Connecting People & Ideas to Advance Mutual Interests in U.S.-Asia Relations

Network Participants

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Cohort 6 Participants (2022-2024):

Cohort 5 Participants (2019-2022):

Cohort 4 Participants (2016-2018):

Cohort 3 Participants (2014-2016):

  • Liv Coleman, Associate Professor, University of Tampa
  • Shinju Fujihira, Executive Director, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
  • Benjamin Goldberg, Japan Analyst, Department of State
  • Shihoko Goto, Acting Director, Asia Program, Wilson Center
  • Tobias Harris, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
  • Levi McLaughlin, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University
  • Emer O’Dwyer, Associate Professor of Japanese History, Department of History and East Asian Studies, Oberlin College
  • Ian Rinehart, Analyst, Materials and Manufacturing, Lux Research
  • Daniel M. Smith, Gerald L. Curtis Visiting Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy, Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
  • Nathaniel Smith, Associate Professor, College of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University
  • Michael Strausz, Associate Professor, Texas Christian University
  • Hiroki Takeuchi, Associate Professor of Political Science, Director of the Sun & Star Program on Japan and East Asia at the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies, Southern Methodist University
  • Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Professor of Sociology and Freeman Spogli Institute Senior Fellow, Stanford University

Cohort 2 Alumni Participants (2012-2014):

  • Celeste Arrington, Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University
  • Emma Chanlett-Avery, Specialist in Asian Affairs, Congressional Research Service
  • Erin Aeran Chung, Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics, Director of the Program in East Asian Studies, Johns Hopkins University
  • Annika A. Culver, Associate Professor, East Asian History, Florida State University
  • Dyron Dabney, Director of Japan Study and Associate Professor of Politics, Earlham College
  • Linda Hasunuma, Assistant Director, Center for the Advancement of Teaching, Temple University
  • Jeffrey Hornung, Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation
  • David Janes, Senior Advisor for Institutional Development Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
  • Weston Konishi, Senior Fellow, The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation
  • Kenji Kushida, Senior Fellow, Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
  • Mary McCarthy, Associate Professor of Political Science, Drake University
  • Kenneth McElwain, Professor, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo
  • Andrew Oros, Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Washington College
  • Gene Park, Professor and Chair of Political Science and International Relations, Loyola Marymount University

Cohort 1 Alumni Participants (2010-2012):

  • Daniel Aldrich, Professor of Political Science, Director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program, Northeastern University
  • James Gannon, Senior Fellow and Former Executive Director, Japan Center for International Exchange
  • Mary Alice Haddad, John E. Andrus Professor of Government, Wesleyan University
  • Ken Haig, Head, Energy and Environment Policy, Asia-Pacific & Japan, Amazon Web Services
  • Llewelyn Hughes, Associate Professor, College of Asia & the Pacific, and Associate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
  • Kathryn Ibata-Arens, Vincent De Paul Professor of Political Science, DePaul University
  • Jennifer Lind, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College
  • Phillip Lipscy, Professor, Department of Political Science; Chair in Japanese Politics & Global Affairs; Director, Centre for the Study of Global Japan, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto
  • Mark Manyin, Specialist in Asian Affairs, Congressional Research Service
  • Matthew Marr, Associate Professor of Sociology, Florida International University
  • Sherry Martin, Senior Research Analyst, U.S. Department of State
  • Robert Pekkanen, Professor, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Sociology, University of Washington
  • Kay Shimizu, Research Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh
  • Mireya Solís, Director, Center for East Asia Policy Studies, Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies, Brookings Center for East Asia Policy Studies
  • Nicholas Szechenyi, Deputy Director and Senior Fellow, Japan Chair, Asia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies

 

Network for the Future Cohort 6 Participant Biographies:

Noriko Akiyama is a senior political writer at The Asahi Shimbun, the second largest newspaper company in Japan. Before assuming her current role, she served as an assistant political editor, political reporter, and reporter for AERA, a Japanese weekly magazine owned and published by Asahi Shimbun. She is the first female senior political writer and an assistant political editor at Asahi. In addition, Ms. Akiyama has authored eights books on women in non-profits, gender politics in Japan, female bureaucrats, civil society leaders, a guide to Japan’s political history, and a biography on Chiyo Obata, Japan’s first female professional wrestler, and other topics. In 2018, Ms. Akiyama received the Social Journalist Award from the Japan Association of New Public. She is also an alumna of the Japan Women Leadership Initiative (2018), a Fish Family Foundation-sponsored program for Japanese women; and the International Visitor Leadership Program (2016), the U.S. Department of State’s premier professional exchange program. Ms. Akiyama holds a Master of Science in empires, colonialism and globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in sociology from the University of Tokyo.

Benjamin Bartlett is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research interests include comparative cybersecurity policy, cybersecurity in East Asia, and international cooperation on cybersecurity capacity building. He has published in the Journal of Cyber Policy and Asia Policy. His most recent publication was a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Politics on cybersecurity in Japan. He is also a 2022 recipient of an NEH Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.

Paul Christensen is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. Much of his past research and publications have focused on addiction and recovery in Japan, including ethnographic fieldwork with Alcoholics Anonymous and the Drug Addiction Recovery Group in Tokyo. In addition to Japan, his research interests include Hawai‘i and Brazil as well as gender, particularly masculinity. Dr. Christensen recently started a new ethnographic project in Tokyo that broadly considers how people conceptualize and create lives they find meaningful and purposeful. He attended the University of Washington as an undergraduate and received his Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Charles Crabtree is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the politics, sociology, and economics of discrimination. In the past, he has studied this normatively important topic mainly in American politics. He increasingly examines it in Japanese politics, an important but insufficiently examined context. Methodologically, he uses experiments and automatic text analysis to better understand why people treat others differently because of their ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, or religion. Dr. Crabtree holds a BA in History from the University of Colorado, an MA in Public Policy and Administration from Northwestern University, an MA in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan.

Sayako Kanamori is an Associate Professor at the Center for Education in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Osaka University. Before joining the Center for Education in Liberal Arts and Sciences, she was a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the Center for the Study of Co*Design and Institute for Transdisciplinary Graduate Degree Programs at Osaka University, a Director of the Research Department at the Japan Institute for Global Health (JIGH), a health specialist at the Global Health Policy Division of the International Cooperation Bureau in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), and a business consultant specializing in finance and accounting management. She obtained her BA in Biological Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, MSc in Medical Parasitology at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of London, and PhD in Health Science at the University of Tokyo. Her main research focuses on health policy, global health diplomacy, global health human resource development, and healthcare business. She has been giving talks and providing various programs to a variety of audiences, from junior high school students to citizens, over the last ten years. She is also managing and providing consultancy to various healthcare projects based on Public-Private Partnerships mainly in emerging countries.

Nick Kapur is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University’s Camden campus, where he teaches Japanese and East Asian history. His research interests focus on modern Japan and U.S.-Japan relations, broadly conceived. His book Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) details transformations in Japanese politics, culture, and society, as well as U.S.-Japan alliance diplomacy and the Cold War international system, that unfolded in the aftermath of the massive 1960 protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. In addition, he has recently published research on Chinese and Japanese environmental policy since 1970, U.S.-Japan relations during the John F. Kennedy administration, and the 1968 centennial celebrations of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Dr. Kapur received his Ph.D. in Japanese history from Harvard University.

Hiroko Kumaki is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. Her research examines negotiations over health and well-being in contexts of environmental change. Her current projects examine environmental health and regulatory governance following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident in 2011. She is developing a new project that explores how disaster mental health and technological innovation have been mobilized for environmental remediation in post-disaster Japan. Her ethnographic work on everyday negotiations around well-being and recovery after the nuclear accident in Fukushima is forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology. She is an Associate in Research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Harvard University, an MA in East Asian Studies from Yale University, and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Tom Phuong Le is an Associate Professor of Politics at Pomona College. His book, Japan’s Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2021) examines how demographics, technology, politics, and norms shape Japanese security policy. Dr. Le’s research on war memory and reconciliation, military technology, and nuclear non-proliferation has been published by The Journal of Asian Studies and The Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, as well as in popular media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post: Monkey Cage, and The Hill. He is research associate at the PRIME Institute at Meiji Gakuin University and Pacific Forum. He was a Fulbright fellow in Hiroshima, Japan, a CSIS U.S.-ROK NextGen fellow, AFIHJ Next Generation fellow, and Sasakawa Peace Foundation fellow. Dr. Le holds an MA and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine, and BAs in political science and history from the University of California, Davis.

