Hi, I am Hiro Richard Watanabe, a Professor of Political Economy in the Department of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Previously, I taught at the University of San Francisco as a Kiriyama Professor and at the University of Sheffield, UK. Also, as an Erasmus scholar, I taught at universities in Germany, Spain and Italy. 

After receiving a bachelor's degree at the University of Tokyo, I worked at the International Legal Section of Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese multinational trading company. Later I moved to academia and received a master's degree at Yale University and a doctoral degree at the University of Oxford. 

I published two books. The first book - "Labour Market Deregulation in Japan and Italy: Worker Protection under Neoliberal Globalisation" (2014, Routledge) - examines the political and socio-economic factors that promoted, or hindered, labor market deregulation in the late 1990s and early 2000s in these countries from the perspective of worker protection under neoliberal globalization. The second book - "The Japanese Economy" (2020, Agenda Publishing / Columbia University Press) - examines the main characteristics of the Japanese economy from a political-economy perspective, focusing on the period after the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s.    

Currently, in addition to examining the causes of Japan's economic stagnation from a perspective of monetary and fiscal policy, structural reform, the role of labor unions, digitalization, etc., I analyze the political economy of regional economic integration, or "dis-integration", in the Asia-Pacific amid the US-Sino trade conflict. 

As for my personal life, I like to watch sports and travel. I frequently traveled to Barcelona to watch "Barça" matches when I lived in London. I have been to more than 80 countries - including all European and most East Asian countries. 

I live in Kyoto with my Estonian wife Natasha, who I met in London, my daughter Erika Larissa Rafaela and my newborn son Leon Ken Roman.