Dr. Gerald Curtis is Professor of Political Science at Columbia
University and is a specialist on politics in Japan and U.S.-East
Asian relations, with particular
research interests in parties, interest groups, and state-society
relations. He has served as Director of the East Asian Institute
for a total of twelve years between 1974 and 1990. Dr. Curtis has
been a consultant and adviser to Newsweek for its Japanese and Korean
Language editions, a columnist for the Tokyo/Chunichi Shimbun, a
member of the international advisory board for The Asahi Shimbun,
a member of the Board of Directors of the U.S.-Japan Foundation and
the American Academy of Political Science, and a member of the Trilateral
Commission and the Advisory Council for the Center for Global Partnership
of the Japan Foundation. He won the Masayoshi Ohira Prize in 1989
for the best book on Japanese politics and was cited by Newsweek
as one of the ten leading Asia scholars in the United States. Dr.
Curtis received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is the author
of Election Campaigning Japanese Style (1971), The
Japanese Way of Politics (1989), The United States, Japan,
and Asia: Challenges for U.S. Policy (editor and contributor,
1994), and several other books and numerous journal articles in English
and Japanese.
Mr. Nishimura
Yoichi has been Bureau Chief of The Asahi Shimbun’s Washington,
D.C. bureau since 2002. He first served in the Washington bureau
from 1998 to 2001 covering
issues related to defense, diplomacy, and the U.S. 2000 presidential
election. Mr. Nishimura previously spent one year at the newspaper’s
Tokyo office as deputy foreign editor and senior diplomatic writer.
He also has covered
the office of the Prime Minster, the Diet, and the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in Tokyo. From 1993 to 1997, he worked at The
Asahi Shimbun’s
Moscow Bureau. Mr. Nishimura received a B.A. from Tokyo University
and studied at
Moscow University and the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian
Academy of Science. He is the author of Grave of Prometheus (Purometeusu
no Haka), and
has contributed to the books The Iraq War (Iraku Senso, 2003), The
World at a Crossroads (Kiro ni Tatsu Sekai, 2002), 55 Chapters to
Know Modern Russia (Gendai Roshia wo Shirutameno 55 Sho, 2002) and The
Gulf Crisis and Japan (Wangan Kiki to Nippon, 1992).
Dr. Nathaniel Thayer is Yasuhiro
Nakasone Professor of Japanese Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He
also has taught at Columbia University, the City University of
New York, and Harvard University.
Previously he was the national intelligence officer for East Asia
and the Pacific for the Central Intelligence Agency, and a foreign
service officer with the U.S. Department of State. Dr. Thayer has
been a Ford Foundation Fellow and an Abe Foundation Fellow. He
received a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Dr. Thayer has written
How the Conservatives Rule Japan (1968) and “Japanese
Foreign Policy During the Nakasone Years,” in Japan’s
Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Gerald L. Curtis, editor,
1993). He is currently working on a new book entitled Japanese Politics
in Comparative Perspectives.
Japan is going through a major political transition. Dr. Curtis
will discuss how the so-called lost decade of the 1990s was
actually a period of important social change that weakened
the support structures of the existing political system and
set in motion new pressures and new trends that are now rising
to the surface and changing the face of Japan's politics.
This event is supported in part by a grant from The Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Japan.