Tom Mason is a specialist in study abroad, international higher education, and Chinese & Japanese language pedagogy. Since 2020 he has served as executive director of United States-Japan Bridging Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides undergraduates from across the United States, especially those from historically underrepresented communities, with scholarships for study abroad in Japan as well as mentorship and networking opportunities. In 2003 Dr. Mason founded the ALLEX Foundation (Alliance for Language Learning and Educational Exchange), an organization that enables universities to establish and enhance Asian language programs by providing them with professionally trained, native-speaking Chinese, Japanese, or Korean instructors. To date ALLEX has trained more than 1,200 lecturers in language pedagogy and led Asian language instruction for tens of thousands of American university students at over 230 partner universities. Outside of ALLEX and the Bridging Foundation, Dr. Mason has held leadership and teaching positions at Columbia University, Cornell University, and several institutions in Japan.  He is a passionate mentor, as well as a frequent speaker, in the fields of social entrepreneurship and international education. Dr. Mason earned his B.A. and M.A. from Cornell University in Asian Studies, and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in East Asian Languages.

Mihoko Matsubara is Chief Cybersecurity Strategist, NTT Corporation, Tokyo, where she is responsible for cybersecurity thought leadership. She previously served at the Japanese Ministry of Defense. Prior to joining NTT, she worked as VP and Public Sector Chief Security Officer for Asia-Pacific at Palo Alto Networks. She served on the Japanese government’s cybersecurity R&D policy committee between 2014 and 2018. Ms. Matsubara is a prolific writer and has published articles from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, Lawfare, New America, the RUSI Journal, etc. She published a cybersecurity book from the Shinchosha Publishing Co., Ltd in 2019, which won an award from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. She has spoken at various international engagements such as the NIST Cybersecurity Risk Management Conference 2018 in Baltimore, the RSA Conference 2018 and 2019 in San Francisco, Singapore International Cyber Week 2019 and 2021, the EU Cyber Forum 2019 in Brussels, and CyCon 2015 and 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia. She is Adjunct Fellow at the Pacific Forum, Honolulu, and Associate Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She earned an MA at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, under a Fulbright program.

Ryo Morimoto, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, is a first-generation college student and scholar from Japan. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things. Regionally centered on coastal Fukushima in Japan, his research creates spaces, languages, and archives through which to think about nuclear things, along with other not immediately sensible contaminants, as part of what it means to live in the late industrial and postfallout era. Dr. Morimoto is finishing up a book project, tentatively titled The Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihood in Fukushima’s Gray Zone (The University of California Press, Spring 23). Based on multiyear ethnographic fieldwork in coastal Fukushima, funded by the Japan Foundation and Toyota Foundation, this book explores the struggles of representing and experiencing low-dose radiation exposure in coastal Fukushima, where individual, social, political and scientific determinations of the threshold of exposure are often inconsistent. In 2022-23, Dr. Morimoto will be working on research that explores the U.S.-Japan collaborations on building a society enriched by science and technology. In particular, he will examine the development of remote technologies (robots) to address two urgent issues in Japan and beyond: decommissioning aging nuclear reactors and the aging population. He holds a Pd.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University.

Charles T. McClean is the Japan Foundation Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies. Previously, he was the Toyota Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. His research focuses on the politics of age, institutions, representation, social policy, and Japan. His work has been published (or is forthcoming) in Comparative Political Studies, Nature Medicine, Political Psychology, PS: Political Science & Politics, and other venues in political science and public policy. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Silver Democracy: Youth Representation in an Aging Japan, that explores the causes and consequences of youth underrepresentation in democracies. He holds a BA in International Relations and Japanese from Tufts University (summa cum laude), an MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego.

Lauren McKee is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies at Berea College in Berea, KY, where she teaches classes on comparative and East Asian politics. She first joined the faculty of Berea in 2014 as an ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow after receiving a Ph.D. in International Studies from Old Dominion University. Dr. McKee regularly works with the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia, has published in the Association for Asian Studies’ journal Education About Asia, and is currently working on a volume for the AAS series Key Issues in Asian Studies on Japanese politics and government. In addition to pedagogy,  Dr. McKee’s research interests are energy policy and security, especially nuclear energy policy in the United States and Japan.

Cindi SturtzSreetharan teaches in the Anthropology and Global Health programs the Arizona State University School of Human Evolution and Social Change. She joined ASU in 2015, after teaching for 12 years at CSU Sacramento. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation, KCCJEE, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japan Foundation, and the Abe Fellowship (Social Science Research Council) for her work on issues relating to Japanese language, gender, and weight stigma. Dr. SturtzSreetharan works at the intersection of everyday language practices, weight, and stigma. She recently published a team-based ethnography Fat in Four Cultures (University of Toronto Press), a comparative project that reveals the shared struggles and local distinctions of how people in Japan, the United States, Samoa, and Paraguay are coping with and managing anti-fat messages from public leaders and peers. Currently, Dr. SturtzSreetharan is working to understand the ways that everyday language practices contribute to felt weight stigma. Dr. SturtzSreetharan received her PhD in linguistic anthropology (言語人類学) from UC Davis.

Network for the Future Cohort 5 Participant Biographies:

John F. Bradford is a Senior Fellow in the Maritime Security Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Immediately prior to coming to RSIS, he was a Council on Foreign Relations-Hitachi International Affairs Fellow placed in Tokyo at the National Graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS). As an adjunct fellow at Temple University’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, he maintains an active research agenda focused on regional security with special attention given to maritime issues and cooperative affairs. His written work can be found in journals such as Contemporary Southeast Asia, Asia Policy, Asian Security, Asian Survey, Naval War College Review, and Naval Institute Proceedings. CDR Bradford received his BA in Asian Studies and Government from Cornell University. During his undergraduate experience, he also earned a Diploma of Indonesian Studies from Malang State University in Indonesia and trained onboard a Royal Malaysian Navy frigate. As an Olmsted Scholar, he studied Political Science at Indonesia’s Gadjah Mada University and completed an MSc from Singapore’s Rajaratnam School of International Studies where earned the UOB Gold Medal as the top student in Strategic Studies. More recently, he completed the Regular Course at Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies.

Naomi Gingold is a journalist who has reported across Asia with NPR and PRI. Her extensive coverage of Japan has spanned from gender issues and sexuality to politics, religion, and pop culture/the arts; her work has frequently brought an unexpected human face to big picture issues and policy—from investigative reporting on sexism at the country’s most elite universities to reporting on the aftermath of the 3/11 triple disaster several years on. Her work has also been featured in outlets such as The Economist and Slate. She is the executive producer and co-host of a new long-form storytelling and news podcast on Asia and does ethnographic research on the evolution of media, technology, and politics in Burma. She earned a BA from Brown University in International Relations, studied music production and engineering at Berklee College of Music, and conducted master’s research at Georgetown University.

Kathryn Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at University of Colorado – Boulder. Her research explores how social inclusion and exclusion shape holistic well-being and embodied experience. She brings together three domains—kinship, medical anthropology, and semiotics—to examine how past and present social relationships are experienced in visceral, embodied terms. In Japan, her research focuses on the stakes of disconnection from family networks. She conducts ethnographic research at child welfare institutions, with foster and adoptive families, and with networks of youth who grew up in state care. She has also conducted research on infertility treatment and the ways “blood ties” are understood in Japan. She examines how kinship ideologies articulate with discourses of Japanese national and cultural identity. She is developing a new, transnational project exploring how psychotherapists, psychiatrists, social workers, and former state wards in Japan and North America theorize attachment and childhood interpersonal trauma. She has been a postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. She holds a BA in English and Anthropology from Rice University and an MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Kristi Govella is deputy director of the Asia Program and senior fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). Dr. Govella is an expert on the intersection between economic and security policy in Asia, as well as on Japanese politics and foreign policy. Her research has examined topics such as economic statecraft, trade war, trade agreements, foreign investment, government-business relations, defense capacity building, regional institutional architecture, and the governance of the global commons. In addition to her publications in journals and edited volumes, she has edited two books: Linking Trade and Security: Evolving Institutions in Asia, Europe, and the United States and Responding to a Resurgent Russia: Russian Policy and Responses from the European Union and the United States. She regularly provides commentary for U.S. and international media outlets. She also serves as an adjunct fellow with the East-West Center and Pacific Forum and as co-editor of the journal Asia Policy. Prior to joining GMF, Kristi was an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and an associate professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. She has also been a visiting research fellow at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University. Kristi holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in political science and Japanese from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Scott W. Harold is a Senior Political Scientist and the Associate Director of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy at The RAND Corporation. He specializes in the foreign and defense policies of China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Taiwan, and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. In addition to his work at RAND, Dr. Harold is an Adjunct Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he has taught since 2006; an Adjunct Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and an Adjust Professor at The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Prior to joining RAND in August 2008, Dr. Harold was a Senior Research Analyst for the John L. Thornton China Center at The Brookings Institution. He holds a BA in International Relations from Michigan State University and a PhD and MA in Political Science from Columbia University.

