James Simms

I am currently a freelance journalist and television and radio commentator in Tokyo and have covered the Japanese economy and politics for two decades. Most recently, I spent a year at the University of Colorado Boulder on a Scripps Journalism Fellowship. For 15 years, I was Tokyo correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, including tenure as the Journal’s Heard on the Street columnist analyzing corporations, policy issues and the economies in Japan and South Korea. In 2011, Dow Jones awarded me its highest writing award for a series on Japan’s budget and bureaucracy. I have conducted hundreds of interviews for print and television, including for CNBC, and covered Asia’s financial crisis and the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. As a Scripps Fellow, my research focused on Fukushima-related issues: Energy policy, especially renewable energy and nuclear power; seismology and seismic engineering; and disaster planning and mitigation.