Jacob M. (Jake) Schlesinger is president and CEO of the United States-Japan Foundation, an organization that gives grants and runs a fellowship program dedicated to bolstering relations between the two countries.
Schlesinger joined USJF in 2023 from The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for more than 30 years as a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., Tokyo, and Detroit. Schlesinger was the Journal’s Tokyo bureau chief and deputy Washington bureau chief.
He is the author of “Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Postwar Political Machine,” published by Simon & Schuster and Stanford University Press. He was a Stigler Center Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago in 2018, and a fellow at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute in 2021-2022, where he studied threats and challenges to democracy, in the U.S. and around the world.
Schlesinger was a member of the Journal team winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. In 2014, he was given Stanford’s Shorenstein Journalism Award, presented annually to a reporter helping global audiences understand the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region.
Schlesinger has a BA in economics from Harvard College. He lives in Washington with his wife, Louisa Rubinfien, a Japanese history scholar.
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