Jordan Heiber is Vice President, International Digital Economy Policy, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He previously served as Deputy Representative with the Washington, DC office of MUFG Bank, Ltd. from 2014 – 2020. In this capacity, he managed a team of analysts focused on assessing political risk in the United States, and the impacts of U.S. foreign policy on the bank’s global strategy, including in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia. Prior to joining MUFG, he served as Director for Japan Affairs in the Office of the United States Trade Representative, where he was involved in key aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. He also spent seven years at the U.S. Department of State’s Offices of Korean Affairs and Japanese Affairs. He was a Mansfield Fellow from 2009-2011, with placements in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; the Japanese Diet; and the private sector. He previously worked as a staff reporter for the Asahi Shimbun’s Washington bureau, and spent several years as an English teacher in Japan’s Fukui Prefecture. He received a BA in Communications from Northwestern University and an MA in Asian Studies from George Washington University.

Hilary J. Holbrow is Assistant Professor of Japanese Politics and Society at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. A sociologist by training, her scholarship examines social and economic inequality, work and organizations, immigration, and the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity. She is an International Research Fellow at the Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo and an Associate in Research at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute.  She has also worked at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, DC and has lived in Kyoto, Osaka, Okinawa, Yokohama, and Tokyo. Her work on the Japanese labor market has appeared in International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Work and Occupations.

Her book manuscript on gender and ethnic inequality in Japanese white-collar workplaces explores how status hierarchies evolve in response to changing and economic and social conditions, and specifically whether Japanese women and immigrants will be able to achieve greater parity with Japanese men as Japan’s population declines. She is currently conducting survey, survey-experimental, and interview research to understand the sources of persistent gender inequality in Japan’s white-collar workplaces, the experiences of professional Asian migrants to Japan, and the effects of Japan’s trainee system on migrant outcomes. She holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Boston University and a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University.

Akira Inayoshi is an Professor of political and diplomatic history of Japan at Niigata University. His research and teaching interest lies at local politics and bureaucracy in modern Japan, focusing on infrastructure initiatives. He is the author of Kaikou no Seiji-shi (Political History of Seaports), published in 2014 by the University of Nagoya Press, which earned the 41st Fujita Award from the Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research. He received an MA and PhD in Politics from Tokyo Metropolitan University.

Kazuyo Kato joined JCIE/USA as Executive Director in April 2021, and has nearly two decades of experience at nonprofit organizations dedicated to U.S.-Japan relations and international affairs in both the United States and Japan. Prior to JCIE/USA, she was Senior Director of Global Partnerships and Initiatives at Japan Society in New York. Before joining Japan Society, she worked for over five years at Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA in Washington DC, where she last served as Director of Programs and Administration to develop delegation and outreach programs on U.S.-Japan relations and to oversee all operational aspects of the organization. Previously, she was responsible for exchange programs and research projects at Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo and the International Security Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and worked in consulting businesses including Armitage International and Arthur Andersen (later KMPG) in Tokyo. She graduated from Stanford University with a BA in International Relations and an MA in International Policy Studies. She also has a Certificate in Non-Profit Management from Duke University’s Continuing Studies Program.

Ryosuke Maeda is an Associate Professor of Japanese Political and Diplomatic History in the Department of Politics at the Hokkaido University Graduate School of Law. His research interests include nation-state/empire building, party politics of social and economic policy, and international/imperial finance in East Asia. His first book, The Beginnings of National Politics in Modern Japan: The Meiji State Reform under the Parliamentary System, 1890-1898 (University of Tokyo Press, 2016) (in Japanese) described the dynamic process of Japan’s nation-state building in the late 19th century, focusing on why and how the Meiji authoritarian state transformed the feudal system of the Tokugawa era. This book was awarded the 39th Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 2017. His current book project, Finance, Empire and War: The International Monetary Politics in East Asia, 1933-1952, examines the possible diplomatic choices of prewar Japan faced with the global economic crisis. There were two contradicting paths for Japan in the 1930s: the strengthening of empire and international economic cooperation. To trace the historical roots of the Bretton Woods system in East Asia, he will shed new light on the efforts of international bankers from Japan, Britain, China, France, and the United States to avoid the war and reconstruct the regional order after Japanese aggression in Manchuria. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology.

Anna Nagamine is the Manager of Business Development Section, Technology Development and Innovation Center (TDIC) at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). TDIC fosters innovation at OIST and in Okinawa to accelerate economic growth. Anna’s work involves developing industry partnerships, supporting entrepreneurship and incubating startups in the region. She was an integral part of the team that established the first OIST startup (focused on biotechnology) in 2014. Her interests are in understanding how science and technology can impact society in solving local and global challenges and how policies, programs and ecosystems support this process. Ms. Nagamine holds a BA from Chuo University, Faculty of Policy Studies, and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she was an East-West Center Obuchi Student Scholarship recipient.

Crystal Pryor is Vice President at the Pacific Forum. She has researched U.S.-Japan outer space security cooperation, strategic trade control implementation in advanced countries, and Japan’s defense industry and arms exports. Prior to joining Pacific Forum, Dr. Pryor held a postdoctoral fellowship in the U.S.-Japan relations program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She has worked for the University of Washington as an instructor of political science and international relations, and for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Dr. Pryor received a BA in International Relations from Brown University, master’s degrees in Political Science from the University of Washington and the University of Tokyo, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington.

Anand Rao is an Assistant Professor of political science and international relations at the State University of New York at Geneseo. He joined the faculty at Geneseo in 2015. Dr. Rao first went to Japan in 1996, and lived in Saga Prefecture for three years as a Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program participant. He lived in other areas of Japan for nearly seven more years after that, from 2002 to 2009, and worked at several places including the University of Tokyo and in the international department of the Japan Securities Depository Center (JASDEC).  At SUNY Geneseo, he teaches courses on East Asian politics, comparative politics, terrorism and national security, and the role of democracy in international relations. Dr. Rao’s publications include an article in the Japan Studies Association Journal and a book review in International Migration Review. His research interests are wide and varied, but he is especially interested in Japanese foreign policy, Japanese party politics, and Japanese immigration politics in comparative perspective. He holds a BA in History and Political Science from Union College, an MA in Political Science from Columbia University, and a PhD in Politics from the University of Virginia.

Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna is an Associate Professor in the department of anthropology at Southern Methodist University. His book, Food Safety after Fukushima: Scientific Citizenship and the Politics of Risk, was published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2019. His work has also appeared in American Anthropologist and Japanese Studies. In his current project, he investigates the government’s vision to move towards “Society 5.0,” a super-smart society, focusing on the uses and prospects for artificial intelligence and sensors in Japan. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the program on US-Japan Relations at Harvard University. He received a BA in Anthropology and International Development Studies from Trent University, an MA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD and AM in Social Anthropology from Harvard University.

Timothy Webster is an Associate Professor of Law at Western New England University. He writes about the intersections of international law and the domestic legal systems of China, Japan, and Korea. His scholarship on international economic law, international human rights, and international dispute resolution appears inter alia in the Columbia, Michigan, NYU, and Virginia Journals of International Law. He has testified before Congress, written for domestic and international media, and lectured in French, Japanese, and Mandarin at colloquia, conferences, and workshops throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. He was previously Professor of Transnational Law, with tenure, at Case Western Reserve University, where he directed Case’s Asian Legal Studies Program and the Joint Program in International Commercial Law and Dispute Resolution with Southwest University of Political Science and Law (Chongqing, China). He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine, National Taiwan University (Taipei), and IÉSEG School of Management (Paris), and a visiting scholar at Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China). He started his academic career as a lecturer at Yale Law School and senior fellow at its China Law Center. He practiced international litigation in Tokyo and New York, and clerked for a judge in Boston. He is in the fourth cohort of the Public Intellectuals Program, the Chinese analogue to the U.S.-Japan Network for the Future, run by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He holds a BA and MA in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and a JD and LLM from Cornell Law School.

