Richard Samuels
Director, Center for International Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Richard Samuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been head of the MIT Political Science Department, Vice-Chair of the Committee on Japan of the National Research Council, and chair of the Japan-US Friendship Commission. He has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was awarded an Imperial decoration, the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star by the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese Prime Minister. His study of the political and policy consequences of the 2011 Tohoku catastrophe, 3:11: Disaster and Change in Japan, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013. Samuels' Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia, was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book in international affairs in 2007. Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community was named one of the Best of Books in 2019 by Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations.

Narushige Michishita
GRIPS, Tokyo
The National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies

Narushige Michishita is vice president and professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo. He has served as a member of the National Security Secretariat Advisory Board and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He acquired his Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. A specialist in Japanese security and foreign policy as well as security issues on the Korean Peninsula, he is the author of “The US Maritime Strategy in the Pacific during the Cold War,” in Sebastian Bruns and Sarandis Papadopoulos, eds., Conceptualizing Maritime and Naval Strategy: Festschrift for Peter M. Swartz, Captain (USN) retired (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020); Lessons of the Cold War in the Pacific: U.S. Maritime Strategy, Crisis Prevention, and Japan’s Role (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2016) (co-authored with Peter M. Swartz and David F. Winkler); and North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966-2008 (Routledge, 2009).

Moderator:

Dyron Dabney
Director, Japan Study Program &
Institute for Education on Japan
Earlham College

Dyron Dabney is an Associate Professor jointly in the Politics Department and the Japanese Studies program at Earlham College, Richmond, IN. He also is the Jackson Bailey Memorial Endowed Chair for Japan Study/Institute for Education on Japan (IEJ) and the Director of IEJ and Japan Study; leading programs in liberal arts and international education. His research and teaching interests include campaigns and elections, political parties, political participation and elite politics. While specializing in Japanese politics, Dabney’s research and teaching interests invite comparative analyses of Japanese and American politics, culture and society. Dabney holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Politics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a Network for the Future Cohort II Scholar of The Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, a former Board of Directors member of ASIANetwork, and a regular guest faculty and lecturer at Waseda University, Tokyo.