Chalmers Johnson - Definition and Overview

Chalmers Johnson is a professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an organization promoting public education about Japan and the rest of Asia. He has written several books, including the best-selling Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (ISBN 0805062394) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (ISBN 0805070044). His most famous and influential work is MITI and the Japanese Miracle, a study of Japanese industrial policy published in 1982.

Chalmers Johnson was born in 1931 in Phoenix, Arizona. He has a M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and taught political science at the University of California from 1962 until 1992, when he retired. He served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley from 1967 until 1972 and was best known early in his career for scholarship about China including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (ISBN 0804700745) and Revolutionary Change (ISBN 0316467308).

His book Blowback won an American Book Award in 2001 from the Before Columbus Foundation. Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, updated the evidence and argument from Blowback for the post-9/11 environment.