I first learned of Emanuel Pastreich’s activities in Japan last August when I came across his speech announcing his candidacy for president of the United States on YouTube. I saw an informed American delivering a carefully crafted speech that addressed the major true problems facing the United States and then fielded questions from the audience in Japanese. I asked myself, could there really be a candidate for president in the United States who actually speaks Japanese—it seemed too incredible to believe. 

I had never heard of Pastreich. The Japanese media only reports on the Democratic and Republican parties, and suggests that there is no alternative. In Pastreich’s presidential speech I discovered an articulate American with a constructive attitude who was actually trying to solve real-world problems that he had identified through careful study. 

Lots of people say lots of things on YouTube, but Pastreich’s historical analysis of the United States is not something that can be easily thrown together, easily imitated. 

That is to say that although his statements are political, he addresses institutional and civilizational issues with both detachment and compassion, avoiding the appeals to emotions that make up politics today. 

I wrote to him by email, curious to know whether I had misunderstood something, or whether he was a bit crazy; to my surprise, I received an enthusiastic response in Japanese and when we met soon afterwards. I learned that not only does he have a Ph.D. in Japanese classical literature, but he is equally fluent in Korean and Chinese. 

Not only did Pastreich understand international affairs, as well as American and Japanese politics, he also had a deep familiarity with Japanese culture.   

His recent book in Japanese, “Watching the sinking of the USS America from a distant shore,” is best read as an autobiography detailing his efforts to understand Asia and Asian culture and to reimagine and reform the United States to respond to the challenges of the current day. 

He explains how he made the unlikely transition from research on classical Japanese literature to the articulation of policy as a candidate for president in the United States. 

The book also gives a concise history of the geopolitical earthquakes that have reshaped the United States and left one of its capable intellectuals as a “castaway” in Korea and Japan. I was reading the tale of an expert with unique skills tossed back and forth by hidden political currents that pushed him out far from his base in Illinois. 

And yet, Pastreich does not give up; he keeps up his adventures, exploring each possible road forward. 

Pastreich started out his career trying to convince the University of Illinois to take Asian studies seriously in light of the rising importance of that region. That led Pastreich to write about geopolitics and international security. Those efforts led him to his current campaign to promote peace in Asia from a new base in Tokyo. It was a long march to get here, starting from his handshake with former ambassador Edwin Reischauer in 1987, to his friendship with Murakami Haruki, to his close ties to his senior from high school, Harvard, and University of Tokyo, Robert Campbell. 

Then came encouragement he received from Joseph Nye and Ezra Vogel at Harvard to consider working on foreign policy in Washington D.C. 

Finally, there was his close work with the Korean president Park Geun-hye, and other Korean and Japanese politicians and government officials to create a lasting peace in the region. 

The important theme in the book is not the famous people he encountered during his Odyssey, but rather the dead ends he hit, the walls he ran up against, and the darkness that crept over education and politics in the United States. 

I have seen a similar trend in Japanese universities. Those who claim to be experts, the scientists and scholars who demand our attention and expect our respect, become oddly timid when serious contradictions in society, or malfeasance in governance, or even in university administration, appear. 

Much of the story revolves around a proposal that Pastreich made back in 2000 for cooperation in teaching and research between the United States, Japan, South Korea and China that led to tremendous, if cloaked, pressures from within and outside the university that ultimately forced him out of the university and the ended of most of his interactions with his scholarly community. 

Although Pastreich took a critical position concerning the policies of the George W. Bush administration, he refused to condemn government in principle and he continued to work closely with those trying to restore the rule of law. He has spent his time between the United States, Japan and South Korea since then, observing the vagaries of American politics from a distance and writing policy proposals.

I was most impressed by how Pastreich accept spersonal responsibility for his own actions and their consequences, making no effort to blame third parties, or to draw people in with false promises. 

That is precisely the approach to politics and policy we would like to see here in Japan. Both politics and society have spun out of control in the post-COVID era.What we need is concrete action aimed at breaking out of the current mental paralysis and coming up with substantial solutions. I could sense from this book that Pastreich is one of the rare intellectuals who is willing to take concrete action. 

As a Japanese I saw much of the samurai tradition in his actions. He assumes that fearlessness is the necessary condition for real political change. 

The assumption in his thinking is that even if an individual’s action is but casting a single pebble into a vast lake, the expanding ripples generated will, in one way or another, be passed on to the hearts and minds of others who will offer the potential power to transform the course of events, to remake institutions and habits.

I personally felt that the essential message offered by this book in an age of increasing discord and uncertainty is at least as profound as what has been expressed in so many bestseller books. 

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This article was originally published on ISF.

Ichihashi Masaru is a professor at Hiroshima University and Director of Organization for International Cooperation, IDEC.

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