Jacob M. Schlesinger has spent the past quarter century moving back and forth between Tokyo and Washington. In 2023, he was appointed president of the United States-Japan Foundation (USFJ). USJF is the largest independent American foundation dedicated to fostering closer ties between the two countries, with assets of around $100 million.
Previously, he covered trade and globalization for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, where he returned in Sept. 2015 after finishing his second five-year stint in Japan. Schlesinger first moved to Tokyo for the Journal in 1989, and, after completing his tour there, authored the book “Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Postwar Political Machine,” published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster.
He joined the Journal’s Washington bureau in 1996, where he covered the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and economic and regulatory policy. In 2003, Schlesinger’s piece on regulatory lapses and the 1990s financial bubble was part of a package of Journal stories awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting. He later served as the Journal’s deputy Washington bureau chief, before becoming Tokyo bureau chief in 2010, where he oversaw coverage of the 2011 triple earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster, Abenomics, and Japan’s rising tensions with China.
In 2014, he won the Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center.