No country feels China's rise more deeply than Japan. Through intricate case studies of visits by politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, conflicts at the East China Sea boundary, concerns about food safety, and strategies of island defense, CFR Senior Fellow Dr. Sheila A. Smith explores the policy issues testing the Japanese government as it tries to navigate its relationship with an advancing China. She finds that Japan's interactions with China extend far beyond the negotiations between diplomats to include a broad array of social actors intent on influencing the Sino-Japanese relationship. Sheila A. Smith, an expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, is senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of the 2015 pacesetting book, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China. Her current research focuses on how geostrategic change in Asia is shaping Japan's strategic choices.

Smith is a regular contributor to the blog Asia Unbound, and frequent contributor to major media outlets in the United States and Asia. She joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. She was a visiting scholar at Keio University in 2007-08, where she researched Japan’s foreign policy towards China. Smith has been a visiting researcher at two leading Japanese foreign and security policy think tanks, the Japan Institute of International Affairs and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, and at the University of Tokyo and the University of the Ryukyus.