JAMES B. ALLEN (www.genkimarketing.com) has been making his living online from his home in Japan for the past seven years. He has presented at online marketing seminars and works with private clients worldwide.

Tokyo-based journalist CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON (www.globalite.posterous.com) has traveled in 84 countries, often on Japan Airlines. He is author of Siamese Dreams and an upcoming novel set in Japan.

ERIC JOHNSTON is Deputy Editor with The Japan Times’ Osaka bureau. He covered the COP15 conference in Copenhagen as well as the 1997 conference that created the Kyoto Protocol. He writes primarily about environmental, social and political issues affecting the Osaka region and Japan.

JOHN LANCASTER is a long time resident of Japan who has traveled widely in Asia and works as a freelance photographer and occasional writer. He used to be the photographer for Blues Alive, a blues magazine, until it closed down. He has held a number of photo exhibitions in Tokyo in which he has shown photographs of musicians and rural South East Asia. After many years living in Yokohama, he moved to the Chiba countryside four years ago.

JULIAN RYALL is the Japan correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.

ROBERT WHITING is the author of several highly acclaimed books on Japan including You Gotta Have Wa (MacMillan, 1989), a work on Japanese society as seen through their adopted sport of baseball, and Tokyo Underworld (Pantheon, 1999), a book about organized crime in Japan and the corrupt side of the U.S.-Japan relationship, which is being made into a film. His most recent book is The Meaning of Ichiro (Warner Books, 2004). Whiting has been in Japan for 31 of the past 46 years. He currently divides his time between a home in Kamakura and another home in California. He is working on a sequel to Tokyo Underworld, a biography of Hideo Nomo and writes a weekly column for Yukan Fuji. A new expanded and updated edition of You Gotta Have Wa was released by Vintage Departures in March 2009.