Network for the Future Cohort 4 Participant Biographies:

Amy Catalinac is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University starting fall 2016. After earning her PhD in Government at Harvard University in 2011, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard (2011-12); an Assistant Professor at Australian National University (2012-14); and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard (2014-15). Her research uses the case of  Japan to address core questions in international relations and comparative politics. Her book, Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan: From Pork to Foreign Policy was published with Cambridge University Press in 2016. Earlier work was published in The Journal of Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Politics and Policy, Japan Forum, and Political Science. Professor Catalinac has spent close to five years in Japan, where she observed the election campaigns of numerous politicians, conducted  interviews with political actors at all levels of the Japanese government, and interned for the Liberal  Democratic Party. She teaches courses on international relations, comparative politics, Japanese security policy, and Japanese politics.

Yulia Frumer is an Associate Professor in the department of History of Science and Technology, at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the history of technology in Japan, and she teaches broadly about the history of science and technology in East Asia. She received her PhD from Princeton University, and spent a year on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In the course of her research in Japan Yulia Frumer was affiliated with the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) and Tokyo University, and held fellowships from the Japanese Government  (Monbukagaskusho) and the Japan Foundation. Her first book manuscript, titled “A Matter of Time: Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan,” is currently under review with the University of Chicago Press. In her current project she focuses on the history of humanoid robots in Japan.

Robert Hoppens received a PhD in Modern Japanese History from the University of Washington and is Associate Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where he teaches Japanese, Chinese, East Asian and world history. His research interests focus on the history of Sino-Japanese relations, Cold War history and issues of national identity in East Asia. He is the author of The China Problem in Postwar Japan: Japanese National Identity and Sino-Japanese Relations, published by Bloomsbury Press as part of the series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan.

Nori Katagiri is an associate professor of political science at St. Louis University, where he teaches international relations, security studies, and East Asia. He is writing a book on Japan’s military power after he published his first, titled Adapting  to Win: How Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States in War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Before joining St. Louis University, he taught international security at Air War College, a joint military graduate school for senior officers and officials of the U.S. government and foreign nations. Between 2016 and 2018, he serves as a visiting research fellow at the Air Staff College, Meguro Base, of Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force. He received his BA in international studies from the University of South Carolina, a Master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Adam P. Liff is Associate Professor of East Asian International Relations at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he is also the founding director of its 21st Century Japan Politics & Society Initiative. His research focuses on international security and the Asia-Pacific—with particular emphasis on Japanese and Chinese security policy; U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy; the U.S.-Japan alliance; and the rise of China. Beyond IU, Dr. Liff is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Associate-in-Research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He holds a PhD and MA in Politics from Princeton University, and a BA from Stanford University.

Ko Maeda (PhD, Michigan State University, 2005) is an associate professor of political  science at the University of North Texas, specializing in elections, party competition, and political institutions. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics.

Reo Matsuzaki is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics and history of East Asia, with a focus on state-building and colonialism. His current book project, through a comparison of Japanese colonization of Taiwan (1895-1945) and the U.S. colonization of the Philippines (1898- 1942), explores the dynamic of state-building at the intersection of state and society, and the role societal intermediaries play in the process of constructing modern state institutions. He received his PhD from MIT and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law before joining the Trinity faculty in 2013. He is an Associate-in-Research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and at Yale University’s Council of East Asian Studies.

Matthew Poggi is a deputy director in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of International Banking and Securities Markets, overseeing coverage of Asian financial systems and specializing in financial stability, shadow banking, and macroprudential policy issues. He is a member of several Financial Stability Board working groups covering these issues. He has also worked in the Office of East Asia covering Japan and Korea, and the Office of Global Economics conducting cross-country analysis. Prior to joining Treasury in 2006, he worked as an economist at Lehman Brothers in Tokyo for eight years and worked in the International Department at the Bank of Japan between 2003 and 2005. He participated in the Mansfield Fellowship Program from 2009-11, during which he served in placements in Japan’s Ministry of Finance, Financial Services Agency, Bank of Japan, and in the office of a member of the Diet.  He holds a BSc in finance and economics from Boston College, an MSc in economics from the London School of Economics, and an MPP from Columbia University.

Michael Orlando Sharpe is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College of the City University of New York. He holds a PhD and Master of Philosophy in Political Science from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Additionally, Dr. Sharpe holds a Master of International Affairs degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, a Graduate Diploma in International Law and Organization for Development from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, The Netherlands, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers College / Rutgers University. Prior to coming to York College/CUNY, Dr. Sharpe was a senior research associate at the Howard Samuels Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before these more recent experiences, Dr. Sharpe was employed as a political analyst for the Consulate General of Japan in New York and earlier in Tokyo as a project coordinator for the United Nations affiliated non-governmental organization the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) of which he is now serves as a member of its board of directors. Dr. Sharpe’s areas of expertise are comparative politics and international relations and his research interests concern looking comparatively at the politics of migration, immigrant political incorporation, and political transnationalism in the Netherlands, Japan, and around the world. He recently published his first book, entitled Postcolonial Citizens and Ethnic Migration: The Netherlands and Japan in the Age of Globalization. Some of his recent work has appeared in the scholarly peer reviewed journals Japanese Journal of Political Science, Policy and Society, Dialectical Anthropology, encyclopedias, and popular media. Dr. Sharpe has given guest lectures and presentations about his work at several venues including Harvard University, Columbia University, University of Amsterdam, the Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University, Sophia University, University of Tsukuba, Villanova University, Japan Local Government Center (CLAIR), University of Manchester, Southern Methodist University, Stanford University, University of Aruba, and regularly presents at professional meetings. He has been interviewed about his work on Dutch radio and given presentations about it to Japanese government officials.

Jolyon Baraka Thomas is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research covers Japan and the United States in four main topics of inquiry: religion and media; religious freedom; religion and education; and religion and capitalism. His academic articles on these subjects have appeared in journals such as the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Material Religion, and Nova Religio, and he regularly publishes related essays in public-facing venues. Dr. Thomas’s most recent monograph, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2019. His first book, Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, appeared from University of Hawai`i Press in 2012. He is now working on a third book, tentatively titled Difficult Subjects: Religion and the Politics of Public Schooling in Japan and the United States. He is also co-editing The New Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, an MA from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and a BA from Grinnell College.

Kristin Vekasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Policy and International Affairs at the University of Maine. Her research interests focus on international political economy, and the dynamics of political conflict, foreign direct investment, and nationalism. She specializes in Northeast Asia, and has spent years conducting research in both Japan and China. Her current research looks at how Japanese multinational corporations mitigate political risk in China. Professor Vekasi received her PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2014. Prior to joining the faculty at University of Maine, she taught at New College of Florida, was a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo, and a Fulbright Fellow at Tohoku University.

Joshua W. Walker became President & CEO of Japan Society on December 2, 2019. Previously, he worked at Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political risk analysis firm, where he served as global head of strategic initiatives and Japan in the Office of the President. He has actively expanded global events and new business offerings, including leading the company’s first ever “GZERO” geopolitical summit in Japan. He has worked with clients worldwide with a focus on Japan and in a variety of sectors to evaluate global geopolitical risks. Dr. Walker has more than two decades of experience in international business and diplomacy. Prior to Eurasia Group, he was CEO and president of the USA Pavilion of the 2017 World Expo in Astana, Kazakhstan; founding dean of the APCO Institute; and senior vice president of global programs at APCO Worldwide, a leading global strategic communications firm based in Washington, D.C. Before joining the private sector, he worked in numerous roles at various U.S. government agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department. He is a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, and professor of Leadership and the American presidency at George Mason University and the Reagan Foundation. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond, a master’s degree from Yale University, and a doctorate from Princeton University.

