Hers was not a typical childhood. Born in Japan on September 16, 1927, Sadako Ogata (née Sadako Nakamura) grew up in an atmosphere of constant family conversations about public affairs and diplomatic relations. This is what passed for small talk in her large clan of diplomats and politicians during shared holidays and weekends. Although she was not drawn into such intense discussions as a young girl, she carries vivid memories of her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother being engaged in them and of "so much commotion" in the clan whenever there were changes in the Japanese cabinet.

A familiar undercurrent of those overheard conversations of her elders was their intense antimilitary stance, since her great-grandfather, Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, had been assassinated by young naval officers during the May 15 Incident of 1932.

Prime Minister Inukai’s daughter had married Kenkichi Yoshizawa, who thus became Sadako’s grandfather; her own mother was the eldest of his nine children. Kenkichi Yoshizawa was a career diplomat who served for sixty years in the Japanese foreign service; in 1932 he was minister of foreign affairs.

Diplomacy ran in the family. Several of Sadako’s uncles and cousins were also in the foreign service, as was her father, Toyokazu Nakamura. He was a career diplomat and an avid reader who kept a large library of books on foreign affairs. "And so this was my natural environment," Ogata, the voracious reader, acknowledges.

It was her father’s foreign service postings that brought the family to the American cities of San Francisco and Portland during Sadako’s early childhood. Toyokazu Nakamura was appointed consul and eventually consul general during his assignment in the United States.

Sadako began her formal education in Portland, Oregon. She went to the private Kathlin Gables School for two years. She remembers good friends there with whom she still exchanges Christmas cards today. "I was just a very happy girl with my friends and having a good early education. It was a very progressive school and we learned poetry and astronomy," she says.

After five years in the United States, Nakamura was assigned to China. There Sadako continued her studies in Japanese schools in Guangdong and later in Hong Kong, where her father employed an American Japanese woman as governess. This was also where she started her Japanese studies. "These were rather tense years," she recalls, referring to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) then underway.

Education was a priority for the Nakamuras, who looked at many schools before deciding where to send their three children. (Sadako is the eldest of three siblings and has a brother and a sister.) Sadako’s mother finished high school, an academic feat considered quite extraordinary in those days, while her father attended the National University of Tokyo.

Sadako and the family returned to Japan in 1942, after her father’s three-year assignment in China. Now a teenager of fifteen, she enrolled at the Sacred Heart, a Catholic private school for girls run by the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart congregation and considered one of the best schools in Japan. "The nuns were too confining in their discipline," she says, "but I think we knew that they loved us. That is a very important thing, for children to grow up in an environment where the teachers were dedicated."

The language of instruction at Sacred Heart was Japanese, although there was excellent English-language teaching. Her years at the school were disrupted by the Second World War, during which many students evacuated to the countryside. Sadako’s family lived alternately in two homes. One was in Karuizawa, a mountain resort in Nagano Prefecture known even today to be an enclave of the well-heeled, to which they resorted during intense American bombing. The other was their family home in Denenchofu, a residential district in Tokyo, to which they shifted when it seemed safe in the capital (or was too cold in Karuizawa).

At the start of the war, Ogata’s father was in Nanjing but he soon joined his family in Karuizawa to await his formal appointment as ambassador to Finland. (Eventually, Toyokazu Nakamura left the foreign service to practice law and engage in business.)

Though spared from the direct effects of the war, Sadako could not remain unaffected by what was going on. "The war gave me sympathy for victims," she says. "I know how and what it is to lose a war. The bombing itself was quite a horrifying experience. My mother and my younger sister left the mountain resort in the north during the cold winter to go back to our home in Tokyo and that was when the incendiary bombs fell, even in our neighborhood. The fire was next door. Part of our school was burned and Tokyo was almost flat."

After the war, the family returned to Karuizawa feeling uncertain about things to come. What was to become of their country and of themselves? How would the American occupation forces treat Japanese citizens? What was going to happen to a country that surrendered? "It was a total surrender. When the Emperor made the announcement that the war was over, everyone—my parents and grandparents—was apprehensive about what was going to happen. There was a shared sadness. It was the first time we ever heard the emperor speak."

In fact, there were a great many politically aware people in Japan who were happy when the war ended, although they were extremely cautious not to make strong public statements about it. In the 1930s and 1940s, liberalism was strong in Japan. There were vocal critics of the military, Ogata says, but "they knew when to talk and when not to."

Although Sadako lost some cousins to the war, it was only when she visited Hiroshima that she realized how "awfully devastating" the bombing was.

At war’s end, Sadako continued her studies at Sacred Heart college (now University of the Sacred Heart) as a member of a small class at the teacher’s training school. Although these were lean years in Japan, Ogata remembers many happy things about them. "I played tennis more than half the time," she says, "even competing in national championships." But reeling from the devastating effects of war, and becoming more aware of the world as she grew older, she also began to ask difficult questions. Why did Japan get into the war? Why did we fight a war that led to defeat? That was the kind of problem that eventually led her to a deeper study of Japanese diplomatic history.

Sadako was not alone in this. "This was not only myself. I have a generation of colleagues who went through that period and would devote decades to scholarly work on the origins of war, of the Pacific War. We did a lot of this kind of research."

She majored in history and English at Sacred Heart, although Mother Britt, the American founder and headmistress of the university, wanted her to major in philosophy. Her college thesis was on East Asian international relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an undeniable reflection of her family’s involvement in politics and foreign affairs.

