so with that, let me turn things over to dick and michishita and for sheila's comments to follow. thank you. >> thanks very much, mike. and i want to thank henry and deepa for organizing this project which has been of enormous interest and it's engaged both michishita and myself in ways that we're delighted to report out to you. there is -- can you hear in the back now 'cause you were having earlier? it's okay? yeah, it may seem odd -- it struck me that it may seem odd to some folks that we're talking about -- we're including japan on a project on rising powers. i mean, this is not the 1920s. [laughter] >> the last time i checked. [laughter] >> and it's not the 1980s when we were all agog about japan as a rising power. but it's including because at least potentially japan is a great power. it has many of the -- many of the pieces to be a great power again. and, of course, after the catastrophes of 3/11 there's the possibility that japan may be reborn yet again, or at least reinvented yet again and so it deserves some closer analysis. that said i guess i start in a very japanese fa

debate choices about which options japan had and what resulted was the oshita doctrine and dick and michishita on the paper does so nicely here but it was a reconstruction era. it was a very particular historical moment. and here we are again at a moment of japan trying to rethink and potentially be at that reconstructive moment again but i think the historical context sort of matters to me when i look at your school of thought and when does why matters and they strengthen and weaken over time and part of the question for the project beyond japan perhaps when you're looking at the introduction of new strategic policies or choices, how do you determine what's continuity and what's changed? how do you determine what's in the autonomy, you know, has been there all along in the debate versus what is really signifying that the agency of change has changed, i.e., whether it was institutions or the individual decision-makers. when do you recognize that he's somebody fundamentally different or he was a blip on the screen over time? the second piece of this question is, of course, the dpj. now, has a n

the paper i've been asked to discuss about japan by dick and michishita narushige two people i've read and talked to so many times. i feel like internalized so much of what they say it's hard to say anything that opposes it. but let me say two things that i think are important here about the schools of thought approach to japan. and the kind of work that both of them have been engaged in for some time and that is that we often especially sitting here in washington assume that japan doesn't have strategic thinking, right? and that there isn't a contest of ideas inside japan that leads to the choices that japan makes particularly in its relationship with us. so again, this kind of work is intergrel that japan has made choices in particularly with us. i think here in out i think japan has made choices with china and other countries and the weak calibration that dick and michishita has made on the paper is getting at is very, very important because the strategic calculus for japan now is going to be very difficult and will require institutional reorganization and it will be deeply conteste