William W. Grimes

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My research has grown out of my interest in Japan. I have written on Japanese domestic politics and political economy, US-Japan relations, and Japan’s relations with its East Asian neighbors. I like to work on contemporary, policy-relevant issues and questions that arise at the intersections of politics and economics, and comparative and international politics. Increasingly, those issues go beyond Japan and the United States, and raise fundamental questions about the future of East Asia as an economic and political region. Reflecting my interests in both scholarship and policy analysis, I was appointed one of the inaugural Research Associates of the National Asian Research Program (a joint project of the National Bureau of Asian Research and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) for 2010-12.

For full details on my work, please refer to my curriculum vitae. Meanwhile, here is a listing of my books.

My most recent book, Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of East Asian Financial Regionalism (Cornell University Press, 2008) received the 2010 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize and Honorable Mention in the competition for the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award in 2009. It offers the first book-length examination of ASEAN+3 regional financial cooperation – arguably, the most highly-developed aspect of East Asian regional cooperation – in English. Unlike virtually all other works that have dealt with East Asian financial regionalism, it focuses on power politics. Drawing on the work of such political economists as Benjamin J. Cohen, Robert Gilpin, Charles Kindleberger, Jonathan Kirshner, and Susan Strange, it develops and applies a realist political economy framework for analyzing contemporary financial regionalism. It appears in the Cornell Studies in Money. Chinese and Japanese translations are in preparation.

My first book, Unmaking the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Politics, 1985-2005 (Cornell University Press, 2001), sought to explain the most important Japanese economic story of the last two decades of the 20^th century: the formation of a massive financial bubble, its bursting, and nearly a decade of failed attempts to solve the problem. The book examines in detail the roles of the Japanese Ministry of Finance, Bank of Japan, and politicians in macroeconomic policymaking, arguing that structural aspects of power led to consistent patterns of policy outputs. In the period under study, those patterns were disastrous for the Japanese economy. [Also published in Japanese as Nihon keizai shippai no kôzô (Tôyô Keizai Shimbunsha, 2002).]

In Japan’s Managed Globalization: Adapting to the 21^st Century (M.E. Sharpe, 2003), my co-editor Ulrike Schaede and I put together an interdisciplinary group of young Japan scholars to ask the questions of how the Japanese political economy was changing or not changing. Chapters addressed a variety of domestic and international policy dimensions, including trade policy, foreign direct investment policy and practice, financial liberalization, corporate governance, self-regulation, and industrial promotion, based on a single analytical concept of “permeable insulation.”