Her parents and other close family ties shaped her, but so did Mother Britt. Although the nun died young, she was very special to her students. Ogata describes her as charismatic and someone who tried to instill in all of them a sense of obligation and leadership; she led them to imagine all of the possibilities and choices that lay before them. Ogata also credits Mother Britt for her conversion to Catholicism, although she had gone on occasional religious retreats before and was familiar with Christian ideas. Other members of her family also became Catholics at different stages of their lives.

Another memorable influence during this period was her maternal grandfather, Kenkichi Yoshizawa. He had been active during the war years as special envoy to Hanoi and Indonesia; he continued serving the government after the war, when he was appointed the first Japanese ambassador to Taiwan. A lover of Japanese sake, he lived to his nineties. Sadako fondly remembers him as a slow speaker. Every night he would enjoy his sake for about an hour and tell a lot of stories. Young Sadako listened attentively. Although he had shifted with the times politically, about sake he was a traditionalist and told his granddaughter, "Sadako, this is the best drink ever. It comes from the essence of rice, not like cocktails where you mix up everything."

During the postwar period, Sadako and her college friends experienced an exhilarating sense of freedom and liberation. More than half of them went overseas to study, as this was encouraged at the university. "Things were opening up for a lot of us," remembers Ogata.

There were scholarship opportunities, for example. Sadako qualified for two grants but she chose the Rotary International grant because it provided a more generous stipend. In 1951, she began breaking gender-based taboos in Japan as one of the first Japanese women to pursue graduate studies in the United States, and the first woman Rotary grantee. She chose to go to the Jesuit-run Georgetown University in Washington DC because the Sacred Heart Sisters were close to the Jesuits and they considered this the best school for her.

Ogata was initially uncertain about which discipline to pursue at Georgetown. History per se did not appeal to her. She was more intrigued by diplomatic relations and international politics. An American exchange teacher from Michigan assigned to the Sacred Heart College helped her choose the field of international relations for her master’s degree.

This was the first time Sadako had returned to the United States since her father’s posting there. It was an exciting time to be a student. She experienced a lot of generosity. The grant gave her and other fellow grantees the opportunity to visit many families of Rotary Club members; they were considered ambassadors of goodwill. Speaking before Rotary Club audiences was an excellent experience and the Rotarians’ strong sense of public service impressed her.

Rotary grantees came from all over the world and they comprised "quite a universe," she says. They all seemed to say that if people only understood us, no one would wage war against us. The Americans they met also seemed to believe that anyone who came to the United States and learned about its basic philosophies and immersed himself or herself in the American way of life was certain to become a "good little democrat."

Throughout her stay at Georgetown, Ogata never experienced the often unkind postwar stereotyping that some Japanese people were subjected to. What stands out in her memory was meeting a Korean student at the university and being told how his family had suffered torture at the hands of the Japanese. This was her first experience of the kind and a troubling one.

Charles Callan, author of Back Door to War and her professor of international political theory at Georgetown, made a lasting impression on her. Callan’s ideas were interesting, although complex; he was critical of the United States and of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies. Although she did not subscribe to Callan’s interpretation, she valued having learned to conduct research under his tutelage, spending hour upon hour at the National Archives using primary documents.

A lover of plays, Ogata occasionally traveled to New York City for the theater. From Georgetown, she would take the Great Northern Railway to Manhattan, which took two nights. "I’m glad I did this," she says, "because it gives you a sense of space. I always tell people who go to the United States, you have to start with understanding this sense of space, which is very different from Japan. We live in a miniature garden by comparison." American values cannot be understood and appreciated without understanding the country’s sense of space. To Ogata, this space provides room for political competition, for interest groups to fight things out. You cannot do this in a small village or neighborhood in Japan, she says.

University life at Georgetown centered on an urban college and graduate school. And Washington DC had its lure of wonderful attractions and access to the Library of Congress. But Ogata found that, as a foreign graduate student, these advantages could be disadvantages as well. In retrospect, she came to feel that perhaps she might have benefited more from a residential university where students’ intellectual and social lives are more fully integrated. Nevertheless, the Georgetown experience was a good one for her, all the more so because it launched her into even more rigorous academic work. She finished her master’s degree in international relations quickly, in just one and a half years, with this very hope in mind.

Ogata now returned to Japan and began to examine Japanese diplomatic and political history as a research student at the University of Tokyo. In a seminar taught by one of Japan’s leading political historians, Professor Yoshitake Oka, she learned the rudiments of thorough historical research.

Professor Oka held a weekly seminar during which his students reported on their research in progress. He was a severe critic. Ogata remembers that he meticulously and mercilessly corrected her early papers using a red pen. "It was all red the first time," she says. But she came to realize how important those comments were. And today, when she herself is shown someone’s first draft of a report, for example, she takes the trouble of reading it thoroughly and critically, just as Professor Oka did with hers.

Ogata’s earliest research paper on the post-Russo-Japanese War period was published in a university magazine. It dwelt on Japanese sentiment against the return of the Liaodong Peninsula to China after the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 (resolved in Japan’s favor in the treaty following the Russo-Japanese War in 1905) and other issues of public opinion and foreign policy in modern Japanese history. She also undertook research studies on the relationship between leadership and foreign policy.

Ogata lived with her family in Japan and, alongside her graduate studies, began working part-time for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) national commission, which was under Japan’s education ministry. She enjoyed this and it instilled in her an interest in working with the United Nations, but she decided first to complete her academic training. To do so, in 1956, she went back to the United States, this time as a "serious student" at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. She remained there until 1958, using her doctoral program to build upon her work at the University of Tokyo and to strengthen her theoretical base in political science. She applied for a research assistantship and was offered one by Professor Robert Scalapino. Although she had never met him, she knew him by reputation. In her first year, she worked twenty research hours a week. In her second year, however, she received a Japan Society fellowship. This permitted her to focus full-time on her studies.

