Michael Zielenziger
Visiting Scholar,
Institute of International Studies,
University of California, Berkeley
and Author of
Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
Michael Zielenziger is the author of Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation published in September, 2006, by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday books. He is a research scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California - Berkeley where he works on issues related to US-China relations, and the impacts of globalization on competitiveness and innovation. For more than seven years, until May 2003, he was the Tokyo-based bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers, publishers of The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Jose Mercury News, and more than thirty other American newspapers.
He has written extensively about social, economic and political trends in Japan, China, South Korea, India and Southeast Asia. He is a recipient of the Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council of New York City and has also been affiliated with UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies.
As a Tokyo-based foreign correspondent, Zielenziger traveled extensively throughout Asia, covering two Philippine revolutions, the IMF crisis in South Korea, the removal of Suharto and the election of Gus Dur in Indonesia, and the efforts of tiny Bhutan to wrestle with the impacts of globalization. After September 11, 2001, Zielenziger also spent long periods in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Israel, covering the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
Before moving to Tokyo, Zielenziger served as the first Pacific Rim correspondent for The San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of Silicon Valley, where he helped described the burgeoning connections between Asia and the U.S. West Coast. He was a finalist for a 1995 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for a series describing the efforts of Overseas Chinese to propel the modernization of China. He also wrote extensively about the emergence of the software industry in India, and its potential to create collaborative and competitive relationships with U.S. software developers. He was also a contributor to two other Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the Mercury News; one described the "hidden wealth" accumulated by then Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.
Zielenziger was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 1991, where he studied in the Asia-Pacific Research Center and Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Previously, he opened Knight Ridder's first Seattle bureau and worked for The Chicago Sun-Times and The Kansas City Star. He is a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He speaks Japanese, French and Hebrew.
Presented by the USC Marshall School of Business
in partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce
