What is Global Japan? -Transformed Japan in a Global World

More than three decades from the collapse of the Reagan-Nakasone bubble, the impact of that critical political-economic juncture is at last beginning to subside. Japan is less cohesive and more volatile in broad socio-political terms than in the high-growth days.Yet it is also less parochial. As one of the largest economies and overseas investors in the world, and as a rentier nation, an increasingly global Japan has major, growing stakes in global stability. What forces will drive it in future years, and how will it influence the course of world affairs? Professor Calder will probe these questions and more, drawing on his over half a century of experience studying and analyzing Japan.   

 

 

Kent E. Calder currently directs the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, as he has done since 2003. He recently also served for varying intervals as Dean, Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs, and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at SAIS.

 Prior to SAIS, Calder served as special advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan; Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); tenured professor at Princeton University; lecturer on government at Harvard; and as the first executive director of Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. Professor Calder received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he worked under the direction of Edwin O. Reischauer, former US Ambassador to Japan.

 

A specialist in East Asian political economy, Kent Calder lived and researched in Japan for eleven years and elsewhere in East Asia for four years. He has served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Seoul National University; as Rajaratnam Professor at Nanyang University in Singapore; and as Visiting Professor at the University of Yangon in Myanmar.

In 2014, Professor Calder was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. His recent publications include: Eurasian Maritime Geopolitics: The United States and China in an Age of Indo-pacific Transformation( 2025 ); Global Political Cities: Actors and Arenas of Influence in International Affairs (2021); Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration (2019); Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan (2018); Singapore: Smart City, Smart State (2017); Asia in Washington (2014); and The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics (2012).

 

This event is part of The Japan Seminar Series, presented by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto.