In November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany symbolized the political reforms that progressed in Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union, bringing an end to the long-lasting Cold War between East and West. At the time, I was a fourth-year university student, and I remember a German exchange student I knew being extremely happy about the fall of the wall. Feeling a sense of exhilaration at witnessing such a major turning point in history, and wanting to see the events with my own eyes, I traveled to Europe alone for my graduation trip, visiting Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia, which were in the midst of democratization movements, and was greatly inspired.
At the time, I never imagined becoming a researcher, so after graduation I took a job at a private company. Although I found the work fulfilling, my interest in international relations never faded, and four years later I decided to quit and study at a graduate school in the United States. After completing my master's degree, I moved to the political science department of another university and continued on to the doctoral program. It was around this time that the focus of my research gradually shifted from Europe and the United States to East Asia. The late 1990s was a period that showed signs of significant transformation in international relations in East Asia, with changes beginning to be seen in Japan's foreign and security policies, and the North Korean nuclear development problem becoming more serious.
I have been researching the division of alliances since I began my doctoral dissertation research in graduate school. At the time, there were very few people doing similar research, but in recent years, it has attracted more attention as China has risen and the situation in East Asia has changed. In recent years, I have expanded my activities, such as being invited to give lectures at American think tanks and participating as an advisor to a research group at a Belgian university.
In particular, themes such as "alliance division strategies" and "alliance binding strategies" are attracting increasing attention from researchers because they directly relate to the current situation where China is trying to drive a wedge into the relationship between Japan and the United States, or between the United States and Europe. I feel that my research is playing a part in understanding real-world society.
At the "US-China Competition and Europe" symposium held in October 2023 (Brussels)
However, the reality is that there are still very few Japanese researchers who are active internationally in these fields. I don't think that I should do anything special just because I'm Japanese, but as a researcher specializing in international relations, I have a strong belief that my activities should not be confined to Japan alone. Because the "domestic market" for theoretical research in international relations, which is my specialty, is still small, the impact is inevitably limited if I publish only in Japanese. For this reason, I basically write my papers in English and strive to actively disseminate them overseas.
To date, I have had papers published twice in the American academic journal *International Security*, a top journal in the field of international security, in 2010 and 2020. Both papers took more than five years from initial writing to publication, and were completed after much trial and error, so I felt a great sense of accomplishment when they were accepted for publication. In the latter case, the editor of the journal secretly submitted it for an academic award, and thanks to that, I won the 2021 Best Published Paper Award from the "History and International Politics Section" of the American Political Science Association, a world-renowned authority in the field of political science. I never thought I would ever win an award, so I can't thank them enough.
A translation of a renowned book on qualitative methods and a paper that won a US academic award in 2021.
