Hiroto Akai is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2017-19.  Akai has served various positions at the Japanese Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Agency.  Prior to joining Shorenstein APARC, he was Deputy Director of Policy Planning and Research Division, which is responsible for producing the Financial Statements Statistics of Japanese Corporations.  He assumed several tasks related to financial markets during his career.  He was Deputy Director of the Office of Foreign Exchange Reserve Management (2015-16), where he was responsible for portfolio management of Japan's FX reserves.  He also worked for Foreign Exchange and Markets Division (2008-09), where he was in charge of foreign exchange market policy during the global financial crisis.  He received a masters degree of economics from Hitotsubashi University in 2005.