Dr. William Brooks

Senior Advisor, Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies
Adjunct Professor, Japan Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS

Dr. William L. Brooks has been a senior advisor at the Reischauer Center and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS since 2009, after retiring from the U.S. Department of State. For 15 years, he served as the head of the U.S. Embassy in Japan’s media analysis and translation unit, which is responsible for analyzing the impact of Japanese media trends on U.S. interests. He had two earlier postings to the Embassy’s economic section and also served at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Dr. Brooks earned his PhD from Columbia University and taught history and the university level before entering government service.

He has written three monographs since retiring – The Politics of the Futenma Base Issue in Okinawa: Relocation Negotiations in 1995-1997, 2005-2006 (Reischauer Center, 2010), Cracks in the Alliance? Futenma Log: Base Relocation Negotiations 2009-2010 (Reischauer Center, 2011), and Politics and Trade Policy in Japan: Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations (Reischauer Center, 2015) – and is currently writing a book on Japanese politics. Dr. Brooks has also translated three books of poetry and four philosophical works from Japanese. He taught at Kyung-Hee University in South Korea during the summer of 2012, and served as a visiting scholar at Waseda University in Japan in the summer of 2014.

He teaches a course at John Hopkins SAIS, titled “U.S.-Japan Relations in Global Context,” in which student write research papers which have the opportunity to be published in the Reischauer Center’s annual year on U.S.-Japan relations. Most recently, he also created a course on Japan’s healthcare system and its political economy.