MARSHA COOKE was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She attended Temple University in Philadelphia, where she majored in radio, television and film. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in communications, she headed west to California to begin her long career in broadcast journalism. After several stints in local radio and television news, Cooke was recruited and hired as an associate producer at the CBS Network News Bureau in Los Angeles. She covered many of the major stories of the 1990s: the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, the Rodney King civil trial, the Northridge earthquake and far too many wildfires to remember. She was then promoted to producer in 2000 working for the CBS Evening News, anchored by Dan Rather. She was the lead producer from Mississippi for the CBS network’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and coordinated coverage of the disaster, including the network’s prime-time specials, broadcast the week following the hurricane. In late April 2006, Cooke accepted the position of producer for CBS News in its Tokyo bureau and now travels back and forth between the CBS bureaus in Tokyo and Beijing. Since arriving in Asia she’s covered the Tibetan riots in China, the Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing Summer Olympics and most recently the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. In December 2008, she was promoted to Asia Bureau Chief for CBS News.

COCO MASTERS is Time magazine’s correspondent and acting bureau chief in Tokyo, where she covers Japan’s business and economic issues, politics, and cultural trends. Since her appointment in December 2007, Masters has written on issues ranging from educational reform in Japanese universities and problems facing labor in the recession, to the growing strength of Japan’s main opposition party for both the Asian and domestic editions of the magazine, Time.com and Time’s style and design section. Previously, Masters worked in Time’s New York office for three years, writing on a variety of issues including the airline industry, start-up companies, technology, and physical and consumer health. She has contributed regularly to cover stories on topics ranging from “A to Z” (Time’s annual “The Year in Medicine”) and America by the Numbers, to Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and the bombing of Hiroshima 60 years later. Before joining Time, Masters worked for three years in product marketing and brand management in Japan. Masters earned an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and graduated from Pomona College, where she was awarded the Asian Studies departmental prize and a postgraduate fellowship from the Freeman Foundation.

ROLAND BUERK has been the BBC correspondent in Tokyo since January 2009. Before that he was based in South Asia for the BBC for five years, first in Bangladesh and from the beginning of 2007 in Sri Lanka. He reported from across the island as the government forces pushed the Tamil Tigers from the east, and fought to take back territory the rebels control in the north. He also covered other countries in South Asia, including India, and had numerous stints in Pakistan and Afghanistan including Kandahar, and the transition to democracy in the Maldives. When the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004, Buerk was on holiday in Unawatsuna on Sri Lanka’s southern coast. With his then-girlfriend, now wife, Anna, he was swept out of his ground-floor beach-front hotel room by the water. Both survived unharmed. All of Buerk’s possessions were lost except for the boxer shorts he was wearing, but he found a mobile phone and began filing reports to the BBC. Buerk has also written a book, Breaking Ships, about how old oil tankers and cargo ships are torn apart by hand and recycled on the beaches of Bangladesh.

FRANK ZELLER joined the Agence France-Presse (AFP) Tokyo bureau as news editor and deputy bureau chief in February 2009. Zeller was born in Tokyo in 1970 but spent his childhood in Germany and his youth in Australia, where he studied communications and then worked for three years for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. After extended travels through Asia, he freelanced for a year in London. From 1997 to 2000 he worked on the Asia desk of Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Bangkok, followed by three more years for DPA in Washington, D.C., until the start of the Iraq war, which he helped cover from Kuwait and southern Iraq. After a year in South America and several months as a travel-book researcher in Indonesia, Zeller joined the AFP Asia desk in Hong Kong in 2005 and worked as an AFP correspondent in Hanoi for the next three years.

REGULAR MEMBERS
Marsha Cooke, CBS News
Coco Masters, Time Inc.
Roland Buerk, BBC
Frank Zeller, AFP
PROFESSIONAL/JOURNALIST ASSOCIATE MEMBERS
James Bradford Cole, University of Tsukuba
ASSOCIATE MEMBERS
Daniel Fath, Weber Shandwick Worldwide
Noboru Matsuoka, Schott AG
Yujiro Miyake, Boyden Japan (Executive Consultants International Inc.)
Akihisa Matsumoto, Sakhalin Oil and Gas Development Co., Ltd.
Juro Chikaraishi, JICA
REINSTATEMENT (ASSOCIATE MEMBERS)
Mark L. O’Friel, Steel Partners Japan G.K.