Political Watershed in Japan: What's Ahead?
Japan has been virtually a single-party oligarchy under the Liberal Democratic Party for decade. But last weekend the opposition DP swept them aside in a landslide victory, winning 308 out of 480 seats in the lower house, and making Yukio Hatoyama the new Prime Minister. Commentator John Feffer of Foreign Policy in Focus has compared what happened in Japan to American voters kicking out both the Democrats and Republicans and giving a Congressional majority to the Green Party. So is Hatoyama an Obama, a Nader, or something else entirely? What kind of significant changes can we expect in Japan's social, economic and foreign policies, and how deep does the change go? Scholar Mark Selden breaks it down for us.
Guests
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MARK SELDEN is a Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University and a coordinator of Japan Focus, an e-journal on the Asia-Pacific region (www.japanfocus.org). He is a co-founder of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, founded in 1968 in opposition to the American war in Vietnam and the author of many books on Japan and China, including The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century.
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What South Asian Immigrants Tell Us About the National Health Care Debate
The national health care debate continues to rage with no sign of an acceptable solution. But amidst all the argument there are some key puzzle pieces often missing from the picture: namely the concerns specific to immigrants, women, and low-income people of all races. Tonight we talk with Sapna Pandya and Prantik Saha of the South Asian Health Initiative about the particular barriers of racism and classism South Asian and other immigrant communities face in trying to get equitable health care. They also suggest how proposals to address these structural issues for immigrant workers could shed light on US health care reform as a whole.
Guests
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SAPNA PANDYA was until recently Director of Programs for the South Asian Health Initiative (SAHI) at NYU School of Medicine's Center for Immigrant Health. She is also a co-founder of Humsafar International, a collective of trainers on sexual health, sexual identity and health access issues; and of the Jeena Circle, a foundation that raises funds for basic living expenses for underserved South Asians.
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PRANTIK SAHA is Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center, and a member of the Community Advisory Board of SAHI. His clinical practice consists of primary care pediatrics for urban immigrant communities.
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Chinatown Film Project at MOCA
The Chinatown Film Project, up now at the Museum of Chinese in America, is a film exhibition that aims to confront stereotyped representations of Chinatown by presenting new work reimagining the space geographically and culturally. Part one consists of ten original short films by artists including Patty Chang and Wayne Wang, while part two takes the concept online and invites viewers to submit their own work on Chinatown as viewed through a variety of formats. More
here.
Guests
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Karin Chien is an independent film producer based in New York City. The producer of seven feature films, including “Robot Stories” (2002) and “The Motel” (2005), her films have won over sixty film festival awards. She is President and Founder of dGenerate Films, a distributor of independent, contemporary films from China, and teaches independent film producing and finance management at New York University and the School of Visual Arts in New York.
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