Sadako Ogata

Sadako Ogata
緒方 貞子
Sadako Ogata at the World Economic Forum on Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, on June 4, 2008
President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency
In office October 2003 – April 2012
Succeeded by	Akihiko Tanaka
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
In office 1991–2001
Preceded by	Thorvald Stoltenberg
Succeeded by	Ruud Lubbers
Personal details
Born	中村 貞子 (Nakamura Sadako?) (1927-09-16) 16 September 1927 (age 89) Azabu, Tokyo City, Tokyo Prefecture, Japan (present day Minato, Tokyo, Japan)
Alma mater	University of the Sacred Heart Georgetown University UC Berkeley
Religion	Roman Catholicism

Sadako Ogata (緒方 貞子, Ogata Sadako^?, born 16 September 1927) is a Japanese academic, diplomat, author, administrator, and professor emeritus at Sophia University. She is widely known as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from 1991 to 2000, as well as in her capacities as the Chairman of the UNICEF Executive Board and as the President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). She was a lecturer of the International Christian University (ICU), and is now the advisor of the Executive Committee of the Model United Nations (present day Japan Model United Nations, JMUN) as the founder of the Model United Nations in Japan.

Sadako Nakamura (Ogata) was born on 16 September 1927 to a career diplomat father Toyoichi Nakamura, who was the Japanese ambassador to Finland. Her mother was the daughter of Foreign Minister Kenkichi Yoshizawa and granddaughter of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, who was assassinated when Sadako was four years old. The family influenced her interest in international politics. In her childhood, she lived in the US and China due to her father's move.

She attended the Catlin Gabel School, class of 1946, and graduated from the University of the Sacred Heart (a Catholic university in Tokyo) with a bachelor's degree in English Literature. After that, she studied abroad at Georgetown University and its Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in the US for a master's degree in International Relations. It was not common for a Japanese woman to study abroad at that time in Japan, even though the democratic days came after the end of WWII in Asia following the surrender of Japan. She wanted to study the cause of the defeated war at the university in the US. She was awarded a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963, after she completed a research report on the policy formation of the foundation of Manchukuo by Japan in 1931. The report provided some clues of the cause of the start of Japanese invasion in China, which led to the defeated war. In 1965, she became a lecturer at International Christian University. After 1980, she taught international politics at Sophia University as a professor and later became the Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Studies until the leave for the UNHCR in 1991.