Pons, Philippe

Philippe Pons is a French historian, specialist in Japan and Korea, and the Tokyo correspondent for the daily Le Monde, covering current events in the Far East. Along with Christian Sautter, in 1973 he co-founded the Centre for Research on Japan (CRJ), a research institute dedicated to contemporary Japan, now part of the prestigious French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and served as its co-director. As a specialist he is the author of many books and articles on the history, culture and politics of Japan and South and North Korea, and with the historian Pierre François Souyri, of a volume about the history of sexuality and eroticism in Japan (all publications in French). Aside from five years spent in Rome, he has lived in Tokyo since the late 1970s.