At the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, we place an emphasis on promoting people-to-people exchanges between Japan and the United States. Our goal is to maintain a high quality and quantity of people and organizations that would support the future Japan-U.S. relationship, and to foster active intellectual exchanges between experts in the two countries in various policy areas.

As part of this effort, our foundation launched a project in 2008 entitled, “Promoting Japan-U.S. Relations: An Opinion Leaders’ Dialogue.” This project supports visits to Tokyo and other cities by American experts and policymakers in various policy areas at senior, mid-career, and young professional levels, and host their speeches and arrange meetings with their counterpart policymakers and experts in Japan during their stay.

Our foundation has conducted the Opinion Leaders’ Dialogue for six years since 2008 (Phase one from 2008 to 2010, second phase from 2011 to 2013) . Building on the success of those phases, we embarked on implementing the third phase of the Opinion Leaders’ Dialogue in 2014 for further exchanges between the two nation’s opinion leaders for another 3 years.