The following is Part 7 of a multiple-part series. To read previous installments in this series, please visit the following articles: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

Since December 8, 2020, SPICE has posted six articles that highlight reflections from 49 students on the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” Part 7 features eight additional reflections.

The free educational website “What Does It Mean to Be an American?” offers six lessons on immigration, civic engagement, leadership, civil liberties & equity, justice & reconciliation, and U.S.–Japan relations. The lessons encourage critical thinking through class activities and discussions. On March 24, 2021, SPICE’s Rylan Sekiguchi was honored by the Association for Asian Studies for his authorship of the lessons that are featured on the website, which was developed by the Mineta Legacy Project in partnership with SPICE.

Since the website launched in September 2020, SPICE has invited students to review and share their reflections on the lessons. Below are the reflections of eight students. I am grateful to Dr. Ignacio Ornelas, Teacher, Willow Glen High School, San Jose, California; Mineko Todd, Teacher, Waiakea High School, Hawaii; Aya Shehata, Hilo High School, Hawaii; and Kathryn Tolbert, a former editor and reporter at The Washington Post for their support with this edition. The reflections below do not necessarily reflect those of the SPICE staff.

Kylie Copeland, California
What makes one an American is not based on their ethnicity or the color of their skin, but rather their devotion to life, liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. These unalienable rights and their importance have been repeated in many pieces of American literature. These rights have shown to not hold as much value when concerning race. As a White-Vietnamese woman, I have endured experiences where I have been treated like I don’t fit an American profile, even though my morals are those that align with the unalienable rights. It is important to understand that one who is American is one who is determined to fight for liberty, and fight for freedom, and fight for those who are affected daily by these important rights.

Janessa Dillion, California
American ideals are among of the most falsely advertised concepts I have had to face growing up. I was taught that there is pride in being an American and what the country stood for. “Liberty and justice for all” is a lie when our own justice system would condone slavery and police brutality. Our founding fathers constructed a country benefiting only the people that they thought mattered. America is not broken; it is how it was intended to be and now it’s up to the youth (the leaders of the future) that recognize this to not “fix” it but to deconstruct what we currently have in place. I am proud to be an American because I get to create a better future and that’s where my patriotism lies.

Evan Ingerick, Pennsylvania
I take being American for granted. I’m a third generation Japanese American. My great-grandmother is a war bride from Japan. I live in rural Pennsylvania. I have heard stories from my grandpa about being bullied about his skin and race. To me, times have changed where kids aren’t as prejudiced. When I think of being American, I think of all the “freedoms” we have. For me, it is freedom of speech, religion, the ability to choose courses for my choice of a career. I can play all sports. I can do anything anyone else can. If I question what being an American is, I wonder if our democracy is eroding because of all race-related riots, immigration problems, voting systems problems in the news today. These things concern me.

Justin Katayama, New York
While the Japanese tend to be bound to their idea of peace, Americans tend to believe that they are the ones who can bring about justice by raising their voice. While the Japanese believe the same thing, they don’t speak out because they prioritize harmony. Because Japan is very conservative, there is not as much conflict. While I am of Japanese ancestry, I was born and raised in America. I was raised to have the mentality that my opinion matters and that I should speak out when I believe I should. Being an American means that my voice isn’t bound by anything and that it will always be heard by someone.

Mailiokawailelenani Mckeague, Hawaii
Living around 2,000 miles away from what I think is the true America, the term “American” has never been more than the title of the country I live in. I say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and watch the news every night, yet there is rarely any mainstream media on Hawaii, where I live. There is a big debate on whether Hawaii is a part of America since it was illegally overthrown. With my father being Japanese and Hawaiian and my mother being from Brazil, there seems to be a big gap between where I fit into this idea of being an American. Yet to me, that seems exactly what it means to be American. To be American means to live in a diverse community of people who may not feel like they fit in but they call America home nonetheless. 

Daniela Muñoz, California
Even though we live in a land of freedom, oftentimes being American means having the necessity to fight for equality and justice. People see America as such a perfect country. In reality, a lot of people have had to fight hard to have the opportunities that they have today. My parents are immigrants who came to the United States for better opportunities. They followed their American dream to accomplish things that they wouldn’t have been able to accomplish in their home country. I have Mexican roots and I sometimes think that I will never truly feel the full experience as an American, but I will contribute to traditions and help better the community. It is the significance of maintaining our traditional culture regardless that is important to me.

