John Van Sant (Ph.D., Univ. of Oregon) is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama–Birmingham (USA). His book, Pacific Pioneers: Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850–1880 (University of Illinois Press, 2000) is a transnational and transcultural examination of many of the first Japanese who lived in the United States. He also edited and introduced a new edition of Arinori Mori's Life and Resources in America (Lexington Books, 2004), an examination of the American political, social, and cultural landscape by Japan's first resident diplomat in Washington, D.C., and originally published in 1872.
Peter Mauch is a lecturer of international history at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He has recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Kyoto University, and is writing a biography of Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo, entitled, Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese–American War. He has published numerous articles detailing Nomura's pre-and post–Pacific War efforts to place Japanese–American relations on a cordial footing.
Yoneyuki Sugita is associate professor of American history at Osaka University of Foreign Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Pitfall or Panacea: The Irony of US Power in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 (New York: Routledge, 2003) and Irony of Hegemony: The Asia–Pacific War and US Policy toward East Asia (Kyoto: Sekai Shisosha, 1999) (in Japanese). He is also co-editor with Richard Jensen and Jon Davidann of Trans-Pacific Relations: America, Europe, and Asia in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger, 2003).