Meet the Editors

We were thrilled to join The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus in August 2023 and excited to undertake the daunting task of upholding the standard of quality that readers of APJJF have come to expect over the years since the journal’s founding two decades ago.

We were both avid readers of the journal before joining, and APJJF has been indispensable throughout our careers in terms of our academic research and classroom instruction as scholars of Japan and the Asia-Pacific more broadly.  We look forward to continuing to work with the tireless members of the NPO board, the editorial board, and the many contributing editors to publish the interventionist, socially-conscious, and empirically rigorous scholarly research and commentary that have made APJJF such a trusted and important resource for so many readers over the years.

We are also both fully committed to the idea that academics have a social responsibility as public intellectuals to engage broader communities both inside and outside academia through our scholarship.  APJJF was a pioneer of open-access peer-reviewed research, and we are eager to build on the journal’s reputation and success in providing a widely-accessible venue for both cutting-edge scholarship and expert contextualization of issues affecting the Asia-Pacific.

We warmly welcome inquiries and submissions from interested authors and any and all feedback from readers and subscribers. We can be reached at [email protected].

Mary M. McCarthy

Mary M. McCarthy is professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. She specializes in Japan’s domestic and foreign policies, with a current focus on the legacies of the Asia-Pacific War on Japan’s foreign relations. She is editor of the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Foreign Policy (2018) and her most recent publications include “The US-Japan Alliance in an Era of Geopolitical and Domestic Change” in Leszek Buszynski, ed. Handbook of Japanese Security (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). Dr. McCarthy received her B.A. in East Asian studies and her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. She joined APJJF in August 2023.

Tristan R. Grunow

Tristan R. Grunow is associate professor of modern Japanese history in the Japan-in-Asia Cultural Studies (JACS) Program at Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan. Trained as a historian, Grunow’s research explores the transformation of built and natural environments around the Japanese empire under the processes of state-formation and imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He joined APJJF in August 2023.