Sadako Ogata, formerly United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is one of Japan's most prominent international figures.
Born in Tokyo in 1927, she grew up in Japan, China and the United States, receiving her PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral thesis, titled "Defiance in Manchuria," examined Japan's failed, military-led expansionism in China in the 1920s and '30s, known as the Manchurian Affair. While working as an academic in Japan (where she became Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo from 1989), she moved into diplomacy, serving on the Japanese delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in 1968 and as a Minister on the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations in New York between 1976 and 1979.
By that time a mother of two, Ogata followed her husband, Shijuro Ogata (a banker and former deputy governor of The Bank of Japan for International Relations), to New York, bringing her son and daughter to live there with them. The experience, she has said, taught her how to work within the international political arena -- and also made her aware that Japanese representatives were frequently not participating in debates for fear of "giving the country a bad image.''