Yoichi Funabashi is co-founder and chairman of Asia Pacific Initiative, an independent Tokyo-based think tank (formerly Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation). He was the editor-in-chief of Asahi Shimbun, Japan's foremost newspaper, from 2007 to 2010. His books include Meltdown: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis (Brookings, forthcoming), The Peninsula Question: A Chronicle of the Second Korean Nuclear Crisis (Brookings, 2007), Alliance Adrift (Council on Foreign Relations, 1998) and Managing the Dollar: From the Plaza to the Louvre (Institute for International Economics, 1988).G. John Ikenberry is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is one of the world's foremost experts on the liberal international order. He is the author of seven books, including Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System (Princeton, 2011) and After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, 2001). Ikenberry is also Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.
"This well-conceived and elegantly written volume effectively captures both international and domestic components of Japan's place in the liberal world order. Steeped in history, its authors illuminate how Japan has benefited from and contributed to the liberal order, and indeed served as one of its staunchest pillars since the disaster of militarism in World War II. The book is a significant contribution to the literature on a subject often neglected in scholarly and popular writing: the distinctive and also constrained role that Japan has played in the post-1945 order.""- Stewart Patrick, James H. Binger Senior Fellow in Global Governance and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program, Council on Foreign Relations"