Nyla Gaeta Nedrow, California
Since its foundation, the United States has been recognized as a pioneer for change. As Americans, I think it’s our duty to keep pushing for progress in areas such as equity and fairness. Our country is far from perfect but when we stand united towards a common goal, anything is possible. From the American Revolution to our most recent election, the American people have proven again and again that we can be agents for change. Being an American means having a nuanced understanding of our country’s past and present. Just because we are asking for improvement does not mean we love our country any less. If anything, I think it means quite the opposite. We ask for improvement because we want the best for our country and for its people.

Hokulani Thomas, Hawaii
When I think about what it means to be an American, I think about diversity. Our country is made up of all different kinds of people from all over the world. From where I am from, which is Hawaii, being mixed race is completely the norm. You could take a walk around town and meet and see people of all different backgrounds. And while to this day there is still prejudice and hate over some cultures and races, in Hawaii we have love and aloha for one another, and we celebrate and support one another’s cultures. So when I think about what it means to be an American, I think about diversity, and how we are getting more and more accepting of different cultures every year.

Rylan Sekiguchi has been selected as a cohort fellow for the Movers and Shakas program (M&S)—an initiative to attract remote workers, especially returning kamaʻāina (Hawaiʻi residents), to create a more innovative, resilient, and sustainable Hawaiʻi. The rationale for the establishment of M&S is based on the following.

“Brain drain” is an enduring challenge for Hawaiʻi as we lose key talent and family members to economic opportunities on the continent. M&S focuses on “brain gain” to grow and diversify Hawaiʻi’s economy so that local folks can come home and never have to leave in the first place.

A recent article, “Hawaiʻi’s Population Drain Outpaces Most States—Again,” in Honolulu Civil Beat features comments by M&S Director Nicole Lim. In the article, she notes, “The overall goal is really brain gain. How to tie people into Hawaiʻi for the good of Hawaiʻi.”

Selected from thousands of applicants, Sekiguchi is one of 50 in the second M&S cohort contributing to the community through volunteer projects and developing personal and professional relationships with people from diverse backgrounds. Sekiguchi is working primarily with the PA‘I Foundation, which is led by Executive Director Vicky Holt Takamine, a respected kumu hula (master teacher of hula), well-known Native Hawaiian advocate, and valuable proponent of M&S in the local community.

The Movers and Shakas program is based on three key pillars.

• Learn: Cultural education helps cohort fellows understand the historical and current context of Hawaiʻi, allowing them to build stronger personal relationships and connect more deeply with Hawaiʻi.
• Contribute: Volunteering allows cohort fellows to contribute their unique professional skillsets and experiences to local nonprofits and startups while learning about Hawaiʻi from community leaders in a reciprocal relationship.
• Connect: Community building centers around the two-way sharing of knowledge, ideas, and culture to foster strong bonds between individuals, within the cohort, with volunteer partner orgs, and with the general public.
   

Following a recent visit to the Bishop Museum, designated as the Hawaiʻi State Museum of Natural and Cultural History, Sekiguchi reflected on his experience. “Though I was born and raised in Hawaiʻi, it wasn’t until I moved to the continent as a student at Stanford University that I began to truly recognize my connection to this place. After being away for 19 years, M&S has been an incredibly meaningful experience for me and an extraordinary opportunity to reconnect with Hawaiʻi. It’s also been inspiring to connect with my M&S cohort mates, many of whom also have personal connections to the state. Someday, I hope to connect my SPICE work more closely with the M&S community.”

Click the link for a transcript of “Spies, Lies and Algorithms with Amy Zegart."

The Origins of Spies, Lies and Algorithms

When I was a professor at UCLA, I was teaching an intelligence class. On a lark, I did a survey of my students and I asked them about their spy-themed entertainment viewing habits, as well as their attitudes towards certain intelligence topics like interrogation techniques.

What I found was there was a statistically significant correlation between their spy-themed viewing habits; people who watch the show 24 all the time were far more pro-waterboarding, among other things, than students who didn't watch spy-themed entertainment.

