Jacob M. Schlesinger
President, United States-Japan Foundation

Jacob M. Schlesinger is president and CEO of the United States-Japan Foundation, an organization that gives grants and runs a fellowship program dedicated to bolstering relations between the two countries. Schlesinger joined the USJF from The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for more than 30 years as a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., Tokyo, and Detroit. At the Journal, he covered economics and economic policy, chronicled elections and summits, trade wars and market crashes, labor strikes, the 9/11 terror attacks in the U.S., and Japan’s March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Schlesinger was the Journal’s Tokyo bureau chief, deputy Washington bureau chief, and global financial regulation editor. He is the author of Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Postwar Political Machine, published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster. In 2018, he was a Stigler Center Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago.