Advisory Committee

Dr. Michael Green, Senior Adviser and Japan Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Dr. Susan Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor, Director of Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, Harvard University
Dr. Leonard Schoppa, Professor, University of Virginia
Dr. Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Research Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University

Michael Green is a senior adviser and holds the Japan Chair at CSIS, as well as being an associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University. He served as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC) from January 2004 to December 2005. He joined the NSC in April 2001 as director of Asian affairs with responsibility for Japan, Korea, and Australia/New Zealand. From 1997 to 2000, he was senior fellow for Asian security at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he directed the Independent Task Force on Korea and study groups on Japan and security policy in Asia. He served as senior adviser in the Office of Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of Defense in 1997 and as consultant to the same office until 2000. From 1995 to 1997, he was a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, and from 1994 to 1995, he was an assistant professor of Asian studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he remained a professorial lecturer until 2001. Green speaks fluent Japanese and spent over five years in Japan working as a staff member of the National Diet, as a journalist for Japanese and American newspapers, and as a consultant for U.S. business.

He graduated from Kenyon College with highest honors in history in 1983 and received his M.A. from Johns Hopkins SAIS in 1987 and his Ph.D. in 1994. He also did graduate work at Tokyo University as a Fulbright fellow and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research associate of the MIT-Japan Program. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, The International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Aspen Strategy Group and is vice chair of the congressionally mandated Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. He serves on the advisory boards of the Center for a New American Security and Australian American Leadership Dialogue, and is a member of the editorial board of The Washington Quarterly.

Susan J. Pharr is the Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics, Director of the Program on US-Japan Relations and Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. She joined the Harvard faculty in 1987 and served as the Chair of the Government Department from 1992-1995, and as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1996-1998.

Dr. Pharr received her PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 1975. From 1974-76, she served as a Staff Associate at the Social Sciences Research Council. Thereafter, until 1986, she was on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. From 1985-87, on a leave from Wisconsin, she held the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she has been a visiting scholar or fellow in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo and Keio University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars and the Brookings Institution. She has also served as a Senior Social Scientist with the Agency for International Development.

Much of her research has explored the social basis for democracy in Japan and East Asia. Her research interests include comparative political behavior; comparative politics of industrialized nations; democratization and social change in Japan and Asia; political development; civil society and nonprofit organizations; political ethics and corruption; environmental politics; the role of the media in politics, the role of Japan and the United States in development, international relations in East Asia; and the international political economy of development.

Her current research focuses on the forces shaping civil societies, and the changing nature of relations between citizens and states in Asia.

Leonard Schoppa is a Professor of Politics and Undergraduate Director at The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He joined the UVA faculty in1990. From 2000-2001, he served as a Visiting Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo Institute of Social Science and the ICU Institute of Asian Cultural Studies in Tokyo, Japan. He also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan from 1993-1994. Dr. Schoppa received his B.S. from Georgetown University in 1984 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Politics at Oxford University in 1989.

Dr. Schoppa’s research focuses on the politics and foreign relations of Japan and is comprised of several distinct projects. Among his recent projects is Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection, (Cornell University Press, 2006), in which he examines the transformation of Japan’s system of social protection as it has been buffeted by the pressures of globalization and changing gender role aspirations of women. He has also written extensively about Japan’s economic negotiations with the United States in a book titled Bargaining With Japan: What American Pressure Can and Cannot Do (Columbia, 1997) and on Japan’s policy immobilism in Education Reform in Japan (Routledge, 1991). Articles growing out of these projects were published in International Organization (1993, 1999) and the Journal of Japanese Studies (1991). Recently, Dr. Schoppa returned to his interest in the electoral and party politics of Japan (in comparison to other advanced industrialized nations) and began working on a new edited volume with Tanaka Aiji of Waseda University. Earlier, he wrote about the effects of the “mixed-member” electoral systems pioneered in Germany and adopted in a modified form in Japan and Italy in the mid-1990s. Dr. Schoppa co-authored this piece with his graduate student, Karen Cox, in Comparative Political Studies (2002).

Ezra F. Vogel is a student of both modern Japan and China. He received his B.A. at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1950 and his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard in 1958. He then spent two years in Japan conducting research. In 1960-61, he was assistant professor at Yale University and from 1961-62 through 1963-64 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard, becoming lecturer in 1964 and professor in 1967. Professor Vogel succeeded John Fairbank as second Director (1972-1977) of Harvard's East Asian Research Center and second Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He was Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980-1987) and, since 1987, Honorary Director. He was director of the Undergraduate Concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1989. In 1993 he took a two-year leave of absence, serving as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council. He returned to Harvard in September 1995 to direct the Fairbank Center until 1999 and was head of the Asia Center from 1997 to 1999. He taught courses on communist Chinese society, Japanese society, and industrial East Asia. The Japanese edition of Professor Vogel's book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) remains the all-time best-seller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. He officially retired in 2000, but remains active in research and East Asia related activities.