The Future of Japan-Korea Relations: Are America’s Asian Alliances at Risk?

Keynote Speaker: Jonathan Pollack, Brookings Institution

Pollack is a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy at the Brookings Institution. His research interests include U.S. strategy in Asia and the Pacific, Korean politics and foreign policy, and Asian international politics. He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He was chairman of the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College and he previously worked at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. Pollack has authored and edited over a dozen books and research monographs.

Celeste Arrington, George Washington University

Professor Arrington is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. She is the author of "Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability," and her current book analyzes the changing roles of lawyers in policy-making. She was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was also a member of the Mike and Maureen Mansfield Foundation's U.S.-Japan Network for the Future and its U.S.-Korea Scholar-Policymaker Nexus.

Cheol Hee Park

Cheol Hee Park is a professor at the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) and Director for the Institute of International Affairs (IIA) at Seoul National University (SNU). He is a former dean of the GSIS and a former director of the Institute for Japanese Studies (IJS) at SNU. He served as the president of the Korean Association for Contemporary Japanese Studies in the year 2017.

His research interests include Japanese politics, Japan-ROK relations, and international relations in East Asia. He has written many articles on Japan-ROK relations in English, Japanese, and Korean. Park has contributed to articles in multiple volumes including East Asia’s Haunted Past, National Identities and Bilateral Relations, U.S. Leadership, History and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia, and Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia. He is currently a columnist at Tokyo Shimbun, Joongang Ilbo, and Munhwa Ilbo.

Park received his BA and MA from Seoul National University and obtained his Ph.D. degree at Columbia University. He has been a visiting professor at University of Tokyo, Keio University, and Kobe University.

Yoshihide Soeya, Keio University

Yoshihide Soeya is currently a Professor Emeritus at Keio University after recently retiring as a professor of political science and international relations at the Faculty of Law of Keio University in March 2020. His areas of interest include politics and security in East Asia and Japanese diplomacy and its external relations.

Soeya received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1987, where he studied world politics. He served as the Director for the Institute of East Asian Studies of Keio University for six years until September 2013, and as the Director of its Center for Contemporary Korean Studies for five years until March 2016. Soeya has been a visiting professor at the Graduate School of International Studies of Seoul National University in the fall of 2006, a Japan Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. from September 2013 to January 2014, and a Korea Foundation Fellow affiliated with the ASAN Institute in Seoul in March-May 2014.

Gene Park, Global Policy Institute (Moderator)

Gene Park's research interests include comparative and international political economy; Japanese foreign policy and politics; and the politics of monetary policy, public spending and taxation. He also has a broad interest in East Asian security. His most recent co-authored book is "Taming Japan's Deflation: The Debate over Unconventional Monetary Policy" (Cornell University Press, 2018). An earlier book, "Spending without Taxation: FILP and Politics of Public Finance," was published in 2011 (Stanford University Press). He earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College and Ph.D. in Political Science from University of California Berkeley. He is an avid tennis player.

Mietek Boduszynski, Pomona College (Moderator)

Mietek Boduszynski is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Pomona College, where he teaches U.S. Foreign Policy, among other subjects. He is also a former U.S. diplomat with overseas service in Albania, Kosovo, Japan, Egypt, Libya, and Iraq.

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