Trustee Emeritus of The Asia Foundation

Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow, Stanford University Institute for International Studies



(In memoriam)

Thomas P. Rohlen served on The Asia Foundation’s Board of Trustees from 2008 to 2016. He was a Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow with Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies, and a former Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He also taught at the University of California, the University of Hawaii, and Harvard University. He served in Japan with the U.S. Foreign Service from 1962 to 1965. A Japan specialist by training, his past research focused on such topics as Japanese corporate organization, the labor market, Japanese schooling, and, more broadly, on matters of economic and cultural change seen through the lens of contemporary institutional practice.

He was also a founder of the Aspen Institute’s Executive Program on Japan, the Stanford Japan Center, and the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies. The author or editor of nine books and numerous articles, his writings received a number of prizes including the Ohira Prize, the American Educational Research Critics’ Award, and the Berkeley Prize in Asian Studies. The American Anthropological Association presented him its Edward J. Lehman Award for Public Service in 1991. He had a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a doctoral degree in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.