Thursday, March 8, 2012, 6:00PM - 8:15PM
ENGLISH
Third-Party Event
Organization Name: Keizai Society

On March 11, 2011, a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan's northern coastal Tohoku region of Japan, ravaging communities and transforming in an instant the world's image of Japan. The heart-wrenching images of the disaster flashed across the world on the net and new SNS media triggered an international outpouring of compassion and support, while the courage and composure of the people of Tohoku stirred fresh admiration for the best qualities of Japan.

Yet, as the long year of recovery has passed, the drawn-out Fukushima nuclear crisis, reports of government and corporate failings both after and before the natural disaster itself, and lingering damage to a Japanese economy that had only just begun to emerge from more than a decade of stagnation has stirred new doubts about the future of the country once considered the unstoppable juggernaut of Asia. Today, Tohoku's recovery is more than a domestic humanitarian challenge for Japan. It has taken on global import as a symbolic barometer of Japan's ability to shake off its long malaise, and reinvent itself to once again flourish in a world transformed by new technologies and the rise of powerful new competitors. During the disaster and its aftermath, the US-Japan military alliance reasserted itself as a powerful tool for relief and recovery through Operation Tomodachi. But today, it is the emerging trans-Pacific synergy in hi-tech that is helping speed Tohoku's recovery, and is pointing the way to new transformative possibilities for the future. The challenge today for Tohoku – and for all of Japan - is not simply to rebuild, but to transform, to emerge not just better prepared to respond to the next catastrophe, but reinvigorated and rewired to compete and flourish in the new connected world.

Our distinguished Tohoku Transformation speakers will take this moment a year since the disaster to see what has been accomplished, and to offer a preliminary sketch for what can be done in the future. Our mix of government and private-sector experts will review how Japan has overcome the immediate impact of the catastrophe, and at the powerful role the Japan-US alliance played in the recovery. They will discuss the new technologies put to the test during the disaster, and discuss what lies ahead in the drive to transform Tohoku, and Japan.

The Honorable Hiroshi Inomata, Consul General of Japan in San Francisco, will update us on the Government of Japan's responses and initiatives to transform the Tohoku region. U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Frank Clark, a key driver of the U.S. Government's Operation Tomodachi that brought the hi-tech weight of the U.S. military into play for disaster response in the immediate aftermath of the quake and tsunami, will discuss what has been achieved and the new, long-term goals of Operation Tomodachi in the years ahead. On our transformational technology panel moderated by Dr. Richard Dasher of Stanford's US-Asia Technology Management Center, Gaku Ueda of Twitter and Dr. Ka Ping Yee of Google will discuss how SNS and collective information technologies came to the rescue when traditional communication networks crashed during the crisis, and forecast what we can anticipate in the future. Kurion's John Raymont discusses the new technologies going into the cleanup of the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor farm. Putting the focus back on the still pressing humanitarian needs in the disaster zone, documentarian and US-Japan cultural innovator Stu Levy shares footage shot on the ground in the devastated community of Ishinomaki for his new documentary, "Pray for Japan,%2

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