Patty Vest: Welcome to Sage cast the podcast at Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: I'm Mark Wood. This season on Sage cast, we're talking with current and former Pomona faculty about the personal, professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today we're delighted to talk to Tom Lee, assistant Professor of politics here at Pomona College. Mark Wood: Welcome Tom. Glad to have you with us. Tom Le: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Mark Wood: You've been at Pomona for about five years or in your fifth year I think. Let's go way back in- Patty Vest: The Way back Machine? Mark Wood: Yeah, and ask you to tell us about your journey, how you got here, how you became interested in what you're doing. Tom Le: Okay. What I do is, I do East Asia security issues, specifically on Japanese security policy and I look at demographics like aging populations, declining populations, and how it affects security. That's what I do. How I got there, I think it's how most graduate students get there, you do your research on a specific question and it turns out that everybody's already answered it. You try to find your angle. Mine ended up being demographics, but if we go way at the beginning, out of high school, I wanted to be a lobbyist. I always envisioned that I'd be working in the Capitol and promoting whatever interest my firm would want me to push. Tom Le: When I was a junior, I got accepted to the UC DC program. I went to UC Davis, and then I also got accepted to a study abroad program in Yokohama, Japan. I was supposed to go to Japan first and then DC, but for some reason on scheduling, I went to DC first. I got my first shot at lobbying. I went to work for Oxfam America, and we were working on farm subsidies which was really great. I had a great mentor and he let me actually go with him and lobby senator. Tom Le: We went into the Feinstein office, the Grassley office, we got to cut farm subsidies. We were quite successful to the point where we're going to get people to agree to sign on to a bill to cut the subsidies. I think at the time in early 2000s, we were given a billion dollars a year until a con. The day before we got the agreement, they just changed their minds, because it turns out like the wife of one of the lead cotton lobbyists was friends with a Senator and then they had a talk or something like that. That's what was behind the scene's action. That made me lose faith in government and said, I'll try the academic track, or I'll just criticize these guys instead. Tom Le: Then the next semester I went to Japan and to be honest, I went because I've never left the US before. It's actually the first time I went on an airplane, DC was and then, International. It was fun. At the time I didn't speak any Oh, I did speak some Japanese but everything was just wild. It was, the rules are different here. The culture is different. I got fascinated with different places and then, the program itself wasn't very rigorous. At the time, the average amount of weekly readings was 12 pages or something like that. Mark Wood: Not exactly Pomona. Tom Le: No it wasn't Pomona. I'm on a study abroad committee now at Pomona, and I tell the students, "Find rigorous programs". Nicole runs that office really well and we have some of the more rigorous programs in the world probably, but you'll learn a lot just from being in another country. Especially since I had never been abroad before. I was taking a class with the professor. I went to Japan one week later than other students because of some visa issue. Everyone enrolled in one class, 60 students, and I didn't know why and I paid the class on like Law of the Sea, because I was into politics and I was the only student. There's actually 10 weeks where it's one professor and me. Patty Vest: One on one. Tom Le: One on one, but since it's Japan, it's still not done in discussion session style, straight up lecture style. Professor Yoshi, standing in front of blackboard. Patty Vest: Did you have to raise your hand? Tom Le: Yes, I did. Patty Vest: Pick me. Tom Le: I would sit there and he would just lecture. It's funny because sometimes I was really tired. I was like don't fall asleep. Mark Wood: And you couldn't sit in the back of the class. Tom Le: No. He was three chairs, it was a weird setup. Patty Vest: You can't skip class. Tom Le: Yeah. At Pomona... Mark Wood: You get noticed. Tom Le: The logical thing to do I think at Pomona is, if that ever happened and didn't cancel a class, you probably have every class at the stage in cafe or something like that. And then you make it into a conversation and you let it evolve but in here, different cultures, different norms. The class itself was boring because it's just one person talking about the Law of the Sea. I asked him, "I want to do a research paper and I want to do it on this shrine controversy". There was this war shrine in Japan that was in the headlines at the time. He said, "Sure, let's do this in addition to the class". He helped me find a bunch of Japanese politicians. We went online and called out their names and just cold called and said, "We want to do some interviews". They said, Yes. Tom Le: I was able to, as an undergraduate, go into these offices of these elites and talk to them. They were really kind and the first interview was with Ishita Yamamoto, who's still in the government now. He's a quirky figure, conservative but young, and he's also a singer songwriter who writes and produces albums on politics, he could sing pretty well. When we got there, he had signed CDs for us and he made a big deal out of it. Tom Le: I got addicted to independent research and Japan seemed like a very welcoming country if you're a Westerner. I learned later when I got deeper into research why that's the case. That was the beginning track of being interested in Japan. After I graduated, I took two years off and when I got into grad school, I started pursuing the Japan research route. Finished grad school. I did a Fulbright, and that's when I applied for the job here. I got flown in from Japan, and I was able to fake it for a couple of days in order to get the offer and it worked out. That's a long way around to the answer. Patty Vest: That's great. You mentioned a few of the opportunities you had as an undergrad. You talked a lot about this also on your social media, about being a first gen student. