Kenji Kushida is the 2010-2011 Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California Berkeley, and was a graduate research associate at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Kenji has an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, and BAs in Economics and East Asian Studies from Stanford University.
Kenji’s research interests are in the interactions between politics, policies, and markets, with specializations in information technology, multinational corporations, and East Asia, particularly Japan. His dissertation analyzes the political strategies of foreign multinational corporations in Japan. Recent publications explore topics such as how the information technology-enabled transformation of service activities transforms traditional political dynamics, and political economic analyses of Japan and South Korea’s broadband and mobile industries. Ongoing projects include an analysis of how the rapidly developing Cloud Computing technologies reopens political debates surrounding privacy and security in different ways across diverse economies, an exploration of the mechanisms of institutional change in Japan’s political economy in the 2000s, and further work on the effects of foreign multinational corporations in reshaping Japan’s model of capitalism.