Bowen to Address Asian Studies Conference at SUNY

NEW PALTZ — Roger W. Bowen, president of the State University of New York at New Paltz, will be the featured dinner speaker (October 16) for the New York Conference on Asian Studies to be held at SUNY New Paltz on October 15-17. His remarks will focus on the significance of the conference theme, “Issues of Responsibility in Asia,” in that nation today.

Bowen will also participate in a panel discussion focusing on the documentary video, “A Man Who Might Have Existed: E. Herbert Norman.” The 95-minute film will have its U.S. premiere presentation at the conference on Saturday, October 17 at 2 p.m. It will be followed by the panel discussion. The documentary is a study of the Canadian Asianist victimized by the McCarthy hearings. Norman (1909-1957) was a prominent scholar of late 19th century Japan and the author of Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State. Bowen is the author of a biography on Norman.

Other panelist will be John Kramer, director of the film, and John W. Dower, writer and historian. Kramer won the Canadian Film Award for Editing, in 1976, for “Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry.” Dower is the author of War Without Mercy (Pantheon, 1986) and editor of Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writing of E.H. Norman.

Bowen, a political scientist whose work is primarily on Japan, is the author of Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: a Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement; Innocence Is Not Enough: the Life and Death of E. Herbert Norman; and many essays and articles on contemporary Japan. He is currently completing a manuscript for a book critiquing postwar Japanese democracy.