Aside from Scalapino, Ernst B. Haas was her mentor in international relations theory and has remained a close friend to this day. Another professor, Sheldon Walden, was more systematic in approach, she says, and espoused nineteenth- and twentieth-century political theory. Norman Jacobson’s course on American political theory was another major influence. She remembers it this way: "You go into the class and then he just muddles you up so much that you feel you don’t understand anything, but it was a very good brainstorming session every time."

Ogata acknowledges UC-Berkeley’s indelible imprint on her. "Berkeley was such an open, liberal place," she says. "No matter your persuasion, interest or belief, there was always a community of experts and colleagues. It was a great place in that sense." Also, she adds, "I learned to read very fast . . . on many different things. In preparing for the prelims, you just take a little break on Saturday night. Even today at the UNHCR, I am considered one of the fastest readers because I’m used to reading a lot of things."

In between terms at Berkeley, the Asia Foundation offered Ogata a summer job as an interpreter-guide for Michiko Fujiwara, who was on a monthlong tour of the United States. Fujiwara was a Japanese woman politician who introduced Ogata to social welfare issues, for which she was a leading advocate. This experience also brought the young doctoral student in contact with prominent American women such as Eleanor Roosevelt.

Looking back at her years as a student in the United States, Ogata recalls: "The American academic community was very, very outstanding. I think it still produces the best research and can bring together the best minds, but the really wonderful thing . . . is the openness, the capacity to bring in people from other countries, the best brains. It is a very fair and open system. This is the most important thing about American leadership in the intellectual world and the academic community."

Ogata completed her preliminary doctoral examinations after two years—a remarkable feat at Berkeley—and then had to return to Japan because her father was ill. Her plan was to complete her doctoral thesis at home and then return to Berkeley for her oral defense.

Back in Japan, she undertook the research for her doctoral dissertation, examining Japanese foreign policy in the early 1930s leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. It was Professor Oka who helped her define her area of study, a topic that grew out of her interest in Japanese national socialism and the crisis of ideology that led to the triumph of militarism and to the war itself. These events had also affected her, and her family, on a deeply personal level.

While researching on the period and the national socialist ideology, Ogata came across two valuable primary sources related to Japan’s military involvement in Manchuria that had not been used before: an official diary of a Kantogun (or Guandong) Army chief of staff and the official correspondence between the League of Nations representative in Geneva and the foreign minister of Japan. Her grandfather was the Japanese representative to the League of Nations at the time, so interviews with him were particularly helpful.

It was in 1960 that Sadako Nakamura married Shijuro Ogata, and thus became Sadako Ogata, as she is now universally known. Shijuro Ogata was an economist and banker but also someone, like her, with a passionate interest in history. His father, Taketora Ogata, was a well-known journalist and international statesman. Sadako’s maternal grandparents and Shijuro’s parents were close friends. In fact, Sadako and Shijuro had known each other from childhood.

Shijuro was posted to Osaka, the start of a prominent career with the Bank of Japan. As a result, Sadako had momentarily to put her research aside, along with her collaboration with other researchers and academics in Tokyo. She had completed the first draft of her dissertation before being married, however, and completed the revision before the birth of their son in 1962. Shortly thereafter, the family of three relocated to London in connection with Shijuro’s next assignment with the bank.

In the meantime, she prepared to defend her thesis and received an offer to publish it from the University of California Press, guaranteeing that it would be read and have influence. When she was finally ready to defend, however, she could not fly to Berkeley because of foreign exchange controls in Japan at the time. An opportunity arose for her to undergo the essential exercise in Japan when, by a stroke of luck, five of her professors happened to be in the country simultaneously. Alas, the chosen day coincided with her first baby’s due date. Thus, it was only later, when she was en route to London, that she went to Berkeley and defended her thesis.

Ogata received her PhD in political science in 1963. Her thesis was published the following year as Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931–1932. The book was lauded for going beyond stereotypical views of Japan’s foreign policy during those years and for demonstrating, surprisingly, how junior Japanese officers defied both their military superiors and civilian authorities alike.

In her book, Ogata closely studied decision making as an analytical tool in Japan’s political process. Even though senior leaders are supposed to make decisions, she observed that, during the critical prewar period, it was the junior people in the bureaucracy that actually made many critical decisions. She traces the role of these junior movers and shakers in the disintegration of Japan’s decision-making process, from the country’s expansion in China to its withdrawal from the League of Nations, to its international alienation, to its engagement in a full-scale war, and, finally, to its devastating defeat. Although she has since published a number of books and written numerous articles on diplomatic history and international relations, Ogata considers her dissertation "her best piece of research."

In 1964, the family returned to Japan and Ogata embarked on a long stable period of work and family life. A second child, a daughter, was born in 1967. While raising her two young children and caring for her elderly parents, Ogata began to teach part-time at the International Christian University in Tokyo, a Protestant institution with an outstanding liberal arts college and a small population of about 1,600 students. There she taught an undergraduate course on Japanese diplomatic and political history and a graduate seminar on the theory of international relations. She also taught part-time at the University of the Sacred Heart. During this period, Ogata worked on a revised Japanese edition of her book, which included additional interviews and substantive notes.