This got me really thinking, what do people know about espionage? Where do they get this information? And what I found is that most Americans don't know anything about the intelligence community, and when you're talking about spy agencies in a democracy, that's really problematic.

The original book was going to be more of a textbook for the class I was teaching, but as I write it, so many things started to change in the intelligence community, both politically and technologically. So with that in mind, I tried to make it forward looking to where intelligence needs to go, not just backward to where it’s been.

Who are the Spies?
 

The biggest surprise for me came from the research I did on open-source intelligence and nuclear threats. If ever there was an area you would think spy agencies would have cornered the market on intelligence, it would be nuclear threats.

But what I found is that there's a whole ecosystem of non-governmental people tracking nuclear threats around the world and actually uncovering really important things. That includes some open-source nuclear sleuths here at Stanford among my colleagues at CISAC.

The more I dug into this, the more I realized that open-source intelligence and publicly available data is the ballgame in the future of intelligence. Secrets still matter; but they matter a whole lot less than they did even ten years ago.

There is so much insight that we can glean from open-source information, but the intelligence community has to figure out better ways to connect with organizations and people who are in this ecosystem.

What are the Lies?

Intelligence is about deception. We don't want our enemies to understand all of our military capabilities, for example, or what our intentions are.

But I think the technology and data revolutions of the last few decades has also changed the nature of deception. It’s gone from elites deceiving elites about where their troops are, and whether they're going to attack, to mass audience deception and this disinformation-information warfare of domestic audiences like we're experiencing here in the United States.

Understanding deception, not in a pejorative sense but as an analytic frame, is critically  important to being able to gather and analyze intelligence correctly.

The Power of Algorithms in Intelligence

We're drowning in data. The amount of data on Earth is estimated to double every two years. Think about that for a minute. It's just an astounding amount of data. And it's too much for any human to deal with.

So, if intelligence is in the business of collecting or finding needles in haystacks, the haystacks are growing exponentially. The intelligence community has to use artificial intelligence and other tools to augment human analysts. AI frees up analysts to then ask questions about things like intent, which humans can figure out much better than machines.

Imagine an algorithmic red team: you have humans that are developing assessments of what is Putin going to do in Ukraine, and you've got a red team that's just algorithms aggregating data, so that you have a sort of competitive analysis between humans and machines that can make the humans better. Those are the kinds of things that intelligence agencies need to be doing much more with AI.

December 7, 2021 marked the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. On the occasion of the anniversary, Professor Yujin Yaguchi, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo, gave a lecture on Pearl Harbor to high school students enrolled in SPICE’s Stanford e-Japan, which is taught by Instructor Meiko Kotani. Yaguchi has been an advisor to both Stanford e-Japan and SPICE’s Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP), an online course about Japan and U.S.–Japan relations that is offered to high school students in the United States and is taught by Instructor Naomi Funahashi. From 2004 to 2009, I worked with Yaguchi during the “Pearl Harbor: History, Memory, and Memorial” summer institutes for American and Japanese teachers that were hosted by the AsiaPacificEd Program for Schools, East-West Center, Honolulu.

Prior to Yaguchi’s lecture, Kotani compiled questions from her students to share with Yaguchi, and he used them to conceptualize his lecture. The students were also required to view a lecture by Stanford Emeritus Professor Peter Duus on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Yaguchi informed the students that he would be introducing diverse perspectives on the Pearl Harbor attack and also encouraged students to think about the questions that they had written while he delivered his lecture. He encouraged them to consider two questions that he devised based on the students’ questions: “Why do you ask such questions?” and “What do the questions tell you about how you think of the past and today?” Yaguchi noted, “I am kind of spinning the table around.”

Yaguchi set the context for his talk by giving a brief geographic and historical background of Pearl Harbor. He pointed out that for ancient Hawaiians, the name of the harbor now known as Pearl Harbor was Puʻuloa, regarded as the home of the shark goddess, Kaʻahupāhau. Following the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the U.S. Navy established a base on the island in 1899. Over the years, Pearl Harbor, along with the Naval Base San Diego, remained a main base for the U.S. Pacific Fleet after World War II. He also noted that Pearl Harbor is the most popular destination in Hawaii for American visitors.