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that formed you as a student but also as an academic, and then talk a little bit about how now as a professor, does that affect the way that you mentor your students specially first gen students? Tom Le: I don't know if it's all direct, let me see how I could explain it. By being first gen, there's a couple of feelings that you always carry with yourself. One is a constant sense of insecurity, that when things go well, it could just go away for whatever reason, because you never have enough capital bill to either financial or political or whatever. You're always feeling insecure and also being first gen is, the amount of space that you have for making mistakes, it's much smaller than those that have adequate resources. Tom Le: A lot of how I've seen my career develop, and I'm really happy with where I'm at right now is that, a lot of it, it's luck and having good mentors. I'll give you a couple examples. I didn't know I needed to take SAT, to go to college. I was a decent student throughout up until high school and I did what was put in front of me. There's something called the GATE program, or something like that. It's in second or third grade. I tested really high into it because the teachers thought I should do it and when I got in, I didn't accept it because I didn't understand why do I need to do this. Patty Vest: You didn't know what it was? Tom Le: Yeah, because I'm like, why would I leave my friends? I just stayed. These are opportunities that are in front of you but if you don't have the resources, you don't really understand. My parents, my mom only went to school until the third grade. High school is already something different and then, I didn't know I needed to take SAT. The only reason why I took it is because, there was a girl that I wanted to take to prom and she asked me, "Hey, Tom, are you taking SAT"? I was like- Patty Vest: She asked you what your score was? Tom Le: Are you going to take it yet? Do you need a ride to Rowland High School, it's some high school near St Gabriel. This is cool, I can hang out with her for a day. That's the only reason I took it. But if I didn't have that random offer, I wouldn't really know that I had to take it. I didn't study for it and things like that. That's the only reason why I did that. When I got into grad school, I run the first two years, people were talking about I want to publish here, go to this conference and all these things and I was thinking, I don't know what a conference is. I don't know any of these things. I had really good friends that mentored and explained things to me. That's why I think most of my friends are a little bit older than me because, I gravitate towards people that were in the know. Tom Le: That's the first hand experience. There may be a ton of resources, but you don't know how to navigate it, or contextualize it, or be efficient in using it. Then we live in a world where getting into school and succeeding is so game now. There're prep centers and all these things. You're not even- Patty Vest: It's an industry. Tom Le: It's an industry. You have to have a lot of good support. Coming from that background, I know at Pomona College and a lot of universities now are doing a great job at increasing diversity but that's one part of it. What I've tried to do is create opportunities for students and connect them with mentors. Working with Zane, at the Pacific base Institute, we set up a permanent internship with the Civic forum for two students every year now and, I have a lot of friends in the professional world, in Law, and things like that's. I'll connect them with students and have them mentor them, that's what I try to do for first gen students help them understand the context and how hard it is to do well and appreciate the mentors you have. Patty Vest: Definitely. Mark Wood: You've also talked about the fact that the term First gen is misused sometimes. Can you talk to us about that? Tom Le: I've seen some people on social medias, one thing I try to do is that, I don't want to never diminish anyone's accomplishments even if they come from stable or wealthy or whatever backgrounds because, succeeding in the world is already hard. I've seen people say I'm a First gen PhD, that's true. But then, my parents both have masters. That's a huge accomplishment but as First gen, it diminishes what it really means and the obstacles of being First gen. It's true, you're the first generation in your family to get a PhD, but there's other obstacles by being first gen that has to do than not just being the first to do something. Being a First gen is not really being first to do something, that's not the most important part. Mark Wood: It's one step above what your parents have