In 1968, Ogata was invited to make her first trip to the United Nations General Assembly through Fusae Ichikawa, a leading Japanese suffragette. Ichikawa was a highly respected member of the House of Councilors (the upper house of the Japanese Diet) and was committed to raising the status of Japanese women. When Japan joined the United Nations in 1956, she pressed the government to allow a woman to be a member of the delegation. Ogata herself had not been actively involved in the women’s movement but was invited by Ichikawa to join the delegation because they needed one more member for the twenty-third session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. She was in Karuizawa when she received a surprise call from Ichiwaka. Ogata learned that she had been recommended because of her familiarity with international organizations.

Accepting the invitation placed Ogata in the difficult though common position of a young mother torn between home and career. Her daughter was then barely one year old. Ogata’s mother immediately offered to look after her two children provided that arrangements were made for a hired person as well. Ogata’s father also encouraged her to accept. "You just say yes," he told her, "and then try to find somebody [to look after the children]." He had always wanted her to make her own choices in her life and career. So Ogata joined her first UN delegation.

The following year she was invited to join the delegation again but she did not even consider it. After her first trip, both her parents and even her husband had said to her, "Enough!" Evidently, the arrangement of having her two children live with her parents, with regular visits from her husband, had been less than ideal for everyone concerned. In 1970, however, the foreign ministry offered Ogata yet another opportunity to attend and by this time the family issues had been resolved. She went and, since then, she has regularly been involved in the formulation of Japanese policy toward the United Nations. In this regard, her husband’s assignment to New York in 1975 was quite fortunate.

Ogata now took leave from her responsibilities as full-time associate professor at the International Christian University and began serving as a minister with the permanent mission of Japan to the United Nations. Her family lived in New York until 1980, during which time she advanced from minister to envoy extraordinary and finally to minister plenipotentiary, in which position she held the rank of ambassador—a rank assigned by the emperor himself.

Ogata became familiar with the full scope of UN work while serving as delegate to various General Assemblies (the twenty-third, the twenty-fifth, and the thirtieth to the thirty-third) as well as to the tenth Special Session, which was devoted to disarmament. As chair of the executive board of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), she also came to know that agency well. "I also covered a special political committee of the UN which dealt with peacekeeping operations," she says. "These were interesting times in the UN, because the developing countries had formed the Group of ’77, the nonaligned movement. These were difficult but dynamic days. Of course, I had to defend the Japanese government position on the issues of peacekeepers and the holding of elections."

How did she find the switch from the academe to bureaucracy? Although this was her first experience working in a government bureaucracy, Ogata found it pleasant and rewarding. Comparing the two, she says, "It is the same—the collection of materials, analyzing materials, expressing your thoughts. But the contexts are different." Ogata was comfortable and successful in both realms. Indeed, her family background and husband’s foreign postings required extraordinary flexibility.

Recognizing that diplomats are bound to support their governments even when they personally disagree with them, she says of her experience: "When you’re in government, you can make a little dent by giving your own input to the position the government holds; sometimes you can go pretty far and sometimes not at all. Those are realities you have to learn because if you are part of government, you do have to be part of it. I haven’t found myself too confined by not being able to express my views wherever I am."

In 1979, the Japanese foreign ministry called on Ogata for a sensitive assignment: to head the Japanese government’s mission to extend relief measures to Cambodian refugees and to investigate what sorts of measures Japan could offer to help Cambodian refugees in Thailand. She carried the rank of UN special ambassador for Indochinese refugee relief for this assignment. "I was exposed to the refugee problem more directly than I had ever been before. There were so many people on the border and the Khmer Rouge refugees were all in black pajamas. I’d never seen so many people in such desperate situations." These Indochinese refugees had captured the attention of the world as "boat people" in a mass exodus. Without her realizing it, this became the turning point in Sadako Ogata’s life.

After this mission, Japan immediately dispatched medical teams to the camps and set up an office at the Thai-Cambodian border to provide assistance to the refugees. The UN mission attracted much public attention because heading it was US President Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, and Richard Holbrooke, who was assistant secretary for East Asian affairs at the State Department. They elicited much public support. In an unprecedented move, Japan established a quota for refugee resettlement, which made an impact on Japanese society. Ogata humbly says that perhaps she played a role in this development.

When her husband was reassigned back to Japan in 1980, Ogata resigned from the foreign ministry and accepted a post as full-time professor of international relations at Sophia University, primarily in the fields of foreign policy decision making and international organizations. She was also busy giving lectures.

Ogata continued as professor at Sophia University for eleven years but accepted several UN assignments in between her teaching and administrative responsibilities. She headed the undergraduate program in international organizations; was director of the Institute of International Relations, a small institute at the university that had only about ten to twelve professors who taught interdisciplinary subjects; and was dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies in 1989. "The institute was interesting but the administrative work was something most of us don’t enjoy so much." On reflection she adds, "Yes, it is something like public service."

Even as she pursued her busy university career, Ogata’s involvement in public affairs continued. She served, for example, on various advisory panels to government agencies on issues ranging from women to diplomatic personnel, to the budget and the economy. In Japan, her affiliations were with the National Institute of Research Advancement, the Japan Association of International Relations, the Japan Foundation, and the Mitsubishi Bank Foundation. Internationally, she was associated with diverse groups such as the Trilateral Commission, the Pontifical Commission on Culture, the Independent Commission on Humanitarian Issues, and the Commission on Global Governance.

From 1982 to 1985, Ogata served as the Japanese government’s first representative on the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). This meant attending the yearly six-week session in Geneva, which began in mid-February each year. It was not possible for her to attend the entire proceedings because of her academic responsibilities but the foreign ministry still insisted on her presence, since it was the first time Japan was ever represented on the UNHRC. Previously, Japan had been involved in various delicate human rights-related issues, especially in relation to Korea. "So I would try to correct [my student’s] papers as quickly as possible and go to Geneva for about four weeks."

