The Enigma of Japanese Power, Four Decades Later

PRESS CONFERENCE
"The Enigma of Japanese Power, Four Decades Later"
Karel van Wolferen, Journalist & Publisher

15:00-16:00 Monday, April 20, 2026

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan is happy to welcome back Karel van Wolferen, a former Club president and one of the most influential journalistic thinkers on Japan in modern times.

To the foreign press, he remains best-known for his monumental study Japanese politics and society, The Enigma of Japanese Power, which has sold more than 650,000 copies in 11 languages since first published in 1989. In Japanese, he has written on wide-ranging social and political issues in 21 books that have sold some 1.5 million copies. In his native Holland, Karel is currently the publisher of Gezond Verstand, a magazine with 14,000 readers that he says "covers developments that are either not written about in the regular media, or badly distorted if they do."