done. Tom Le: It's more about the other conditions that I mentioned earlier about not knowing what's up. Patty Vest: Let's go back a little bit about your academic expertise. You said that you got interested as an undergrad. You wrote a research paper out of your class of, your one on one class. Tell us about how that evolved. You focus on East Asia and security issues, what are the topics that you're interested in, and how has that developed? That's a pretty active area in politics. Can you tell us a little bit about your research? Tom Le: It's definitely expanded, especially at Pomona because there's always a problem with breadth and depth for departments. Politics is one of, probably the medium sized department on campus. But if you think about it, we have 12 people or so. And so, Professor Engelbert has to do all of Africa. I have to do all of Asia. My first year, there was two persons of color. Professor Foster, who does American politics and then me, so I get Asia and then, the first three theses I had to read were on Southeast Asia and I'm Vietnamese. I speak Vietnamese but that's not my research areas. I know it from personal interests or reading but this isn't my thing. In order to be a decent thesis advisor, I had to bone up on literature too. Then over time because of general interest in North Korea, I've had to move in that direction. Tom Le: Originally, my research question is actually beyond East Asia, because I'm an international relations scholar first and foremost. My question is, how do we justify violence in international relations? That's my core question that I tried to access through whatever research project I'm on. I found Asia to be a useful case that's method driven Japan in particular, because you have a country that was hyper militarized with the colonial period and then also the occupation of Korea, and the war with the United States and that, then you have a country that is anti-militaristic. They have a military now but it only does defense of the nation, disaster relief. Vast majority of its missions are related to natural disasters and humanitarian assistance. Mark Wood: That's built in into constitution right? Tom Le: Yes, exactly. How do you get a country to go from that to that in a very limited amount of time, the same people are still alive. I wanted to pursue that question. Then there's this big debate about, is Japan going back to normal? My questions were always related to, how do we define normal? Why is the use of force in international relations considered normal? That's why I pursued the Japan case. The dissertation was looking at Japan and is it really going back to normal? What I decided on in with the book project is that, normal is according to the context of that nation in that time period. Tom Le: I argue that Japan is modernizing its military now, but due to the aging population and declining population, it can't normalize in the American sense. They never can recruit enough people to even join the military, how do you get big if people won't join? There's a long history of a piece culture now, where people aren't interested in that warfare. In the United States, if someone attacked her state, this country the natural reactions are okay, we got to get them back to prevent them. If that happened in Japan, they will not automatically get to that conclusion. I want to determine why is it that people think about the use of force differently? During my graduate school, I did my Fulbright in Hiroshima and I did a lot of work with peace activists and grassroots elites, and then that expanded my research to non-proliferation and anti nuclear activities. That became a track. Tom Le: From personal interest I became very interested in ... the natural evolution was, since I studied demographics, I have to study gender. Equity in the workplace, in society, because population decline has to do with social engineering and the government side and how to get people to have more children. I got really interested in feminist literature and theory. That got me interested in the comfort women issue in Korea, then my research moved towards Japan, South Korea relations, and I have a project right now where I'm working with a couple of students. Your research takes you to different places as you do it because it gets interesting. Mark Wood: Talking about the use of force violence. A lot of what we hear in the news these days in the US, has to do with confrontations with Iran or with North Korea. Violence has to do with non-symmetrical sorts of violence too? You said you've had to expand your work into areas like North Korea. Can you talk a little bit about what you've done with that and how that ties into the things we see in the news every day? Tom Le: For North Korea, most of the stuff I had to do is for Pomona College, we've invited defectors here. John Park was a student, was hosting a couple years ago and helped him out a little bit with that. I've had alumni events and also Pomona in the cities, I think, generally people are interested in North Korea. The one thing I'll say North Korea is that, I've written popular articles on it and I've constructed lectures, but North Korea is the worst case to study because no one has good data. Tom Le: If I we're really honest about it, most people don't have access to North Korea if so it's a very limited window or with elites. If we are going to talk about North Korea, we should generally defer to people in South Korea, academics there who have better access and in the United States, the biggest scholars are like Victor Cha, who