Those were the last days of the East-West conflict, Ogata remembers. The very first human rights meeting she went to was when General Wojciech Jaruselski, president of Poland, declared martial law and suspended all human rights provisions. The Russian delegate, who was a very senior commissioner, bluntly told Ogata, "We know better about Poland than you do."

Experiences such as this led to Ogata’s writings on how genuine human rights issues are raised by the UNHRC as an international regime for cooperation and, at the same time, how often such issues are also used for political and diplomatic maneuvering.

A parallel organization, the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, was founded by Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan and the Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan to look into the whole range of humanitarian issues, as distinct from human rights issues. From 1982 to 1987, Ogata became a member and met many distinguished individuals. It was a General Assembly-recognized independent commission, but its members were in attendance in their personal capacity; they gathered every six weeks. "I was there as a professor at Sophia University," she says.

In November 1990, after returning to Japan from Myanmar, where she had been sent as special rapporteur to examine conditions of Cambodian refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border on behalf of the UN Human Rights Commission, Ogata was informed that the incumbent United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) would be resigning. She was asked by the foreign ministry if she was interested in taking on the position. She was uncertain whether she could run this office because she had not dealt directly with refugee work. But she was gently persuaded to consider it because of her background in human rights and her experiences with the UN and the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues.

Her latest assignment as special rapporteur to Myanmar was an additional qualification. It was just for a week, but a very difficult task, as she recalls. The international human rights community, most especially the Western one, was firmly against the Myanmar regime. And while the regime warranted criticism and disapproval, she says, "we had to find inroads into making things better."

"Yes," she decided. "If I become a candidate, I think I won’t run away."

In December 1990, Ogata was named high commissioner by the UN General Assembly, the eighth in the agency’s history and its first woman leader. She thus became the highest-ranking woman in the United Nations. Bringing her academic responsibilities to a close at Sophia University, Ogata began full-time work with the UNHCR in January 1991, to complete the unexpired three years of her predecessor’s term of office. In 1993, she was reelected for a full five-year term. (In 1999, Ogata was elected for a third term and served as high commissioner until 2000.)

Created in 1951, the UNHCR began its work aiding millions of European refugees in the aftermath of World War II. It works independently to coordinate emergency assistance and relief efforts to refugee groups, to supply material and training needed for them to become self-supporting, and to seek lasting solutions to the refugee problem. It has earned two Nobel Prizes for Peace, in 1954 and 1981.

The mission of the UNHCR as a humanitarian agency is to provide assistance and protection to the world’s refugees. A refugee enjoys protection from two basic international laws, the 1951 UN Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the status of refugees. Both define who can be legally recognized as a refugee and stipulate how refugees should be treated. "A refugee is above all a victim . . . a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable . . . or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." These days, the scope of the UNHCR’s work also includes persons displaced within their own countries or those who have returned to war-torn countries but do not, as yet, have the resources and the wherewithal to build their lives anew.

The UNHCR is based in Geneva and operates directly under the authority of the General Assembly, which is an intergovernmental body that works through seven committees. The UNHCR reports to the third committee, which deals with social, cultural, and humanitarian affairs. Members of the third committee are appointed by the Economic and Social Council of the UN. The UNHCR manages one of the most autonomous mandated units in the United Nations.

"I didn’t know what I was getting into," may have been Ogata’s initial candid response to her appointment. She immediately found herself immersed in critical refugee situations. Early in her tenure, three important UNHCR operations took place in countries with very unstable conditions. These were in northern Iraq, Yugoslavia, and the Great Lakes region in Africa. The diminutive Ogata, standing barely five feet tall, took on the complex tasks of the Commission as they applied in each crisis: providing immediate and short-term protection for the refugees in terms of employment, education, and asylum; seeking guarantees of protection should they opt to return home; and facilitating the voluntary repatriation of refugees, their integration into new communities, or their resettlement in a third country. Another role of the UNHCR came into play as well, namely, keeping refugees alive and well while seeking long-term solutions to their problems.

The 1991 Iraqi crisis highlighted the scope and complexity of the refugee problem, for not only had the number of displaced persons swelled ominously, but also the crisis had become an international issue. After Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War in March 1991, the Kurds had rebelled against Saddam Hussein and his forces and gained control of large areas of the Iraqi part of Kurdistan. When the Iraqi forces attacked the Kurds, they killed thousands of them and forced about four hundred thousand Kurds to the Iraq-Turkey border. About half of the Kurds managed to escape into Turkey, while the other half were turned back and left stranded in the mountains. The situation was vexed by a long history of conflict between Turkish Kurds and the government of Turkey, dating to the birth of modern Turkey in 1923; to the Turks, Kurds were insurgents. A flood of new Kurdish refugees into Turkey was therefore most unwelcome.

The mandate of the UNHCR was to assist those who crossed the border. But what about those internally displaced people who had not crossed any border? This was more than a logistical problem. The US-led Gulf War coalition forces that had successfully waged war against Iraq decided to move the Kurdish people back to their region of origin, even if that was not the safest alternative considering the hostile Iraqi regime. The mountainous terrain into which they had temporarily retreated dictated such a move; it was bitter cold there and relief aid had to be dropped from aircraft. Iraq did not welcome the idea of independent organizations being involved in this conflict, much less Western air forces "coming in with aid from the sky." Aside from Iraq’s suspicions and hostility, the Kurds themselves were fractious. Despite all this, the Kurds who had fled Iraq were now expected to resettle and live normal lives there. As they did so, it was the UNHCR’s work to ensure that they were safe and well protected.

