Mark Peattie served for nine years with the U.S. Information Agency in Japan, receiving intensive Japanese-language training in Tokyo. After earning his Ph.D. in modern Japanese history from Princeton University, he taught Japanese history at Pennsylvania State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. For many years Peattie was a research fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He currently serves on the research staff of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.
Peattie is the author, coauthor, and co-editor of eight books on Japanese imperialism and colonialism and modern Japanese military and naval history, including the award-winning Kaigun: Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941, coauthored with the late David Evans. He is currently researching Japan’s involvement with Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present.