Yasushi Watanabe is a professor at the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University. Highly interested in the relationship between culture and politics, he has published several books and articles, including Culture and Diplomacy: The Age of Public Diplomacy (2011) and Cultural Security (2018). He has served on the advisory panels on public diplomacy at the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on NHK World. He is an executive director at the International House of Japan and a co-chair of the Japan Advisory Council of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Mr. Watanabe received a B.A. in American Studies from Sophia University (Tokyo), an M.A. and Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship held at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He has held visiting appointments at Cambridge, Science-Po, Peking University, College of Europe and the Wilson Center. In 2005, he received the Japan Academy Prize - the highest award for mid-career scholars.