Another group of refugees fled from Iraq to Iran. As the crisis mounted, Ogata appealed to Iran to keep its borders open. As a consequence, Iran received an exodus of 1.2 million Iraqis at one point. One of the most fundamental commitments of the UNHCR is to assist governments that assist refugees; it now did so in Iran.

Ogata describes the Iraq crisis as the largest refugee flow to occur in a short period of time, involving 1.7 million people. The crisis also highlighted the classic plight of refugees—the fact that they are not really welcome in either the country they are fleeing to or the country they are fleeing from. In the case of the latter, they may be an unwanted or persecuted ethnic group; as far as the governments are concerned, it would be best for them simply to disappear "as silently as possible," with no publicized accounts of lost freedoms or torture.

When just a few refugees manage to cross a border, they and their stories of atrocities are often received with public sympathy. But when the number of refugees rises and relief services become scarce, and when host countries begin to view the refugees as consumers of scarce national resources, public sympathy quickly subsides.

A most critical question for the UNHCR in any refugee crisis is which countries will be willing to open their doors to asylum seekers. A high degree of activism is required of the UNHCR as it negotiates with governments to find permanent new homes for refugees, especially in keeping with its age-old principle of not forcing refugees to return unwillingly to a country from which they have fled. "Given the magnitude and complexity of the problem, it is easy to forget that refugees are first and foremost individual human beings, not an abstract problem," Ogata reminds everyone. "Refugees are not just people crying in despair for charity," she emphasizes, "nor is a bundle of personal belongings the only thing they bring to their new-found homes."

In the midst of a refugee crisis, a key role of the UNHCR is to make sure that countries that receive refugees can provide physical support for them. The agency negotiates for campsites, provides food and shelter and medical assistance, and makes certain that water is available. It also takes a census so that the identities of the refugees, and their number, are recorded. A great deal of logistical support is required, of course, and much of the work is done in collaboration with partner nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), although the host government also provides services.

Thinking beyond the crisis stage, finding "long-term" solutions for refugees is not easy. Generally, there are three alternatives: (1) settling permanently in the country of asylum, (2) resettlement to a third country, or (3) repatriation. For a large number of refugees, repatriation has been the most common solution. In creating conditions favorable to the repatriation of refugees, the political role of the UN and its participating governments and partner organizations is critical. The returnees, even those regarded as enemies, must somehow be integrated into the mainstream development of their countries; ensuring this often involves the work of many agencies, both international and local. In striving for success, the office of the UNHCR has to deal with political and economic realities not only of the country in question but also of the whole system, including other countries assisting with the effort and the UN organization itself.

A year after the unrest in Iraq, the Kurds no longer monopolized media attention. Another refugee crisis was brewing in Europe, the largest since World War II. The catalyst was the outbreak of civil war in Croatia and Bosnia (formerly parts of the united Yugoslavia) over conflicts between rival ethnic and religious groups. The conflict turned especially brutal with campaigns of "ethnic cleansing" to establish ethnically pure areas; anyone not in conformity or found ineligible was killed. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2.7 million people fled to neighboring countries and to the rest of Europe. It fell to the UNHCR to pave the way for their eventual repatriation, in conjunction with a ceasefire and the insertion of peacekeeping forces. With ethnic expulsion and purification as the reasons for the exodus, and given the apparent irreconcilability of such conflicts, drastic measures were necessary.

It was here, in the old Yugoslavia, that Ogata facilitated the first large-scale collaboration between the UNHCR and UN peacekeeping forces. At first she was reluctant to do so, for fear of the stigma of partiality. But as the conflict intensified and the UNHCR found itself increasingly having to operate in areas under direct attack, the Yugoslav UN Protection Forces (UNPROFOR) began providing protection for the agency’s relief workers. Ogata came to see this as absolutely necessary and points out, moreover, that the Sarajevo airlift, which provided food, medicines, and equipment to people stranded in the Bosnian capital for more than three years (between 1992 and 1996), was something made possible only with UNPROFOR support. "Without a doubt," says Ogata, "the airlift saved tens of thousands of people and kept the city alive through three winters of war."

This working partnership with UNPROFOR allowed the UNHCR to pursue its humanitarian projects. Along the way, the UNPROFOR and the UNHCR became familiar with each other’s work. In particular, UNHCR trained the military on carrying out humanitarian projects.

Ogata declared 1992 as the Year of Repatriation. Before Ogata’s tenure, when refugees crossed national borders (which were often ideological borders as well), they remained in countries of asylum until the situation drastically changed in their home countries—often a long and painful process. This was a problem Ogata sought urgently to address. The repatriation solution—a measure the UN and the UNHCR are committed to undertake in "safety and dignity"—is an attractive option in part because it allows for closing refugee camps with a minimum amount of displacement. Translating this into actual practice has not been easy because today many of the countries to which refugees are returning are both war-torn and poverty-stricken.

Significant UNHCR achievements in this area during Ogata’s tenure included the voluntary repatriation of about 1.7 million refugees to Mozambique between 1992 and 1995; the voluntary return of 200,000 Burmese Muslim minorities to their homeland in Arakan (Myanmar), from which they had fled to Bangladesh in 1991 and 1992; the return of 100,000 boat people to Vietnam and 27,000 to Laos, under the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochina; and the voluntary repatriation of 370,000 Cambodian refugees in March 1992 from camps in Thailand to their native villages. In connection with repatriation, Ogata has repeatedly spoken of the need "to ensure not simply the security of states but also the security of people."

