Sadako Ogata, the diminutive woman who is one of Japan’s best-known and longest-serving public figures, is 81.
That number, though, does not interest her. Like death, taxes and the dizzying rise and fall of Japanese prime ministers, it is beyond her managerial control.
What she can manage is a Japanese government agency that gives assistance and expertise to the world’s poorest people, and is the the world’s largest bilateral development agency.
The Japan International Cooperation Agency, which Ogata heads, recently merged with a government bank that offers grants and low-interest loans.
That gives the agency an estimated $10.3 billion in available financial resources, an amount it says is about two and a half times that of the Unites States Agency for International Development.
Ogata will be in Washington today to talk with US officials and the World Bank about how her expanded agency can collaborate with them to fight poverty, especially in Africa.
What she wants to do with Japan’s beefed-up aid bureaucracy is to move aid and manpower into crisis areas such as Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Fast.
“Unless you are there on the ground at the crucial point, you cannot meet real needs,” she said in an interview, noting that for decades Japan’s aid bureaucracy had a well-deserved reputation for avoiding dangerous trouble spots and for having far more employees sitting at desks in Tokyo than working in the field.
Her manner was dignified, her voice calm and her English diction impeccable. But she has a very un-Japanese habit of saying exactly what she thinks, no matter whom it offends.
Shuffling papers while people were dying has always ticked Ogata off.
When she was the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, a position she held from 1991 to 2000, Ogata angered her boss, secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and embarrassed the UN Security Council by demanding in 1993 that the United Nations either break the Serbian siege of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia or carry out a large-scale evacuation in the area.
Two years after her warning, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in Srebrenica by Serbs in the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War.
Ogata was born into one of Japan’s most distinguished families.
Her great-grandfather, prime minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, was killed by ultra-nationalists in 1932, an assassination that halted party politics in Japan and ushered in the military-dominated governments that propelled the country into the Second World War.
She came to the world of big-league diplomacy in her fifties, after raising two children. She had no choice but to wait that long. When she was young, Ogata said, women were not permitted to join Japan’s diplomatic corps.
With a masters degree in international affairs from Georgetown University and a doctorate in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, Ogata became a professor of international relations in Japan.
After she was selected in 1990 as a compromise candidate to head the UN refugee agency, multiple regional wars erupted around the world, producing a record 27 million refugees.
With people in need from the Balkans to Rwanda to Kurdistan, her staff swelled to more than 5,000 and her budget topped $1 billion.
But unlike many high-powered UN officials, Ogata never mastered the art of speaking at length while saying nothing. She even chided Japan for failing to be serious about humanitarian work.
Years later, she is still chiding Japan. What upsets her now, she said, is the government’s failure to address the country’s demographic crisis.
Japan has the world’s oldest population and is projected to lose up to 70 per cent of its workforce by 2050.
Yet Japanese leaders have done “nothing” to increase immigration, “nothing” to ease the strain on working mothers and “nothing” to change a work-obsessed culture that keeps many young couples from having children, she said. “Nothing was done.
Do we have political leaders who are far-sighted? No!”
Japan’s government has cut spending on overseas development aid by 40 per cent in the past 11 years.
But Ogata did not complain about the cuts. She has made do, closing her agency’s offices in Europe and shifting resources to Africa, where needs are greatest.
As for retirement, Ogata laughed and said she would stick around for at least another year to oversee the agency’s expansion. “I am used to moving people and moving things,” she said.
