Professor Ken Kotani

Ken Kotani is Professor at the College of Risk Management, Nihon University, Japan. He obtained his MA from King's College London and Ph. D from Kyoto University. He served for 12 years at the National Institute for Defense Studies, Ministry of Defense, Japan. He was also a Visiting Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in 2008–9, Visiting Lecturer of the National Defense Academy, Japan in 2011–17, Visiting Fellow of the House of Councillors Secretariat, National Diet of Japan in 2022-24, and Visiting Research Fellow of The London School of Economics and Political Science in 2024.

Professor Kotani's major field of studies are Anglo-Japanese relations in the inter-war period, the Pacific War and intelligence history. He has written several books and articles on these topics in English and Japanese, including Japanese Intelligence in World War II (Osprey 2009), Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies (Routledge 2014) and The SAGE Handbook of Asian Foreign Policy (SAGE 2019).

His recent research topics relate to arms control and disarmament in the 1930s and Japanese intelligence history. Professor Kotani published a book, Nihon Interigensu Shi (History of Japanese Intelligence after WWII) in 2022. It took almost 10 years to conduct research for writing this book, as there were no official documents or previous academic works on the topic to draw upon. He is also the co-author, with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, of Kokuryoku Kenkyu (A Study of Japan's National Power) published in 2024.