Prime Minister Suga becomes the first foreign leader to visit President Biden in the White House on April 16th. The visit symbolizes the importance of the US-Japan alliance for both countries as they seek to stave off China’s ambitions in the region and in the world. What has the summit meeting accomplished, where is the Free and Open Indo-Pacific vision headed, and how will the US-Japan alliance intersect with other emerging frameworks such as the Quad and the CPTPP to shape the regional and global geopolitics in the coming years and decades? Featuring two leading foreign policy experts from Japan and the US, Yuichi Hosoya (Keio University) and Sheila Smith (Council on Foreign Relations), this panel examines these questions on the heels of the Biden-Suga meeting. Moderated by Kiyoteru Tsutsui (Stanford University), the webinar will have a Q&A session, and the participants are welcome to submit their questions in advance using the registration form and at the event using the Q&A function of Zoom.
SPEAKERS
Yuichi Hosoya, Ph.D., is professor of international politics at Keio University, Tokyo. Professor Hosoya is Managing Director & Research Director at the Asia-Pacific Initiative, Tokyo. He is also Senior Researcher at the Nakasone Peace Institute (NPI), Senior Fellow at The Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, and also Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA). Professor Hosoya was a member of Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security (2013-14), and Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on National Security and Defense Capabilities (2013). Professor Hosoya studied international politics at Rikkyo (BA), Birmingham (MIS), and Keio (Ph.D.). He was a visiting professor and Japan Chair (2009–2010) at Sciences-Po in Paris (Institut d’Études Politiques) and a visiting fellow (Fulbright Fellow, 2008–2009) at Princeton University. His research interests include the postwar international history, British diplomatic history, Japanese foreign and security policy, and contemporary East Asian international politics. His most recent publications include,
Security Politics: Legislation for a New Security Environment (Tokyo: JPIC, 2019) ;
History, Memory & Politics in Postwar Japan (Co-editor, Lynne Rienner: Boulder, 2020); and “Japan’s Security Policy in East Asia”, in Yul Sohn and T.J. Pempel (eds.),
Japan and Asia’s Contested Order: The Interplay of Security, Economics, and Identity (Palgrave, 2018). His comments appeared at
New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, USA Today, Die Welt and
Le Monde, as well as at major Japanese media.
Sheila A. Smith is senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, she is the author of
Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power,
Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China (released in Japanese as 日中 親愛なる宿敵: 変容する日本政治と対中政策), and
Japan's New Politics and the U.S.-Japan Alliance. She is also the author of the CFR interactive guide Constitutional Change in Japan. Smith is a regular contributor to the CFR blog
Asia Unbound and a frequent contributor to major media outlets in the United States and Asia. Smith joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. She was a visiting scholar at Keio University in 2007-08, where she researched Japan’s foreign policy towards China, supported by the Abe Fellowship. Smith has been a visiting researcher at two leading Japanese foreign and security policy think tanks, the Japan Institute of International Affairs and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, and at the University of Tokyo and the University of the Ryukyus. Smith is chair of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) and the U.S. advisors to the U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON), a binational advisory panel of government officials and private-sector members. She teaches as an adjunct professor at the Asian studies department of Georgetown University and serves on the board of its
Journal of Asian Affairs. She also serves on the advisory committee for the U.S.-Japan Network for the Future program of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation. Smith earned her MA and PhD from the political science department at Columbia University.
MODERATOR
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he is also Director of the Japan Program, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor of Sociology. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2021).