Network for the Future Cohort 3 Participant Biographies:

Liv Coleman is associate professor of political science at the University of Tampa, where she teaches East Asian comparative politics and international relations.  Her research interests include Japanese gender politics and family policy responses to the declining birthrate, as well as Internet governance and processes of change in international organization. Dr. Coleman received her PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her BA from Smith College. She conducted doctoral dissertation research as a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science. She was also an advanced research fellow in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University.

Shinju Fujihira is the Executive Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Weatherhead Center International Affairs (WCFIA), at Harvard University. At the WCFIA, he has been a National Security Fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and an Advanced Research Fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. His research has examined the role of finance in great power competition, Japan- China relations, and Japan’s diplomacy in East Asia. He is the author of “Can Japanese Democracy Cope with China’s Rise?” (2013) in Clash of National Identities and “Legacies of the Abe Administration” (2008) in Japan’s Political Mess (both published by the Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) “From Shenyang to Pyongyang: Japan’s Diplomatic Trials in Northeast Asia” (Harvard Asia Quarterly, Autumn 2002); and his interview on Japan’s partisan conflict and foreign policy has appeared in the Asahi Shimbun. Prior to his current position, he was an assistant professor of political science at Tufts University. He received his BA in government from Cornell University, and PhD in politics from Princeton University.

Benjamin Goldberg is a Japan analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He focuses on issues such as Japan’s internal political situation, Japanese foreign policy, and regional economic and diplomatic activities. Previously, he served as a Foreign Media Analyst in the Media Reaction branch of the Office of Research in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In this position, he served as the primary editor and drafter of the Early Report, a daily analysis of global media reaction to major international events. Before joining the State Department, he worked as Analytical Director for an independent consulting company, Intellibridge Corp., as well as a junior reporter for the Washington bureau of Japan’s second-largest newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun. He graduated from Haverford College in 1995 with a BA in East Asian Studies, and is competent in Japanese and Spanish.

Shihoko Goto is the Acting Director of the Asia Program and Deputy Director for Geoeconomics at the Wilson Center. Her research focuses on the economics and politics of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, as well as U.S. policy in Northeast Asia. She is also a contributing editor at The Globalist magazine. Prior to joining the Wilson Center, she was a journalist writing about the international political economy.  As a correspondent for Dow Jones News Service and United Press International based in Tokyo and Washington, she reported extensively on policies impacting the global financial system as well as international trade. She was also formerly a donor country relations officer at the World Bank. She received the Freeman Foundation’s Jefferson journalism fellowship at the East-West Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s journalism fellowship for the Salzburg Global Seminar. She received an MA in international political theory from Waseda University’s Graduate School of Political Science and a BA in modern history from Trinity College, University of Oxford.

Tobias Harris is senior fellow for Asia at the Center for American Progress, with a portfolio that includes Japan, the Korean Peninsula, and broader Asia. His analysis of Japanese politics appears regularly in publications like the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal Asia, and Foreign Policy and he has provided on-air analysis for CNBC, Bloomberg, NHK, and Al Jazeera International. Prior to his current position, he was an analyst of Japanese politics and economics at Teneo Intelligence, a political risk firm, as well as  an Economy, Trade, and Business Fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA. In 2011-2012, he was a Fulbright scholar at the Institute for Social Science at the University of Tokyo, where he conducted research on the Japanese bureaucracy. Before working as an analyst, in 2006- 2007 Mr. Harris worked on the staff of Keiichiro Asao, at that time a member of the upper house of the Japanese Diet and shadow foreign minister for the Democratic Party of Japan, for whom Mr. Harris conducted research on foreign policy and Japan’s relations with the United States. Mr. Harris holds an MPhil in international relations from the University of Cambridge. He received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University.

Levi McLaughlin is associate professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Carolina State University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2009 after previous study at the University of Tokyo, and he holds a BA and MA from the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. He worked as a research assistant at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, taught at Wofford College, and was a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore and the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Iowa. Articles and book chapters by Dr. McLaughlin appear in English and Japanese in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Religion Compass, Sekai, the Social Science Japan Journal, and other publications. He has co-authored and co-edited Komeito: Politics and Religion in Japan (IEAS Berkeley 2014); is co-authoring and co-editing a special issue of the journal Asian Ethnology titled “Salvage and Salvation: Religion, Disaster Relief, and Reconstruction in Asia”; and is completing a book manuscript titled “Soka Gakkai: Buddhism and Romantic Heroism in Modern Japan.”

Emer O’Dwyer is associate professor of Japanese history in the Department of History and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She specializes in twentieth century Japanese history with research interests in imperial, political, and social history. She is the author of Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria, published in 2015 by Harvard University’s Asia Center Press. Her second book project explores Japanese experiences of the immediate post-defeat period, 1945-1955. Dr. O’Dwyer holds an AB in East Asian Studies from Harvard College and a PhD in history and East Asian languages also from Harvard. She has been a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (2010-2011), a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (2011-2012), and an academic associate at Harvard’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations (2015-2016).

Ian E. Rinehart is is an Analyst in Materials and Manufacturing at Lux Research. Prior, he was a Researcher/Analyst at Mitsubishi Corporation Americas. He was previously an Analyst in Asian Affairs at the Congressional Research Service, where he provided information and analysis to Members of Congress and their staff on issues relating to Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Asia-Pacific regional security. He was recently a 2013 Japan Studies Visiting Fellow at the East-West Center in Washington, where he authored a short paper on U.S.-Japan security cooperation and collective self-defense. Mr. Rinehart has worked at the research consultancy Washington Core, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, and the Social Science Research Council. He received an MA in Security Policy Studies from the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs and a BA in International Relations from Pomona College.

Daniel M. Smith is the Gerald L. Curtis Visiting Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His research focuses on political parties, elections, and coalition government in contemporary Japan and Western Europe. His PhD and MA in political science are from the University of California, San Diego, and his BA in political science and Italian is from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Smith has conducted research in Japan as a Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology research scholar at Chuo University, and as a Fulbright research fellow at the University of Tokyo. Prior to joining Columbia, he was assistant professor of comparative politics in the Department of Government and faculty affiliate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. His most recent research on Japanese politics appears in Japan Decides 2014 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Komeito: Politics and Religion in Japan (Institute of East Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, 2014).

Nathaniel M. Smith is an associate professor in the College of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University.  A cultural anthropologist specializing in Japan, Dr. Smith’s research focuses on nationalism, social movements, and organized crime. His current manuscript is an ethnography of the moral and social worlds of Japan’s prominent rightist activist groups that traces their trajectory from the early post-WWII years, beyond the Cold War, and into the contemporary terrain of post-3.11 civil society. He maintains broad interest in the history of Japan anthropology, urban studies and inter-Asian migration, and sound and visual studies of Japan. He was previously assistant professor of East Asian Studies and affiliated faculty in the School Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Prior to that, Dr. Smith spent two years serving as Japan Foundation Faculty Fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Smith holds a PhD in anthropology and MA in East Asian studies from Yale University, an MA in international relations from Waseda University, and a BA in foreign language from the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Language from the University of California, Riverside.

Michael Strausz is an associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University.  He earned his BA in international relations and Japanese from Michigan State University and his MA and PhD in political science from the University of Washington. His research focuses on the relationship between the state and foreign residents and on the role of norms in international politics, and he has published articles in journals including Pacific Affairs; the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy; and Foreign Policy Analysis. He is currently researching a book-length project about Japanese immigration policy as a Japan Foundation Fellow.

Hiroki Takeuchi is associate professor of political science and Director of the Sun & Star Program on East Asia in the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University. He previously taught at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as a Faculty Fellow in the Political Science Department and at Stanford University as a postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Public Policy Program. He received his PhD in political science from UCLA, his MA in Asian studies from University of California at Berkeley, and his BA in economics from Keio University. Dr. Takeuchi’s research focuses on Chinese and Japanese politics, comparative political economy of authoritarian regimes, and political economy and international relations in East Asia, as well as applications of game theory on political science. His first book, Tax Reform in Rural China: Revenue, Resistance, and Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2014), examines how China maintains authoritarian rule while it is committed to market-oriented economic reforms, by offering a systematic analysis of the central-local governmental relationships in rural China while focusing on rural taxation and political participation. His recent articles have been published in the International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, the Journal of Contemporary China, the Journal of Chinese Political Science, the Japanese Journal of Political Science, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and Modern China. His second book project examines the implications of global supply chains in the Asia-Pacific on international relations and security of the region.

