FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
An on-the-ground perspective of North Korean society
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Returning to her office in Pyongyang from a site visit to an agricultural development project one day last year, Katharina Zellweger had a revelation to share with her colleagues:
“I saw trees, bushes, upland rice, maize, berries, and all kinds of other crops planted on the hillsides!” she said.
Life in North Korea today is much more vibrant than the stark slopes and muted grey concrete buildings Zellweger encountered when she began traveling to North Korea in the mid-1990s. Day-to-day existence is still a struggle for many people, especially in the countryside, but Zellweger, who is the 2011–12 Pantech Fellow with Stanford’s Korean Studies Program, has watched positive change slowly ripple throughout the country for 17 years.
“If you have the patience and perseverance, and try to understand the country as well as you can, it is possible to do work there that is meaningful for the survival of the people and for the future of the country,” she said during a recent interview.
Zellweger’s projects in North Korea began in 1995 while she worked for the Hong Kong office of Caritas Internationalis, a Catholic network of humanitarian organizations, and continued when she moved to Pyongyang to lead the efforts of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, a part of Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. She lived in Pyongyang and interacted with North Koreans on a daily basis for five years until coming to Stanford in October 2011.
Since her earliest visits to North Korea, Zellweger has introduced ways to help alleviate the formidable problem of food scarcity and hunger. North Korea has always been a country of urban dwellers, she said, and the 60 percent of North Koreans who live in cities drain the countryside of its crops. In an effort to carve out new places to grow food during the toughest years, farmers have resorted to stripping hillsides of their trees. The solution is short-term and unsustainable, though, as the denuded slopes can only be planted for a few years, and it leads to soil erosion and flooding.
“If you do not have enough to eat and you are hungry, that is what people do,” Zellweger said.
She and her team tackled the problem in one province with a simple solution. They taught rural housewives to plant bands of deep-root vegetation every 10 meters along cleared hillsides. The slopes are a “no man’s land” outside of the commune system, and the women have official permission to either keep what they harvest or sell it in the market for extra income. The environment also reaps big benefits from this sustainable agricultural method, which is catching on in more provinces.
“The last time I visited the project, the women told me that they now grow about 15 species of crops, whereas previously they only had one or two,” Zellweger said. “It has brought biodiversity back to those areas.”
Along with receptiveness to new farming techniques, North Koreans have also embraced certain technological developments. Even though the city and countryside are relatively cut off from one another, for example, cell phone tower transmissions now crisscross most of North Korea. Already one million of North Korea’s 24 million citizens own cell phones, and can find coverage in 75 percent of the country.
“Mobile telephones are not just in the big cities—even farm managers have them,” Zellweger said. “With that, communication has improved a lot among the North Korean people.”
Some ripples of change have also penetrated North Korea’s educational system. English replaced Russian a few years ago as the main foreign language taught in school, Zellweger said, who smiled as she described the warbling greetings of school children who would sometimes approach her to test out their language skills.
“Years ago, I would not even have eye contact with people,” she said. “People would simply look down, and I would feel like thin air, as if I did not exist. That has gone—there is now a certain amount of natural curiosity.”
When she first began visiting North Korea, the Pyongyang Business School, a professional development project close to Zellweger’s heart, did not exist yet. Under her leadership, several groups of 30 to 35 mid-level managers and government officials had the opportunity to participate in a special diploma program. During each 12-month program cycle, lecturers from the Hong Kong Management Association flew monthly to Pyongyang to teach an intensive three-day seminar on subjects ranging from finance to management.
“The Hong Kong lecturers would say, ‘We could not have more diligent students,’” Zellweger said. “The feedback from the students was also very, very positive.”
As Zellweger experienced during her 17 years working in North Korea, change may unfold gradually there but it does come. And for the positive development to grow even more transformative, she said, the basic needs of everyday North Koreans must be met.
“When basic needs like food and medical care are covered, I believe things will start moving forward at a different pace,” Zellweger said. “There are 24 million people in North Korea who just want to lead a decent life, and who have the same dreams and hopes as we all have. That goes beyond any political issue.”
Zellweger will give a talk on May 11 about her work and the change she witnessed in North Korea.
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Katharina Zellweger, 2011-12 Pantech Fellow, holds a drawing she has been presented with by a child at a North Korean school.
Courtesy Katharina Zellweger
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Entrepreneurship in Japan’s ICT Sector: Opportunities and Protection from Japan’s Telecommunications Regulatory Regime Shift
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Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship played a critical role in transforming Japan’s telecommunications sector. Between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, in a sector long dominated by a stable set of large actors with well-established patterns of interaction, entrepreneurs introduced new technologies, new business models, and new norms of interaction.
