When Hatoyama talks about his time at Stanford, it's hard to know whether it was artificial intelligence, linear programming or football that drew him to the Farm. "I think I saw almost all the games—I was at Stanford in 1970 and 1971, when Stanford football was at its strongest. Jim Plunkett was the best player in the U.S. then," he says.
Between games, he limbered up himself. "Every Sunday I got together with Japanese friends and we played touch football." The football story continued into his premiership. In 2009 he greeted incoming U.S. ambassador John V. Roos, '77, JD '80, with a gift that would push all the right buttons: a Cardinal helmet. In return, Roos invited him to watch the live broadcast of Big Game at the ambassador's residence. "There were a lot of fans from both Stanford and Berkeley there," Hatoyama recalls.
Roos remembers the fateful day: "The first half was fun," he says. But then Stanford gave up its lead in the second half. The ambassador jokes that maybe he should have ended the party at half time.
Hatoyama left Stanford with memories beyond football. "One of the things that surprised me was not just the campus, but how the classroom itself was open to the outside world. It meant that in the class I took, for instance, there would be researchers from outside companies attending, and these corporate researchers would be asking questions during the class—and that is something that I think Japanese universities could learn from," he says.
"One thing that was also impressive was the granularity of the curriculum, especially in the Business School. . . . It's set up to cover everything from basic to advanced level." The curriculum is much more rigid in Japan, he says. "Departmental and class divisions are still set up vertically under the names of the professors, so the system is not that granular. This is one of the things Japanese universities could learn from the Americans."
Is there anything Stanford might borrow from Japanese practice? "One thing I did introduce as prime minister was a system whereby [engineering] credits among Japanese, Chinese and Korean universities could be made interchangeable. So even though you were studying at Tokyo University, you could follow courses offered at Peking University or Seoul National University. If Stanford were to join this initiative, students [in these universities] could follow courses Stanford gives, and vice versa."
