The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Enters its 14th Year: Ghost Towns, Lawsuits, and A Million Tons of Water

Martin Fackler

Visiting Research Associate, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University

Former Assistant Asia Editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief, The New York Times

Martin Fackler is a research associate at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. He has been a writer and journalist in Asia for two decades, working most recently as Assistant Asia Editor at The New York Times managing the paper’s coverage of China. He was a correspondent at The New York Times for ten years, serving as Tokyo bureau chief from 2009 to 2015. In 2012, he led a team that was named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative stories into the Fukushima nuclear disaster that the prize committee said offered a “powerful exploration of serious mistakes concealed by authorities in Japan.” He has also worked in Shanghai, Beijing and Tokyo for The Wall Street Journal, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Associated Press and Bloomberg News. From 2015-17, he was a Senior Fellow and Journalist-in-Residence at the Asia Pacific Initiative, a Tokyo-based think tank. He also currently serves as an advisory board member at the Institute for Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo. Fackler is author or co-author of 11 books in Japanese, including the bestseller Credibility Lost: The Crisis in Japanese Newspaper Journalism after Fukushima (2012). In English, he edited Reinventing Japan: New Directions in Global Leadership (2018). He grew up in Georgia, and holds degrees from Dartmouth College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley. 

Boxed lunch will be provided.

Sponsored by East Asian Legal Studies. Co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.