The subsequent transformation of Japan’s telecommunications sector was dramatic, providing consumers with not only fast and sophisticated services but also low prices and an entire new ecosystem of mobile content—a considerable departure from Japan’s long track record of being known as producer- rather than consumer-oriented, with consumers enjoying high-end services and products, but at high prices.
Yet, these transformative entrepreneurs were not acting in a vacuum. Regulatory shifts in telecommunications were critical in providing opportunities for entrepreneurs, while simultaneously protecting them from large incumbent firms. These regulatory shifts were driven by the political dynamics of the 1990s as Japan struggled through its post-bubble economic malaise and political changes.
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Kenji E. Kushida
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Former Research Scholar, Japan Program
Kenji E. Kushida was a research scholar with the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center from 2014 through January 2022. Prior to that at APARC, he was a Takahashi Research Associate in Japanese Studies (2011-14) and a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow (2010-11).
Kushida’s research and projects are focused on the following streams: 1) how politics and regulations shape the development and diffusion of Information Technology such as AI; 2) institutional underpinnings of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, 2) Japan's transforming political economy, 3) Japan's startup ecosystem, 4) the role of foreign multinational firms in Japan, 4) Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster. He spearheaded the Silicon Valley - New Japan project that brought together large Japanese firms and the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
He has published several books and numerous articles in each of these streams, including “The Politics of Commoditization in Global ICT Industries,” “Japan’s Startup Ecosystem,” "How Politics and Market Dynamics Trapped Innovations in Japan’s Domestic 'Galapagos' Telecommunications Sector," “Cloud Computing: From Scarcity to Abundance,” and others. His latest business book in Japanese is “The Algorithmic Revolution’s Disruption: a Silicon Valley Vantage on IoT, Fintech, Cloud, and AI” (Asahi Shimbun Shuppan 2016).
Kushida has appeared in media including The New York Times, Washington Post, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Nikkei Business, Diamond Harvard Business Review, NHK, PBS NewsHour, and NPR. He is also a trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation, alumni of the Trilateral Commission David Rockefeller Fellows, and a member of the Mansfield Foundation Network for the Future. Kushida has written two general audience books in Japanese, entitled Biculturalism and the Japanese: Beyond English Linguistic Capabilities (Chuko Shinsho, 2006) and International Schools, an Introduction (Fusosha, 2008).
Kushida holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He received his MA in East Asian Studies and BAs in economics and East Asian Studies with Honors, all from Stanford University.
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Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Japan's Response After the Tohoku Disaster
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Prior to March 11, 2011, many observers had all but written Japan's economy off; after all, it was said, Japan produced only 10 percent of global manufacturing output. Four days later, the world realized that a good portion of that 10 percent sits at a critical upstream spot in the global supply chain, in many products that we not only like (such as the iPad) but also need (e.g., fine chemicals for lithium-ion batteries, silicon wafers, or microcontrollers). In some cases, more than half of global output in critical input materials was located in the Tohoku region. Remarkably, by May 2011, most of the factories not located in the radiation zone had repaired the earthquake damage and resumed operations.
This presentation explores Japan's role in producing components and materials that are critical in global manufacturing, and then zooms in to analyze the speedy efforts at reconstruction by Japanese business after the Tohoku disaster. It argues that Japan is unlikely to relinquish its leading role in supplying critical components due to this shock, precisely because these "New Japan" companies are competitive, nimble, and fast.
Ulrike Schaede studies Japan’s corporate strategy, business organization, management, financial markets, and regulation. Her book Choose and Focus: Japanese Business Strategies for the 21st Century (Cornell UP, 2008) argues that Japan’s business organization has undergone a strategic inflection so fundamental that our knowledge of Japanese business practices from the 1980s and 1990s is no longer adequate. Her current research looks at “New Japan” companies that have assumed global supply chain leadership in materials and components. She also works on projects regarding corporate restructuring, changing human resource practices, and entrepreneurship in Japan.
Schaede holds an MA from Bonn University, and a PhD from the Philipps-Universtät in Marburg, Germany. She is trilingual and has spent a total of more than eight years of research and study in Japan. She has been a visiting scholar at the research institutes of the Bank of Japan, Japan's Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and at the Development Bank of Japan. Before joining the University of California, San Diego in 1994, Schaede held academic positions in Germany (Philipps-Universtät Marburg) and Japan (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo), and she was a visiting professor at the business schools of UC Berkeley and Harvard.
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Ulrike Schaede
Professor of Japanese Business
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University of California, San Diego
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