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at Shorenstein APARC, the Director of the Japan Program at APARC, a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor of Sociology, all at Stanford University. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in July 2020, Tsutsui was Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Japanese Studies, and Director of the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society.. His current research topics include global human rights and three minority social movements in Japan, the global expansion of corporate social responsibility and its impact on Japanese corporations, changing discourses about the Asia-Pacific War in Japan, and the transformation of minority rights stipulations in national constitutions across the globe. His past research has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and other sociology and political science journals. His most recent book publication is Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press 2018). He has been a recipient of the SSRC/CGP Abe Fellowship, Stanford Japan Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and National Science Foundation grants, and is a Scott M. Johnson Fellow of the U.S.-Japan Leadership Program. Dr. Tsutsui received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kyoto University and earned an additional master’s degree and PhD from Stanford University.

 

Network for the Future Cohort 2 Participant Biographies:

Celeste Arrington is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research interests include civil society, social movements, democratic governance, law and society, policy-making processes, the media and politics, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is currently completing a book manuscript on victim redress movements and governmental accountability in South Korea and Japan.

Dr. Arrington earned a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an AB from Princeton University. She was an advanced research fellow in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University in 2010-2011. During the 2011-2012 year, she was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Emma Chanlett-Avery is a Specialist in Asian affairs in the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service. She focuses on security issues in the region, including U.S. relations with North Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Singapore. Ms. Chanlett-Avery joined CRS in 2003 through the Presidential Management Fellowship. She has also held positions in the State Department in the Office of Policy Planning and on the Korea Desk, as well as at the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group in Bangkok, Thailand. Professional and academic fellowships include the Amherst-Doshisha Fellowship, the Harold Rosenthal Fellowship in International Relations, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in advanced Japanese, the American Assembly Next Generation Fellowship, and a U.S. Speaker and Specialist Grant from the U.S. Department of State. She has served on the Council on Foreign Relations Working Group on the U.S.-Japan Alliance and the Mansfield Foundation Task Force on Creating a Contemporary U.S.-Japan Vision for Shared Progress and Prosperity.

Ms. Chanlett-Avery received an MA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and her BA from Amherst College.

Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics, Director of the East Asian Studies Program, and Co-Director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship (RIC) Program in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She was an advanced research fellow at Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relation, a Japan Foundation fellow at Saitama University in Urawa, Japan, and a visiting research fellow at the University of Tokyo and Korea University. Her research interests include international migration, comparative ethnic and racial politics, citizenship, and civil society. Her first book, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2010), examines how the strategic interaction between state efforts to control immigration and grassroots movements by multi-generational Korean resident activists to empower the foreign community have shaped contemporary immigration and citizenship politics in Japan. In 2009, Dr. Chung was awarded an Abe Fellowship by the Social Science Research Council to conduct research in Japan and Korea for her second book project, Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies.

Dr. Chung received her PhD in political science from Northwestern University.

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Annika A. Culver serves as an Associate Professor of East Asian History at Florida State University. She has also taught at the University of Chicago, Skidmore College, Beijing University, and the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, with research and teaching interests in Japanese cultural imperialism, wartime Sino-Japanese cultural relations, and U.S.-Asian interactions since the mid-19th century. She has published articles, essays on teaching, and book reviews for History Compass, U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal (USJWJ), Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs (SJEAA), Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians (JNCAH), Association for Asian Studies Newsletter, and Perspectives (Overseas Young Chinese Forum). Her recent book, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (University of British Columbia Press), explores how once anti-imperialist intellectuals produced modernist works celebrating the modernity of a fascist state and reflecting a complicated picture of complicity with, and ambivalence towards, Japan’s utopian project.

Dr. Culver received a BA from Vassar College and her MA in regional studies East Asia from Harvard University. She was a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow at Waseda University and holds a PhD in modern Japanese intellectual history from the University of Chicago.

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Dyron Dabney is the Director of Japan Study and Associate Professor of Politics at Earlham College. His research and teaching interests include campaigns and elections, political parties, political participation, and elite politics. While specializing in Japanese politics, Dr. Dabney’s research and teaching interests invite comparative analysis of East Asian politics and culture and American politics. Dr. Dabney’s present research is motivated and informed by interdisciplinary studies that bring into focus gendered differences in political participation and behavior. His current research projects include an examination of spousal participation effects on election campaign outcomes in Japan and the United States and gender and election campaign corruption in Japan and the United States.

Dr. Dabney holds a PhD in comparative politics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He currently serves as a board of directors member of ASIANetwork, and is an advisory committee member and the 2011-2012 resident director for Japan Study at Waseda University.

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Linda Hasunuma is Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Temple University, where she develops and facilitates trainings and workshops to support active learning, student-centered teaching, and inclusive pedagogy. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Bridgeport’s School of Public and International Affairs. She has published on the politics of the LDP-Komeito coalition, “womenomics”, women’s participation and activism in civil society, the impact of the #MeToo movement in Japan and South Korea, and the politics of the comfort women memorials in the United States. She has provided commentary to The Asahi Shimbun, NPR, The Economist, and the BBC World News. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation analyzed the politics of Japan’s decentralization and economic reforms during the Koizumi years

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Jeffrey Hornung Jeffrey Hornung is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He specializes in Japanese security and foreign policies, East Asian security issues, and U.S. foreign and defense policies in the Indo-Pacific region, including its alliances. He has previously served as the fellow for the Security and Foreign Affairs Program at Sasakawa USA, and as an associate professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS) in Honolulu, HI. He has written extensively about Japanese security and foreign policy issues and broader Northeast Asia security issues for numerous media, policy, and academic outlets. This includes Washington Quarterly, Asian Survey, Foreign Policy, New York Times, Washington Post, War on the Rocks and many others, including the two major Japanese dailies Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun.

Dr. Hornung received his Ph.D. in political science from The George Washington University, where he wrote his thesis on Japanese decisionmaking to send the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War. During 2005–2006, Hornung was also a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo where he conducted his doctoral research as a Fulbright Fellow. He also holds an M.A. in international relations with a concentration in Japan Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

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David Jänes is Senior Advisor for Institutional Development in the Office of the President at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST). He leads OIST’s development efforts in the United States and assists OIST in connecting to the U.S.-Japan world. Aiming to be the world’s best science and technology university and one of the most innovative educational institutions, OIST is poised to help with the sustainable development of Okinawa, with scientific research in Japan, and contribute to science and technology knowledge globally.

He was previously the Director of Foundation Grants and Assistant to the President at the United States-Japan Foundation, also working on broader Asia-wide projects including U.S.-Japan-China relations. During his tenure at the Foundation, Mr. Jänes created the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Awards and founded the Reischauer Scholars Program that is directed by Stanford University. Previously, Mr. Jänes served as director of college and university relations for the International Partnership for Service-Learning & Leadership. Mr. Jänes is a trustee of the Japan ICU Foundation; a member of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center’s advisory board; a board member of Saeko Ichinohe and Company, Inc.; a Scott M. Johnson Fellow of the United States-Japan Leadership Program; and a Fellow of the British-American Project.

Mr. Jänes holds a BA from Mary Washington College where he graduated summa cum laude, an MA in Asian religions from the University of Hawaii, and an MA in international affairs and a certificate in the advanced study of nonviolent conflict from the Fletcher School. Mr. Jänes is also a graduate of the Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone, Japan. Mr. Jänes is concurrently pursuing a doctorate in sociology at The New School for Social Research, where he is focusing on civil society in Japan.

Weston Konishi was the Associate Director of Asia-Pacific Studies at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. He was previously the Chief Operating Officer of Peace Winds America. A specialist in Asia and U.S.-Japan relations, Weston brings over fifteen years of experience in the non-profit and think tank arenas in Washington, Cambridge, and Tokyo. He is the author and editor of numerous books and publications on Asia-Pacific security issues, and is a regular participant in various leadership forums and events. Operating out of the Washington, DC area, he is primarily responsible for leading the expansion of PWA’s activities with new partners and programs and advising the CEO on the strategic direction and internal operations of the organization. Weston received both his BA and MA from the International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo.