A special concern of Ogata’s has been women and children refugees, for they comprise the majority of the displaced. "The refugee problem has a female face," Ogata stresses, aware that women are usually the most vulnerable, left alone to fend for themselves and for their children. The male members of these families usually stay behind in their home countries to continue to fight. While fleeing and also in the refugee camps, women are subject to sexual attacks and, even in food distributions controlled by men, are usually the last to receive their share.

A Somali woman in Ethiopia speaks for other women when she says, "Men are free to move. But we women are walking with children and we can’t move; we can’t take any decision to travel as easily as men." In 1992, the UNHCR mounted the First Regional Forum on Gender Focus in Working with Refugee, Returnee, and Displaced Women (FOREFEM) to highlight the concerns of women refugees. In part due to Ogata’s urging, gender-based persecution is now sufficient ground for obtaining refugee status.

As for children, one anecdote helps to tell the story. Three refugee children living in a camp in Thailand were asked, "Where does rice come from?" Their quick answer was, "From a truck"—a telling reminder of the disturbing impact of refugee life on normal childhood.

For Ogata, "preparedness" was one of the key factors in UNHCR’s success during her tenure. Preparedness emphasizes the capacity to deal with emergencies when they occur: having well-trained emergency staff and teams; stockpiling goods; and readying funds that may be allocated immediately without being delayed by bureaucratic requirements. In this regard, the UNHCR keeps a US$25-million emergency fund and maintains "standby" arrangements with several governments and NGOs. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, is able to dispatch doctors quickly in emergency situations. Some NGOs are equipped to evacuate a hundred persons within a certain time frame. "We are a global organization," said High Commissioner Ogata, "and we should be able to get anywhere quickly."

During Ogata’s tenure, the UNHCR’s budget tripled, reflecting both the expanding role of the agency and the magnitude of the world’s escalating refugee crisis, with displaced persons representing more than one out of every 120 inhabitants of the globe. As of 1997, the UNHCR was protecting and assisting more than 23 million people who had fled war or persecution. The number of uprooted people, including those displaced within their countries of origin, was estimated at 50 million.

Unlike other UN agencies with fixed budgets, the UNHCR operates on voluntary contributions and 95 percent of its funding comes from national governments. The main contributors are the United States, Japan, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Five percent of its funding comes from private corporate and individual donors. The largest private contributors are from Japan, Spain, Italy, and Germany.

Funding is never easy, but if the UNHCR is managed well, the international community and governments are always willing to help. "It is very important that there is international recognition that refugee protection assistance has to be done. It’s one of the major global agendas. These are the facts of life. It is an ongoing, fund-raising, fund-accounting process with donors all the time. Governments do earmark certain amounts of their money for certain [UNHCR] projects, so there is influence in what we do."

Though she did not seek publicity for herself, Ogata made UNHCR one of the UN’s most visible agencies. Recognizing the power and reach of media, she says she tried to nurture media relations and to be as open as possible to interviews. "I would . . . take media with me everywhere, so that the plight of the refugees would be reported widely," she says. Public compassion is aroused when readers learn about the plight of the refugees; that, in turn, results in the mobilization of much-needed resources. She also realizes that media interest wanes quickly, usually long before the problem finds a resolution.

A related phenomenon, "asylum fatigue," as manifested in the declining willingness of countries to grant asylum, is to Ogata "one of the most disconcerting issues on the international humanitarian agenda." Ogata appealed for more "international burden-sharing," pointing out just how unevenly divided are the burdens between and within continents. For example, Germany hosted more Bosnian refugees than all other countries in Western Europe together, while in parts of Ivory Coast, Guinea, Tanzania, and Pakistan refugees outnumber the local population. While financial resources come from industrialized countries, the burden of actually supporting the refugees is usually borne by neighboring countries. "They are mostly Third World countries, not very wealthy countries, receiving refugees from even poorer countries," says Ogata of this disparity and contradiction.

The job of high commissioner is difficult, but Ogata acknowledges her highly dedicated and experienced colleagues without whom, she says, she could never have managed. She takes pride in the fact that, during her tenure, all senior colleagues and professional staff had extremely rich field experience. All of that brought "a sense of reality" to the difficult problems they faced.

As high commissioner, Ogata’s typical 9:00-a.m.-to-8:00-p.m., seven-days-a-week workday in Geneva began with a meeting with her deputy high commissioner, who also functioned as her chief of staff. There followed meetings all day long interspersed with visitors to be received and an incessant flow of documents to be read and studied. While keeping her eye on world events, Ogata was also preoccupied with the office’s internal management and personnel issues. She lived in a functional apartment located ten minutes’ drive from her office.

Trust and interchangeability characterized her working relationship with her deputy high commissioner, so that when one of the two was away, the other automatically took over.

Having been raised in big cities, Ogata is comfortable both in Tokyo and in New York, a city she loves. But Geneva to her was ideal for her work with UNHCR because many of the areas where the agency was active—in Africa and Eastern Europe, for example—were within the same time zone and she was spared the adjustments of jet lag.

Ogata earned a reputation for being an energetic and impassioned advocate for the human rights of refugees, asylum seekers, and the internally displaced. In accepting the Human Rights Award by the International Human Rights Group in 1994 on behalf of her staff, she reiterated her commitment to human rights issues, "The Award is an acknowledgement that the plight of refugees and the displaced is as much a human rights problem as it is a humanitarian one."

