Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China

No country feels China's rise more deeply than Japan. CFR Senior Fellow Sheila A. Smith will discuss her new book, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China. Smith explores the policy issues testing the Japanese government as it tries to navigate its relationship with an advancing China through intricate case studies of visits by politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, conflicts at the East China Sea boundary, concerns about food safety, and strategies of island defense.
Sheila A. Smith, an expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, is senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Smith was on the faculty of the department of international relations at Boston University (1994–2000), and on the staff of the Social Science Research Council (1992–1993). She has been a visiting researcher at two leading Japanese foreign and security policy think tanks, the Japan Institute of International Affairs and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, and at the University of Tokyo and the University of the Ryukyus. Smith teaches as an adjunct professor at the Asian Studies Department of Georgetown University and serves on the board of its Journal of Asian Affairs. She earned her PhD degree from the department of political science at Columbia University.