at Georgetown served on, helped with the six party talks and Sandra Feher who's, she's not in the United States, she's at Sofia University in Japan, but she did a lot of work with, looking at the plight of North Korean. There's experts I rather defer to when it comes to predict North Korea. Tom Le: My arguments on North Korea have always been that, a lot of our models or policies are on these assumptions that we have very limited data on and I find that problematic. I make more commentary about how we have a reaction to them tends not to be built on solid data. It's likely not to be the best advice, or it might be the best advice, but we have no idea, there's no way to check. That's always been my concern to caution, overly rigid views on North Korea when we really don't know that much about the country. Mark Wood: Your work is in demographics, and we certainly don't have any way of knowing much about the demographics of North Korea, I would guess. Tom Le: There's think tanks that put that out but you need to be able to have access, and we just don't. I always take everything with a grain of salt. A lot of stuff is done with satellite imagery. I do believe that maybe our governments know a lot more but a lot of it is probably classified, but I'm not a North Korea expert. A lot of people claim they are and not that they do the best that they can, but that's just the hardest case to do. We just have such limited access to them and yet we spend so much of our energy on them. My big push recently, I'm writing an article right now, just a short Op ed with two of my students looking at East Asia and that all our energy is now on, what do we do about China? Tom Le: How do we stop North Korean nuclear weapons? Is Taiwan going to be a problem? Should they be independent or not? What's that going to do to the regional order? These are all problems of the last century and We made no progress. We're just maintaining the status quo and we don't have a clear idea of how we want to move forward. What we do know is that, contagion, the coronavirus, and things that are going to be huge problems and as it spreads, and if there's no cooperation among these countries, its harder to fix. We know climate change is going to be a major issue around the world in East Asia and we know that, mass migration is going to happen due to climate change, or if the North Korean state false. We saw from the rainbow crisis East Asia is not ready for that. There's actually tangible existential threats that are going to happen sooner than later, that we're not paying attention to because we're paying attention to North Korea. Patty Vest: You mentioned that you were writing an op ed with one of your students or a couple of your students that's actually, you spent a lot of energy on writing, making sure you're writing with your students, but not only for academic journals, but also for more public facing outlets. Tell us a little about that process and what do you think that's important? Tom Le: Sure. Daphne, and I we just published an article yesterday. I forgot to send it to us. We got to get that out there. We're making sure students have as much on their CV or resume as possible when they get out of here. It's part of it. Giving them opportunity. For a couple of my classes, some assignments are to write an Op ed and get it published for the Pacific form PBI collaboration, the final assignment of that is to get published as well. To be clear Op ed's aren't as valuable, as peer reviewed articles, because at least for academic points not but at least you're engaging with an audience. Tom Le: I spent, I think, a year and a half, writing a peer reviewed article and I checked the date on it, I think it's been downloaded 40 times, or something like that and I was like God, that's a lot of work for so little impact where it's like, you can write it off and it gets into the monkey cage, and you'll know at least you'll get a couple thousand hits in a day or something, at least some people are reading it. I like working with the students and I want them to write as one is get comfortable putting your ideas out there so you have to get comfortable defending it. Tom Le: Or be comfortable being criticized. Secondly, is that our op ed's are useful in that they're short. It's really easy to just write. But getting your ideas in a shorter space is difficult and this is where you and Mark have been really helpful with me. The first Op ed that we're sending you and I just got here was 2000 words. I was like, what is going on, 2000 words that's not 12,000, you're welcome. Patty Vest: Make it 600. Tom Le: Get it to 600 and it's a useful skill and I think they get really into it. Once they see their name published, they could send that it's a very tangible result that doesn't take that much time where they could send it to their parents or their friends and it's just like, "Look, I did something." I think it's a really useful tool and many ways to get them interested in academia. Mark Wood: You also share your own projects on Twitter. If they're using Twitter is even more contracted. Can you talk to us about the use of Twitter in academia. Is that something that's growing? Tom Le: I'm not sure actually because I joined Twitter 10 years ago and I didn't tweet until I got to Pomona. For five years I didn't even log in and I only started doing that because I started working with Patty and mark and they're just like, you guys should put it out there. I'm actually quite bad at twitter. Mark Wood: We pushed you there. Tom Le: Definitely. I'm more a Facebook person. Sorry? Patty Vest: You are welcome. Tom Le: Twitter actually has connected me with a lot of different scholars. I think journalists use it a lot. It's almost like that's the only way they communicate now. I don't like Twitter because I just the reason why I didn't use Twitter for so long was I didn't know who was talking to who. When it says at something I wasn't sure, does that mean only they can see it? Or and I'm still not sure. And I'll have an idea that I want to test and it's 20 sentences long I'd rather just have a paragraph but you have to do that. Patty Vest: 105, 205, 305. Tom Le: Exactly. I don't have that many interesting things to say or not like witty in the sense. When I write, it's just too much pressure. You're going to be quite performative on Twitter. What I do find I like a lot what Twitter is there are some really good threads done by scholars where I think is they'll just make an argument and they'll link 20 articles. Then other scholars will jump in and then you'll see a lot of stuff or in my syllabi, I've been trying to increase diversity in my syllabi. In all my school I post the demographics of the authors. Tom Le: It's really hard to get some parity and that's not 50, 50 just parody that represents the evolution of the discipline. Which means by nature, it's going to be more men than women because really in a political science the foundational stuff is mostly men, but you don't know what you don't know and so by being on Twitter, there's the hashtag women also know then I think person's scholars also know and so I could ask these scholars who are better versed in this disciplines and then they'll just give a ton of suggestions. I found it to be a really valuable tool in data collection, but when it comes to producing stuff if you actually look at my Twitter, I've got very few followers because it just be like the Lakers win a game or something and I'll just be go Lakers. No one is going to log in [crosstalk 00:28:50] and be that's a pretty hot take, I don't have takes. That's my relationship with Twitter. Patty Vest: That's a good transition to one of the courses you're teaching this spring sports and politics. Can you tell us a little bit about what you had in mind for that course and then we can talk a little bit about basketball and the Lakers. Tom Le: I've always wanted to do a sports and politics class for my personal interest. I do East Asia first and my original inspiration for it was when South Korea played Japan in the World Baseball Classic in the finals in Dodger Stadium. It was a heated match and if you're versed in the literature there you're like, of course, it would be. There's this colonial history and there's this rivalry. But if you looked at the media discussion of it like in LA Times or LA Times got it actually, but other outlets, they would be like, "Where did all these Asians come from? Why are they all in Dodger Stadium and why are they so mad? It's just a baseball game." Tom Le: Because it's not just baseball, and in the United States, baseball is not just baseball, it's a pass-time and all those words have meaning. I was like, I want to do a class where for one of our classes wouldn't be awesome where week 10 or so which probably where it would fall, where during the World Baseball Classic, we could just take a class and watch a game and then see politics in action. That was the original inspiration. But I have a lot of responsibilities to the department, [inaudible 00:30:30] and East Asia class is my security class, but eventually I was just like, I'm just going to do it and so this semester, I was finally able to put together a syllabus. Tom Le: It's an analyzing difference and speaking intensive One, two, I used to teach debate for 10 years, so I try to do as much of that as I can. We look at how sports interact with gender, class, race, colonialism, health, we look at prize fighting. I'm a huge MMA fan and so it was a personal passionate talk about the stuff I like to talk about. But at the same time, it easily translates to Politics and International Relations. It's just sports are political and we apply our politics to our athletes. Mark Wood: Do you look at the Olympics? I've always thought the Olympics supposedly bring us together, but you never see people so jingoistic as they are when they're watching their own team play against some other team. Patty Vest: It's true. Tom Le: Yes, it's just like, for two weeks, everyone's a fencing expert. It's just like I care so much and then the next day they don't. Mark Wood: And winter it's, what is the one the- Patty Vest: Curling. Mark Wood: Curling. Tom Le: People are weird, we're irrational in some ways. We care about a person who's probably super wealthy, and their ability to throw a ball into a rim that's 10 feet in the air in the parameters of an 80 foot or that's arbitrary. But we do that's fun to explore. The point of the class is to question a lot of our assumptions, that sports is all about merit. What's not? Some of it is genetic lottery there's race and class issues built into it and it questions our loyalties, why do we care so much about something? You care about your country, but you didn't choose the country you were born in. Mark Wood: You don't choose your baseball team? Tom Le: You don't choose your baseball team. Mark Wood: It chooses you. Tom Le: All that and yet we put a lot of money, energy and heartache into it, it's fun to explore. Once we realize everything's absurd, then you're free to do what you want. Patty Vest: Along those lines of emotion and how much investment we put into our teams, let's talk a little bit about you wrote recently about Kobe Bryant's death and his impact that he had and talk a little about how that hit you, you grew up in Southern California, correct? Tom Le: I'm originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan. We came here in first grade. Patty Vest: Okay, let's talk a little about why has that had such an impact on you and California and a lot of basketball fans? Tom Le: The Kobe thing hit me way harder than I thought. I've been sick the last couple days so I was already bummed and then the Kobe thing really hurt because I've been really just watching clips all day and just googling and just reading as many articles trying to find some control on a situation that's obviously the weather where there was no control. I guessed a couple things. It really bummed me out. Tom Le: For Kobe was, first you are a Laker fan, I grew up with Chick Hearn and the last days of magic. When magic made a short comeback as well and then he coach for a while, so I was really into the Lakers in the beginning. Then the Lakers had that really great run with Shaq and Kobe. The thing about Kobe that was always fun was and also easy to hate on, I would go back from your petulant player, you're killing us here to how many game winners that we got out of him. He was a very cinematic player in some ways. He had so many moments where, just a buzzer beaters. Tom Le: He was a very fun Player to watch and he was with the team for 20 years. It's only really him and Tim Duncan in the modern era that stuck with the team and Tim Duncan's also one of my favorite players for the opposite reasons of Kobe. But when Kobe died, I think he did a really good job at marketing the idea that he was indestructible. He was always going to be this presence in your life, that he gets injured but he'll play through the injury, his fingers dangling off his hand, he's still playing. Tom Le: His death was quick and arbitrary. He was just hanging out with his kid and then they were going to a game and then it was an accident. Then all of a sudden he's gone and I get a message from my brother, Kobe's dead. I was like, "Oh my god." That was part of the shocking part of it. Also, I think for me as a political scientist, I was always interested in Kobe more so for his post NBA career. He's a really weird player. He grew up in Italy. He has no friends. He didn't grow up in the AAU circuit that's why the NBA is changed right now like LeBron, Wade all these guys are friends because they grew up playing with each other. Where's like was developed independently. Tom Le: He has a ton of money and he's investing and he's producing. He was going to be this media and empire. He's a young black intelligent guy and those guys can do a lot of good stuff. I was just excited, what is he going to do? He's going to make mistakes, and he's going to be controversial, but he's going to have an impact. I just wanted to follow that part of his career. When he was retired, I was just looking forward to reading those developments. Then he dies and then you just realize he's not going to be with me along the way. I always expected him to be in the background and so that's jarring because an athlete like him, it's a signpost where you could know where you are in life in some ways as well. Tom Le: That was quite upsetting. I think for Los Angeles, he has fans across demographics. Asians love him. Latinos love him. African Americans love him. Everybody loves Kobe. White's love him, everyone does because of the performance dimension, but also he's a spectacle and that's why we like sports. That was one dimension of it. Then it was also hard too because I was expressing my grief on social media, but at the same time, he has the Colorado sexual assault case, and things like that too so you don't want to lianise the guy and you want to point to recognize how this grieving process can affect other individuals negatively as well. Tom Le: It's really hard to find the right time for it because it's weird there's this big debate online about like Kobe, his daughter and seven others died? Also, Kobe had this 2003 case. That's a weird headline. But how do you talk about it. It just means in our society, we're still figuring out how do we talk about death? How do we talk about sexual assault? All these things we don't actually have norms and rules yet. Mark Wood: It's not just us. It's even the arbiters of those things. The media, the Washington Post punished a reporter for tweeting something about that in the midst of all the anguish then there's been a backlash from journalists about that because why are you punishing her for this? It's seems to be something that we're struggling with as a whole country. Tom Le: Sports are political you can't escape it and even in death, the politics are applied onto the athlete. He's not here to litigate it, but will litigate it for him. It's interesting and it's unavoidable and I think that's almost if you're grieving for Kobe, you don't have a choice because either really cared for him or you're upset that people really care for him. Which is fine, those are natural reactions and it just means we're going to be talking about it. Tom Le: But it is a loss. It's just, all the other victims too, where we're focused on one player, but we have a baseball coach from Orange County who's a local legend and then we have a bunch of kids who can't even pursue their dreams, the whole thing is just sad. At the most basic level, I was just really bummed about it. It's going to take me a while to just, I