Speakers:

• Hiroyuki Akita (Commentator at Nikkei)

Moderator:

• Robert Dujarric (ICAS Co-Director)

Overview

Since the mid-19th century, Japan has lived in a region where wars or the risk of major conflicts have been the norm.  Japan's current security environment is far less critical than it was in many periods in the past 150 years. However, it has evolved. Some external threats to the country's well-being have gotten less salient, while others have grown more worrisome.

During this session, we will seek to shed light on the impact of developments in the past decade, such as the evolution of China's policy, the turmoil in the United States, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  We will start with a conversation with Hiroyuki Akita, one of Japan's leading commentators and analysts, with Robert Dujarric of TUJ, followed by Q&A from the audience.

Speaker:

Hiroyuki Akita

Commentator at Nikkei

Hiroyuki Akita is a Commentator at Nikkei (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, which also publishes Nikkei Asia in English, and owns the Financial Times). He regularly writes commentaries and columns, mainly on foreign and international security affairs. He joined Nikkei in 1987 and worked in the Political News Dept.(1998-2002) where he covered Japanese foreign and security policies, and domestic politics. He was Senior and Editorial Staff Writer (2009-17). He also was with the “Leader Writing Team” of the Financial Times in London in 2017.

He also served as Beijing Correspondent (1994-98) and Washington Chief Correspondent (2002-06). In Beijing, he reported major news events such as the death of Deng Xiaoping and the Hong Kong handover to China. In Washington DC, he covered the White House, Pentagon, and the State Department during the Bush-43 administration.

Hiroyuki Akita graduated from Jiyu Gakuen College in 1987 and holds an MA from Boston University. From 2006 to 2007, he was an associate of the US-Japan Program at Harvard University, where he conducted research on US-China-Japan relations. In March 2019, he won the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist Award, a prize for outstanding reporting on international affairs. He is an author of two books in Japanese: “Anryu (Power Game of US-China-Japan)”(2008), “Ranryu (Strategic Competition of US-Japan and China)”(2016).

Moderator:

Robert Dujarric

ICAS Co-Director

Robert Dujarric is co-director of TUJ's Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS). Raised in Paris and New York, he was with First Boston Corp. in 1984-87 and Goldman Sachs in 1989-93 in the US, Europe and Asia, prior to joining a think tank in Washington in 1993. He moved to Tokyo in 2004 as a Council on Foreign Relations (Hitachi) International Affairs Fellow, joining TUJ in 2007. He is a Harvard College graduate and holds an MBA from Yale University