Kenji Kushida is a senior fellow for Japan studies in Carnegie’s Asia Program, directing research on Japan, including a new Japan-Silicon Valley Innovation Initiative at Carnegie. He was formerly a research scholar with the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Kushida’s research interests are in comparative political economy, mainly on Japan with comparisons to Korea, China, and the United States. He has four streams of academic research and publication: 1) institutional and governance structures of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster; 2) political economy issues surrounding information technology; 3) political strategies of foreign multinational corporations in Japan; 4) Japan’s political economic transformation since the 1990s. He has also written two books in Japanese entitled Biculturalism and the Japanese: Beyond English Linguistic Capabilities (2006) and International Schools, an Introduction (2008).

Dr. Kushida received his PhD in political science from the University of California Berkeley, where he was also a graduate researcher with the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. He received a BA and MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University.

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Mary M. McCarthy is a Professor of Political Science at Drake University. Dr. McCarthy joined the department in the fall of 2007. She teaches numerous regional courses on the politics and international relations of Japan, China, and East Asia, as well as topical courses in world and comparative politics. Her research and teaching interests include the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy-making, the interaction between the state and the market, the relationship between bureaucrats and politicians, the role of the media in the political system, and the impact of environmental degradation and resource depletion on international and national security.

Besides her teaching and research, Dr. McCarthy enjoys mentoring students to help them to have the most enriching experience both at Drake and beyond. In this capacity, she advises students on post-graduate opportunities in Asia, including teaching English in Japan through the prestigious Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET).

Dr. McCarthy received her MA and PhD degrees in political science, as well as her BA degree in East Asian studies, from Columbia University.

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Kenneth McElwain is a Professor at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo. He studies the comparative politics of institutional design, particularly in Japan and other advanced industrialized democracies. His current book manuscript examines how partisan incentives influence the initial selection and subsequent manipulation of electoral systems, and how these choices can help unpopular governments to stay in power. Other research topics include the organizational principles of political parties and the procedural complexity of constitutional amendments. Dr. McElwain’s work is motivated by a general interest in asymmetrical party systems: legislatures where one large party coexists with multiple small parties. These cases represent idiosyncrasies in “normal” forms of party competition and have distinctive patterns of government composition, policy, and longevity.

Dr. McElwain joined the political science faculty at Michigan Fall 2008, following post-doctoral appointments at Stanford and Harvard, and joined the University of Tokyo faculty in 2015. He was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, and he received his AB from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He received his PhD from Stanford University.

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Andrew L. Oros is a specialist on the international and comparative politics of East Asia and the advanced industrial democracies, with an emphasis on contending approaches to managing security and on the linkage between domestic and international politics.. He is the author of He is the author of Japan’s Security Renaissance: New Policies and Politics for the 21st Century (Columbia University Press, 2017), Normalizing Japan: Politics, Identity, and the Evolution of Security Practice (Stanford University Press, 2008), co-author of Global Security Watch Japan (Praeger Press, 2010, with Yuki Tatsumi), and over a dozen scholarly and mass media articles on topics related to East Asian security and Japanese domestic politics. He was on sabbatical leave from July 2020 through December 2021, serving as a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC to work on a new book tentatively titled “America’s Aging Allies in Asia: Demographic Change and National Security in the Indo-Pacific.”  The project is also supported by grants from the Global Taiwan Institute and the Korea Foundation.

Dr. Oros earned degrees from Columbia University (PhD, MPhil), the London School of Economics (MSc), and the University of Southern California (BA). He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, Keio University, and Peking University; and studied as an undergraduate at Osaka University of Foreign Studies and Nanzan University.

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Gene Park is Professor and Chair of Political Science and International Relations at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). He specializes in comparative politics, international relations, and political economy. Dr. Park has written extensively on the politics of public finance in Japan including a book entitled Spending without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan (Stanford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a comparative study of taxation. Prior to arriving at LMU, he taught at Baruch College, City University of New York. Dr. Park has been a Japan Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Shorenstein Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC). He also spent two years as a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance’s Policy Research Institute.

Dr. Park received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Institute of International Education fellowship. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Swarthmore College, an MA in City and Regional Planning from Berkeley.

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Network for the Future Cohort 1 Participant Biographies:

Daniel P. Aldrich is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security and Resilience Program at Northeastern University. He was an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow at USAID (during the 2011-2012 academic year) and a Fulbright research fellow at the University of Tokyo (during the 2012-2013 academic year). Aldrich has focused on the ways in which state agencies interact with contentious civil society over the siting of controversial facilities such as nuclear power plants, airports, and dams. His current research investigates how neighborhoods and communities recover from disasters. He has published two books, Site Fights (Cornell University Press 2008, 2010 and to be published in Japanese by Sekaishisosha) and Building Resilience (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 50 peer-reviewed articles, and more than 60 book chapters, reviews, and op-eds for general audiences. His research has been funded by grants from the Abe Foundation, IIE Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Reischauer Institute at Harvard University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard’s Center for European Studies. Aldrich has been a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance, the Institute for Social Science at Tokyo University, Harvard University, the Tata Institute for Social Science in Mumbai and the Institut d’etudes politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). Aldrich received his PhD and MA in political science from Harvard University, an MA from the University of California at Berkeley, and his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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James Gannon is a Senior Fellow and the former Executive Director of the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE/USA), the American affiliate of one of the leading nongovernmental institutions in the field of international affairs in Japan. JCIE brings together key figures from around the world for programs of exchange, research, and dialogue designed to build international cooperation on pressing regional and global challenges. Before joining JCIE in 2001, Gannon conducted macroeconomic and political research with the New York office of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, the Japanese government’s overseas economic assistance agency. He has also worked with the Donald Keene Center for Japanese Culture and taught English in rural Japanese middle schools for two years as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme. Gannon graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a BA in government, conducted graduate research on postwar Japanese economic history at Ehime University in Japan, and received a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he focused on U.S.-Asia relations. He has written about international affairs for American and Japanese publications.

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Mary Alice Haddad is the John E. Andrus Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, where she teaches Government and East Asian studies. She has received awards from numerous institutions including the Harvard Academy, Mellon Foundation, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, East Asia Institute, and the Japan Foundation. Her publications include Politics and Volunteering in Japan: A Global Perspective (Cambridge 2007), Building Democracy in Japan (Cambridge 2012), and articles in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Journal of Asian Studies, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Her current research project is about environmental politics in East Asia. Haddad received her PhD and MA in political science from the University of Washington and her BA from Amherst College.

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Kenneth Haig is the Head of the Energy and Environment Policy in the Asia-Pacific & Japan Office of Amazon Web Services. He received his AB in History from Harvard and his MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. During previous years of fieldwork in Japan he has been affiliated with Bard College, Keio University, Hokkaido University, and the Otaru University of Commerce. His current research focuses on the political challenges posed by aging and shrinking populations. His most recent publication was a chapter on Japanese immigration policy in Routledge’s Handbook of Japanese Politics (Alisa Gaunder ed., 2011).

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Llewelyn Hughes is Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University and also Research Director for GR-Japan, a government affairs and public policy consultancy focused on the Japanese market. He was previously an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University (GWU). His research focuses on international and comparative political economy, including the exploration of how governments and firms behave in resource markets and the political economy of climate change. He also publishes on the international relations of Northeast Asia and Japanese politics. Prior to joining the faculty at GWU, Hughes was research fellow in the Consortium for Energy Policy Research at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Before entering academia, Hughes was employed in the public and private sectors in Tokyo. From 1997-2001 he acted as international aide and interpreter to Ichiro Ozawa, former Secretary General of Japan’s governing Democratic Party of Japan. In the private sector he advised firms operating in the energy, telecommunications, retail, and aerospace sectors in Japan on the management of government and public relations. Hughes has a Master’s degree from the University of Tokyo and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Kathryn Ibata-Arens is Vincent de Paul Professor and Director of the Global Asian Studies Program, DePaul University. Her scholarly work focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship in Asia, science and technology policy, women’s economic empowerment, and inclusive innovation. Ibata-Arens’ recent research explores technology leadership, innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem development in biomedical industries in Asia. Her book, Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia (Stanford University Press 2019) analyzes national policy and firm level strategy in China, India, Japan, and Singapore. From 2012 to 2013 she served on the METI-State Department Japan-US Innovation and Entrepreneurship Council, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Japan-America Society of Chicago and as a member of the U.S.-Japan Council. Previous research, utilizing social network analysis and GIS methodologies, examines emerging life science (biotechnology and medical devices) regions in Japan and the United States. In 2012, Ibata-Arens was a visiting researcher at the Research Center for Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI, Tokyo), Ritsumeikan University Research Center for Innovation Management (Kyoto) (2011-2012), and as a Fulbright Fellow at Kyoto University (2010). In 2008, Ibata-Arens was a Japan Policy Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC and received a Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Grant for her work on national entrepreneurship and innovation policy. Her dissertation research was conducted at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) at the University of Tokyo as a Fulbright Doctoral Fellow. Ibata-Arens’ previous book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Japan: Politics, Organizations and High Technology Firms (Cambridge University Press, 2005) analyzes leading high technology firms and regional economies in Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo. She received a BA in international relations from Loyola University Chicago and a PhD in political economy from Northwestern University.