wake up every morning just be it's just weird that Kobe is that not in the world. To me, it's just weird. Patty Vest: Let's shift a little on what's next for your research. You mentioned a book I don't know if you told us about what it is about and what are you pursuing next for your research? Tom Le: The book title is Japan's aging piece. Competing securities and modern Japan are competing militarism. I don't have a final title yet. The manuscript's complete, I sent it out for review and three presses were interested in it. A fourth one actually just contacted me recently, they want to take a look which is cool. I did not expect that. I actually haven't taken my argument and tested it in the real world, really. I got some reviews back and they have been positive so hopefully I'll be able to just pick that before I come up for tenure. Patty Vest: That's helpful. Tom Le: This place gets rid of me [crosstalk 00:40:45]. I'll take my talents. That's the most immediate thing I need to get out of the way. Then I have five projects I'm working on right now. Two articles I'm working with my friend Neil Chaturvedi and Cal Poly Pomona. One of them is on people's responses to terrorist attacks in the West and the non-West. Then their support for the use of force and torture. The motivation for that was when there's terrorist attacks in France, everybody changed their Facebook photo, and they were like, I went there and [inaudible 00:41:23] there's one in, the name, the country escapes me. The flag is in my mind, it's like a pine tree. Patty Vest: Lebanon? Tom Le: Lebanon. I don't know why I couldn't place it. But when there's a terrorist attack there nobody says a thing except my Lebanese friends, because they have an intimate connection. We're trying to develop an argument on there and then another article and no hypotheses, which is boring you don't want to hear what that. I have an article on Godzilla. I've been working on how different countries interpret Godzilla differently. Tom Le: For Americans, we apply our militaristic mindset onto that film. Whereas the Japanese have a different interpretation of that film and it goes back to my general theory of how do we justify violence and how do we see the world? Then the big project now is funded by the Korea foundation. It's a really difficult project. This one's going to take a while to do because I had to get familiar with the literature too. I'm comparing reconstruction Era America suppose civil war with post World War Two East Asia, and I'm trying to develop a theory of apology and reconciliation on what happens if you don't solve the crisis immediately and effectively, right after the war and then you let it linger for decades. I use the analogy of debt and interest. If you think about the original sin is debt. Tom Le: In the United States would be slavery and in East Asia it would be Japanese colonialism and things like that. The thing about that is if you don't pay it right away, completely, there's interest. The United States, the slaves were free but then the slave owners weren't really punished. There was no true tribunals and things like that. The laws at the time were designed in that way. That's just a fact of history, not so much something else. But then over time that becomes like Jim Crow, and that becomes other things and that's like the interest. Tom Le: We've done things to try to rectify it, civil rights acts and voting rights act and things like that. But that's really paying off the interest. It's not paying off the debt. How do we get, go ahead. Mark Wood: No I was going to say it's interesting. Sorry. Tom Le: That's okay. How do we get to 2020, where we still have Black Lives Matter, and these movements that are tied to their original sin, but really very different. That means the tools that you use have to be different. In East Asia, same thing was that Japan has apologized and paid off with agreements and things like that but there are some issues that weren't fully settled and so that's how I see it is possible for the victim side to feel that they've never been properly compensated and for the former aggressor sites to feel that they've apologized too much. Tom Le: Both things can be true. That's the tragedy where one side feels they've made a lot of positive gestures and the other side still feels it's not enough. It's like student debt traps that you could constantly pay and still be stuck. That's what I'm developing and so in this project I have a couple students working with me, Michelle timber, Lucy gold, Daphne Yang, I'm trying to get another grant to get a couple more students and they're helping me find polling data and just get familiar with the literature and we're hoping to produce some Op eds out of it. Academic article, a policy paper and two presses have actually already contacted me on it and that's like, I think we'll turn this into a book one day or something. I'm not even close to that, but that'd be a cool project. Patty Vest: After tenure. Tom Le: That's how I'll make fool or something like that. This is really early, and I'm really stressed about it just because it's a hard topic and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to tackle it yet. Patty Vest: That's interesting though. Mark Wood: On that note, we're going wrap this up. We've been talking to Tom Lee, system professor of politics. Thanks, Tom. Tom Le: Thank you. Mark Wood: Thank you, Tom. That was awesome. Tom Le: And to all those who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sage cast the podcast at Pomona College. Until next time.