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Mr. Jacob M. Schlesinger

President and CEO

Jacob M. 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 the USJF 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.   

At the Journal, he covered economics and economic policy, chronicled elections and summits, trade wars and market crashes, labor strikes, the 9/11 terror attacks in the U.S., and Japan’s March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Schlesinger was the Journal’s Tokyo bureau chief, deputy Washington bureau chief, and global financial regulation editor.  

He is the author of “Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Postwar Political Machine,” published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster. While writing that book, he was a fellow at Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center. He was later a Stigler Center Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago. Schlesinger returned to Stanford in 2021 as a fellow at the Distinguished Careers Institute, where he studied the 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 on the dot-com bubble and crash. 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 grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and has a BA in economics from Harvard. He lives in Washington with his wife, Louisa Rubinfien, a professor of Japanese history. They have two daughters, one currently working at the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, the other doing graduate studies in chemical physics at the University of Minnesota.