well as normative issues in international criminal law. He has also written on professional ethics and on the Just War tradition.  

In addition to being W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, he is also a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University in Canberra.  He has previously taught at Washington University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, and University of Connecticut. 

He has published 25 books and 100 articles. His five most recent authored books have been published by Cambridge University Press, including: "Genocide: A Normative Account" (2010) and "Global Justice and Due Process" (2011). 

His authored books have won awards from the American Philosophical Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the International Association of Penal Law, the American Society of International Law, and the American Library Association. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Professor May has lectured extensively around the world, including, in the last two years, keynote or plenary addresses at conferences in: Oxford, St. Andrews, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Belgrade, Bielefeld, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.  

He has served on the board of directors of the American Philosophical Association and is past president of AMINTAPHIL, the American section of the International Society for Philosophy of Law. In addition, he has occasionally taken a criminal appeals case, and has worked on several death penalty cases, in the United States.