Tadashi Yamamoto CBE (March 11, 1936 – April 15, 2012) was one of Japan's leading internationalists and a pioneering proponent of efforts to strengthen nongovernmental ties between Japan and the United States as well as between Japan and other countries. Yamamoto championed the view that civilian diplomacy and person-to-person exchanges conducted by nongovernmental organizations had a critical role to play in international relations. He was the founder and longtime president of the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE) a foreign policy think tank established in 1970 which promotes bilateral relations and exchanges between nongovernmental organizations. Yamamoto also helped to found the Shimoda Conference in 1967, a private sector forum for the discussion of bilateral issues between American and Japanese policymakers and policy experts. The Wall Street Journal has called him "an ardent champion of the U.S.-Japan alliance."
Yamamoto served as the President of the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE) from 1970 until his death in 2012. As head of the JCIE, Yamamoto simultaneously served as director for a number of forums, including the German-Japan Forum, the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, the Korea-Japan Forum, the Trilateral Commission Pacific Asia Group, and the Friends of the Global Fund, Japan, which works to promote the goals of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria throughout Asia.
In addition to the Shimoda Conference and the JCIE, Yamamoto also founded the Korea-Japan Forum, the U.S.-Japan Parliamentary Exchange Program, and the Trilateral Commission.
Biography
Early life
Yamamoto was born in 1936 into a Japanese Catholic family in Tokyo. His family moved to Hong Kong when he was three months old. The family then moved to Bombay, British India, where they lived for seven months. Yamamoto and his family returned to Japan in 1940. He initially studied at Rokko Senior High School before transferring to Komaba High School, from which he graduated in 1953.
He enrolled at Sophia University in 1954 with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest. However, his career path changed when he transferred from Sophia University in Japan to St. Norbert College in the U.S. state of Wisconsin in 1958. He studied in the United States from 1958 until 1962, receiving his MBA from Marquette University, a Jesuit university in Milwaukee, in 1962. He became interested in the social changes occurring in the U.S. at the time, including the civil rights movement, and the election of President John F. Kennedy, whose table he waited on during the 1960 campaign. The progressive ideals that they advocated and the values of “love and community” which he saw reflected in the Vatican II reforms of the same era became the inspiration for his later work.
He married his wife, Chiyoko Aikawa, in 1966, and they had four sons together.
Career
After graduating from Marquette in 1962 he returned to Japan where he worked at the Shin-Etsu Chemical Company as the foreign relations secretary for Tokusaburo Kosaka, the then president of Shin-Etsu who would later be elected to the House of Representatives of Japan.
Working for Kosaka, Yamamoto helped organize and found the first Shimoda Conference in Shimoda, Japan, in 1967, where United States Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield served as the keynote speaker. The inaugural Shimoda Conference was the first postwar meeting to convene political leaders and public intellectuals from the United States and Japan on equal footing for a foreign policy dialogue, and it came to be seen as a milestone in Japan’s reemergence on the world stage. The conference, which was held regularly until the 1990s, became a leading avenue to promote private sector dialogue between the two countries. In February 2012, Yamamoto organized a relaunch of the Shimoda Conference, which had not been held in seventeen years.