Dr. Mark Tilton, Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Asian Studies program at Purdue University, will speak on "The Politics of Pain: Prime Minister Koizumi's Attempt to Sell Economic Reform to the Japanese People." Mark Tilton's teaching and research interests include comparative political economy, East Asian politics, international trade, and theories of comparative politics. His publications include Restrained Trade: Cartels in Japan's Basic Materials Industries (Cornell University Press, 1996), Regulation and Regulatory Reform in Japan: Are Things Changing?, co-edited with Lonny Carlile (The Brookings Institution Press, 1998), and "Informal Market Governance in Japan's Basic Materials Industries" in International Organization. Dr. Tilton's past work has attempted to document how Japanese antitrust policy and industrial policy work together in practice. Currently, he is continuing that work in a comparative context, and is pondering the role ideas play in shaping economic policy. His ongoing research looks at Japanese, German and American antitrust policy, focusing on case studies of the steel and telecommunications industries.
Dr. Tilton did advanced Japanese language at the Stanford Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Tokyo (1976-7), and completed his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. (1990) in political science at U.C. Berkeley. He is the recipient of Fulbright, Japan Foundation, and Abe Fellowships, and his current work on Japanese telecommunications policy is funded by a grant from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Hamburg, Germany; the Science Center Berlin, Germany (WZB); the University of Tsukuba, Japan; and several times at the University of Tokyo. He has also presented lectures at Kobe University, Japan; Saitama University, Japan; the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France; and several universities in Peru. He has spent five years residing in Japan, in trips over the past twenty-five years. In addition to Japanese, he speaks several European languages.
