A staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle for the past 16 years, Charles Burress has had a special interest in Japan since 1980, when he worked as an intern reporter in Tokyo. He has written many freelance articles for newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Japan, most recently in the February issue of Chuo Koron. He lived in Japan for one year as a Fulbright Fellow 1996-97 and returned last August as a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo on an Abe Fellowship to write a book on U.S. media coverage of Japan. He has an undergraduate degree in government from Harvard and a master’s in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley.