Yoichi Funabashi is Chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation and a former Editor-in-Chief for the Asahi Shimbun. He served as correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun in Beijing (1980-81) and Washington (1984-87), and as American General Bureau Chief (1993-97). He won the Japan Press Award, known as Japan’s “Pulitzer Prize,” in 1994 for his columns on foreign policy. His books in English include The Peninsula Question (Brookings Institute, 2007); The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Disaster: Investigating the Myth and Reality (Routledge, 2014); Japan in Peril?: 9 crisis scenarios (CLSA, 2014); Quiet Deterrence: Building Japan’s New National Security Strategy (Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, 2014); Anatomy of the Yoshida Testimony (Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, 2014); Examining Japan’s Lost Decades (Routledge Contemporary Japan Series, 2015). He received his B.A. from the University of Tokyo in 1968 and his Ph.D. from Keio University in 1992. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University (1975-76), a visiting Fellow at the Institute for International Economics (1987), a Donald Keene Fellow at Columbia University (2003), and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo Public Policy Institute (2005-2006).
Award Information
By means of this project I hope to analyze the domestic factors within each nation which shape that nation's foreign policy, specifically its foreign policy towards the other two nations of the trilateral grouping. I propose to concentrate on China, since its internal situation and main interest groups have not yet been fully analyzed by either Japanese or American political scientists. Historically, geopolitically, and economically, the three nations have never achieved genuine working cooperation. While investigating strains in the trilateral relationship, I would try to identify opportunities for true trilateral cooperation by classifying the domestic dynamics in each nation. This project would clearly identify who within China, the U.S., and Japan is in favor of trilateral cooperation as China continues to grow and become more important on the world stage.
