Seminar 25. Nobuo Shimotomai: “Japan and the Origins of the Cold War”

On Thursday, March 4, 2021, the International Laboratory on World Order Studies and the New Regionalism and the Department of International Relations of National Research University Higher School of Economics held the 25^th session of Eurasian Online Seminar. Our guest was a renowned Japanese expert on International Relations, Russian and CIS politics and history Professor Nobuo Shimotomai. The topic of his talk was “Japan and the Origins of the Cold War”.

Nobuo Shimotomai is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Law and Politics at Hosei University in Tokyo and a Specially invited professor at Kanagawa University. Professor Shimotomai was born in Sapporo in 1948. In 1971 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Tokyo and in 1978 received his Legum Doctor (LL.D.) from the same faculty. He taught at Seikei and Tokyo Universities and did research in Moscow and the UK (University of Birmingham). From 1988 until 2019 he was professor at Hosei University. In 1992-1994 he was a Visiting Fellow at Russian Research Center (currently Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies) at Harvard University and The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. In 1998-2001 he was Associate Writer at Asahi Shimbun. In 2002-2004 he served as President of the Japanese Association of the International Relations, and in 2005 – Vice President of Asian Political Science Association.

Professor Shimotomai has authored about 30 books and more than 100 articles and monographs. His major publications include: Soviet Politics and Trade Unions: A Political History of the NEP (Tokyo University Press, 1982); Gendai Soren Seiji [Contemporary Soviet Politics in Japanese] (Tokyo University Press, 1987); Moscow under Stalinist Rule 1931-34 (Macmillan, 1991);  Tou ga syoyuusita kokka [The state owned by the party (Kodansya, 2002); Moskva i Kim Il Sung (Iwanami, 2006; Russian version from MGIMO, 2009); A.Torkunov, Iokibe, Streltsov, and Shimotomai, A History of Russo-Japanese Relations (Brill, 2019).