Yaguchi pointed out that the excellent questions from the students were primarily about the United States and Japan. He posed the question, “But is Pearl Harbor really only about the U.S. and Japan?” and encouraged students to critically consider the following points, which were the five key points of his lecture.

1. We need to see history in a longer and wider perspective.
2. History is not only about powerful nation states.
3. History is not only about (mostly male) politicians and leaders making decisions.
4. Pearl Harbor means different things to many people.
5. We need to see Pearl Harbor from multiple angles—especially from the perspectives of race and gender (non-white, non-Japanese, non-male)—those who have been making/writing history.
    

He followed up each point with specific questions. For example, “What does Pearl Harbor mean to the indigenous people of Hawaii or the Native Hawaiians?”; and “Was Pearl Harbor an attack on the United States” or “Was Pearl Harbor an attack on Native Hawaiians as well?” were follow-up questions to point number four. Yaguchi pointed out that he was born and raised in Hokkaido, the northern-most main island of Japan, and to his surprise one of the students mentioned that he lives in Kushiro, a city in Hokkaido that is Yaguchi’s ancestral hometown. Since the Ainu are an indigenous people from the northern region of Japan, particularly Hokkaido, Yaguchi’s questions prompted some students to think about parallels between the Ainu and Native Hawaiians.

The five key points of his lecture led to many questions during the question-and-answer period. One student asked, “Is there anything that you keep in mind when teaching Japanese about American history or specific events such as Pearl Harbor?” Yaguchi replied, “At the University of Tokyo, I really encourage students to think about why you learn history in specific ways. Who decides what you need to study? I also encourage students to be critical of the education that you receive. University years are a time for you to reassess what you learn… We living in Japan or educating in Japan tend to connect Pearl Harbor as the beginning and the atomic bombs as the ending… or the cause and the effect. And this is a very common way of framing history. People in the United States do not necessarily think so.”

While listening to Yaguchi’s lecture, I reflected upon UTokyo Compass, which is the University of Tokyo President Teruo Fujii’s statement of the guiding principles of the University of Tokyo—the ideals to which the university should aspire and the direction it should take, under the title “Into a Sea of Diversity: Creating the Future through Dialogue.” In his lecture, Yaguchi extended the reach of UTokyo Compass to Stanford e-Japan high school students throughout Japan. Kotani and I were most appreciative the ripple effect of UTokyo Compass that he provided through his lecture. Kotani stated, “I am so grateful to Professor Yaguchi for introducing my students to not only diverse perspectives on Pearl Harbor but also for engaging them in questions related to epistemology.”

UTokyo Compass prompted me think about the importance of one’s “moral compass,” or a person’s ability to judge what is right and wrong and to act accordingly. Through Stanford e-Japan and the RSP, Kotani, Funahashi, and I hope to encourage high school students to remember to navigate their academic and professional careers with their own moral compass. In addition, as a compass always follows true north, I think that leaders should follow a set of unwavering personal values, including integrity. The students in Stanford e-Japan and the RSP are among the best and brightest in Japan and the United States and future leaders. I encourage them to singlehandedly change the world, to be changemakers.

SPICE recommends the use of a 13-minute lecture—titled “Civil and Human Rights: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy” by Dr. Clayborne Carson—for use at the high school and college levels. Dr. Carson is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor Emeritus at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, FSI, at Stanford University. In the video lecture, Professor Carson not only discusses Martin Luther King, Jr. as a civil rights leader but also examines his larger vision of seeing the African American struggle as a worldwide struggle for citizenship rights and human rights.

A free classroom-friendly discussion guide for this video is available for download on the website above. The organizing questions that are listed in the guide are:

• What are civil and human rights?
• What were the significant achievements of the Civil Rights Movement?
• What is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy in terms of civil and human rights?
• How are Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision, ideas, and leadership still relevant today?
• How is the American Civil Rights Movement similar and different from other rights-related movements?

SPICE also recommends the resources on the following websites for use in classrooms.

• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute supports a broad range of educational activities illuminating Dr. King’s life and the movements he inspired. Dr. Carson is the founding director of the Institute.

• The World House Project works to realize Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of the world as a large house in which “we must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.” Dr. Carson is the director of the Project.