She became known for her decisiveness and firmness of speech, and for fearing no one. When there were threats of attacks endangering the lives of relief workers in Bosnia, she stood before the General Assembly and rattled UN officials by declaring that she would suspend aid to Bosnia if these attacks against relief convoys did not cease. She feels strongly about the guarantee of "unimpeded and safe humanitarian access" for the UNHCR staff while engaged in their missions.

Regarding the difficult decisions she has had to make, Ogata says, "you do sometimes think about it when you wake up. But you have to make decisions when you’re doing operations like these. I ask some colleagues to bring up certain alternatives, to work it out, and from all these I have to make the decision myself."

As high commissioner, Ogata had to deal with conflicting interests of various groups—governments, NGOs, informal militias, the military. "We had to create common interests among a diverse group of opposing interests," she says. For this reason, justice and reconciliation are not necessarily compatible. When you push for justice, Ogata says, others are alienated. Thus, in seeking solutions, there is the need for a careful and studied balance between political reconciliation and justice.

Ogata acknowledges that the UNHCR cannot do its job without its NGO partners. While experiencing long years of fruitful collaboration with NGOs, the increasing number of refugee crises in the early 1990s also created stresses. Some NGOs faulted the UNHCR for its overly bureaucratic practices. Decision making was difficult, they said, and careerism sometimes trumped efficiency, as UNHCR officials hesitated to act for fear of criticism by their superiors. Moreover, the required written forms were tedious, complicated, and often incomprehensible. NGOs in the field sometimes said they did not know who to turn to for accurate information and assistance; the UNHCR staff seemed too burdened with their own work to assist them. Funding was another contentious issue. With declining support from their traditional sources, both the UNHCR and NGOs had to find new donors; in the process they became more competitive than collaborative.

Ogata promptly responded to these grievances. A manual designed to give NGOs a better understanding of the UNHCR’s operations was prepared for publication. For better collaboration and communication, she appointed liaison staff members in the field and in the regional bureaus. Regarding funding, both the agency and its NGO collaborators decided to work toward common appeals for funds instead of competitive ones.

If the role of the UNHCR changed after 1991, Ogata says it was because the world had changed; the institution had to respond. The traditional definition of "refugee" changed radically, for example, and came to address the realities of displacement and uprootedness in undeveloped countries as well as violence, human rights abuses, and ecological disasters.

Is the world safer today than it was in the 1950s? Ogata says that it is safer in terms of wars between nations. The problem now is war and conflict within nations. The end of the Cold War has given rise to the growth of local "nationalisms" and "ethnic-centered sentiments." Many of today’s refugee crises stem from such conflicts. This is a problem the UNHCR continues to grapple with. "It is a much more difficult challenge than . . . in the heyday of the big outflows," Ogata recognizes. Despite its noble intentions, the UNHCR has limited clout. "They (UNHCR and its NGO partners) cannot bring civil wars to an end," says Ogata, or "oblige governments to respect the human rights of their citizens, or prevent the deliberate displacement of civilian populations." Nevertheless, the world’s powerful states have placed higher expectations on it and on other humanitarian organizations, reluctant as they are to take decisive action on their own when civil wars, crimes against humanity, and genocides occur.

Preventing the creation of refugees involves ending or containing the passionate conflicts that cause people to flee in the first place. This calls for the difficult and painful exercise of looking at root causes through the concerted efforts of the international community, in collaboration with the UNHCR. Often, these are tensions between different groups of people about religious, ethnic, or political differences, or disputes over territories or human rights abuses. Resolving the refugee problem is not just a question of charity or humanitarian concern, as Ogata reminds us. It is an integral part of the United Nations’ efforts to establish a more "peaceful, prosperous, and secure world."

Humanitarian action must therefore be combined with an effective political and economic agenda. That is why High Commissioner Ogata was resolute about maintaining a public awareness campaign targeted to students and citizens of the next generation. Independent thinking is very important for the emerging world. In the United States, a world power and a country of refugees and migrants, exists the potential for the message of humanitarian solidarity and awareness to spread, she says. Indeed, humanitarian solidarity is the key. "We [at the UNHCR] can protect people, provide assistance, build confidence, buy time, and promote solutions. But we need the political will, the involvement of governments and their leaders and of the United Nations to maintain and build peace."

According to Ogata, her home country of Japan has supported the work of UNHCR through substantial donations (although it has to be nudged, she says). Its pacifism and its reluctance to become a military power need to be understood in the context of its history. It is an economic power but it realizes that is not enough. Humanitarian action is something that appeals to the Japanese, says Ogata, but she believes there should be a more serious commitment, such as receiving refugees.

Were Ogata to teach a course today in international relations, she would have to emphasize ethnic and societal issues in the context of the present political world order, where, on the one hand, Western European states are moving into a single market to make their economic base stronger and, on the other hand, states in other world regions are splitting up—on an emotional basis, in her opinion. "The splitting of states is going to make a much more unstable world," she fears.

Personally, however, Sadako Ogata is hopeful. "We will probably have to go through a period of rather cruel experiences and fighting," she says. "That’s the dark side of the current world in transition. But I think human beings will learn. I hope."

Despite the UNHCR’s achievements in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America during her remarkable tenure, Ogata likens these efforts to "being like a Band-Aid"—alluding to the ever-growing numbers of refugees and displaced people. Never mind, she says. "It [was] our job to carry on with our work, no matter what." Despite its frustrations and the painful exposure to human suffering, it brought "enormous satisfaction."

"If we do things properly," she says, "we do make a difference."

Neni L. Santa Romana-Cruz

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