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Jennifer Lind is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. She is also a Faculty Associate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Lind is the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics, a book that examines the effect of war memory on international reconciliation (Cornell University Press, 2008). She has also authored scholarly articles in International Security and Security Studies, and writes for wider audiences in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Asahi Shimbun. Lind has worked as a consultant for RAND and for the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense, and has lived and worked in Japan. She is currently writing about energy competition in East Asia; geography and security competition in the region; and is working on a book project about the evolution of national identity. She received a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master’s in Pacific International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Phillip Y. Lipscy is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He is also Chair in Japanese Politics and Global Affairs and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. His research addresses substantive topics such as international cooperation, international organizations, the politics of energy and climate change, international relations of East Asia, and the politics of financial crises. He has also published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy. Lipscy’s book from Cambridge University Press, Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations, examines how countries seek greater international influence by reforming or creating international organizations.

Before arriving at the University of Toronto, Lipscy was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. Lipscy obtained his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University. He received his M.A. in international policy studies and B.A. in economics and political science at Stanford University.

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Mark Manyin is a specialist in Asian affairs at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a non-partisan agency that provides information and analysis to members of the U.S. Congress and their staff. At CRS, Manyin’s general area of expertise is U.S.relations with East Asia, particularly Japan, the Koreas, and Vietnam. He also has tracked the evolution of terrorism in Southeast Asia and the environmental causes of security tensions in Asia. From 2006-2008, Manyin served as the head of the CRS’ 11-person Asia Section, overseeing the Service’s research on East, Southeast, and South Asia as well as Australasia and the Pacific Islands. Prior to joining CRS in 1999, Manyin completed his PhD in Japanese trade policy and negotiating behavior at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He has written academic articles on Vietnam and Korea, taught courses in East Asian international relations, worked as a business consultant, and lived in Japan for a total of three years.

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Matthew Marr is an Assistant Professor of Sociology for the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Asian Studies Program at Florida International University. Marr’s research focuses on the process of exiting homelessness in in Japanese and American cities, exploring how it is shaped by contexts operating at multiple levels of social analysis, from the global to the individual. He is particularly interested in the role of social ties in this process, and how ties are affected by organizational and policy contexts. His research employs multiple methods, including longitudinal interviews, participant observation, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Marr has recently published articles in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Cities, Urban Geography, and Housing Policy Debate. He plans to continue researching urban poverty and marginality in Japan and the U.S. from a global, comparative perspective, looking at the ground level effects of policy change. Marr began studying Japanese at Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1993 with degrees in government and Japanese studies and spent two years studying Japanese language and culture in Nagoya. He earned his MA degree in Sociology from Howard University in 1997 and has worked with community based organizations to address homelessness in Los Angeles and Tokyo. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007, with a focus on ethnographic research methods and social stratification.

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Sherry Martin is a foreign affairs research analyst at the United States Department of State. She was formerly an associate professor at Cornell University jointly appointed in the Government Department and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her areas of expertise include mass participation in politics, public opinion, electoral institutions, political socialization, and gender and politics in Japan and the United States. Her research on the relationship between gender, a decline in partisanship, and widespread feelings of political alienation in contemporary Japanese politics has appeared in the Social Science Japan Journal and the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy. Martin’s book, Popular Democracy in Japan: How Gender and Community are Changing Modern Electoral Politics, was published with Cornell University Press in March 2011. This work examines how institutional changes combined with new patterns of citizen engagement to create the conditions for higher levels of electoral participation than might be expected throughout a period of Japanese politics led by an entrenched elite widely criticized for being unresponsive to voters. Martin earned her AB in politics from Princeton University and her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan.

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Robert Pekkanen is a Professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and, while on leave from UW, currently an Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba. He received his PhD in political science from Harvard University in 2002. He has published articles on Japanese politics in such journals as The American Political Science Review, The British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Asian Studies, and The Journal of Japanese Studies, among others. His first book, Japan’s Dual Civil Society: Members without Advocates (Stanford, 2006) won the Ohira Prize in 2008 and an award from the Japanese Nonprofit Research Association (JANPORA) in 2007. The Japan Times also featured it as one of the “Best Asia Books” of 2006. A Japanese translation appeared in 2008. With lead editor Benjamin L. Read, he edited a volume on local organizations published by Routledge in 2009. His third book, Neighborhood Associations and Governance in Japan, appeared the same year (co-authored in Japanese with Yutaka Tsujinaka and Hidehiro Yamamoto), and also won a prize from JANPORA. Pekkanen’s fourth book is The Rise and Fall of Japan’s LDP: Political Parties as Institutions (Cornell University Press, 2010, co-authored with Ellis S. Krauss). This book departed from the theme of civil society and associational life to examine party organization and theories of institutional change and origin through the case of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. Pekkanen is currently co-PI on a major research project funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate parties’ nomination strategies and legislative organization in eight countries. Pekkanen has interviewed over fifty members of the Japanese Diet, and shadowed several in the past few elections. He has been interviewed by media including PBS’s “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” The Christian Science Monitor, Asahi Shimbun (Japan), USA Today, and radio programs in the U.S., China, Jamaica, and Australia.

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Kay Shimizu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Shimizu’s research concerns the political economy of Japan and Greater China, with a current focus on central-local fiscal relations and financial politics. In Japan, she has been a research scholar at Gakushuin University and RIETI (Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry). During 2009-2010, she was an advanced research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs’ Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University. She earned her BA in economics and international relations and PhD in political science from Stanford University.

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Mireya Solís is director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies, and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. Prior to her arrival at Brookings, Solís was a tenured associate professor at American University’s School of International Service. Her research interests include international and comparative political economy, Japanese politics and foreign policy, and regional integration in East Asia and North America. Solís authored Banking on Multinationals: Public Credit and the Export of Japanese Sunset Industries (Stanford University Press, 2004), and is co-editor of Cross-Regional Trade Agreements: Understanding Fragmented Regionalism in East Asia (Springer, 2008), and Competitive Regionalism: Explaining the Diffusion and Implications of FTAs in the Pacific Rim (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). Solis has been awarded a fellowship for advanced social research on Japan by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission as well as an Abe Fellowship by the Center for Global Partnership and the Social Science Research Council. Acting as principal investigator, Solís received a grant from CGP for the project Competitive Regionalism: Strategic Dynamics of FTA Negotiation in East Asia and Beyond. Solís has published articles in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Political Economy, The World Economy, Pacific Affairs, Business and Politics, Journal of East Asian Studies, and Asian Economic Policy Review, as well as several book chapters.  Solís has received numerous prizes and academic distinctions, including the Young Scholar Award from the Association of Japanese Business Studies, Fulbright and Ford Foundation scholarships, and fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University in Tokyo, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the UCSD, and the U.S.-Japan Relations Program at Harvard University.  Solis received her BA from El Colegio de Mexico and her PhD and MA from Harvard University.

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Nicholas Szechenyi is the Deputy Director of the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) where he is also a senior fellow. His research focuses on U.S.-Japan relations and U.S.–East Asia relations. Prior to joining CSIS in 2005, he was a news producer for Fuji Television in Washington, D.C., where he covered U.S. policy in Asia and domestic politics.

Mr. Szechenyi’s recent publications include “The U.S.-Japan Alliance: Prospects to Strengthen the Asia-Pacific Order” in Strategic Asia 2014–15: U.S. Alliances and Partnerships at the Center of Global Power (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2014) and “Maintaining the U.S.-Japan Alliance” in Global Forecast 2015 (CSIS, 2014). He holds an M.A. in international economics and Japan studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in Asian studies from Connecticut College.

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