Philippe Pons

Philippe Pons (10 August 1942) is a French historian, specialist in Japan and Korea, and the Tokyo correspondent for the French daily Le Monde , covering current events in the Far East. Along with Christian Sautter, in 1973 he co-founded the Centre for Research on Japan (CRJ), a research institute dedicated to contemporary Japan, now part of the prestigious French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and served as its co-director. His first articles for Le Monde date from 1974. In...See more

Philippe Pons (10 August 1942) is a French historian, specialist in Japan and Korea, and the Tokyo correspondent for the French daily Le Monde , covering current events in the Far East. Along with Christian Sautter, in 1973 he co-founded the Centre for Research on Japan (CRJ), a research institute dedicated to contemporary Japan, now part of the prestigious French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and served as its co-director. His first articles for Le Monde date from 1974. In 1976, he became the daily's correspondent in Japan, from where he also covered the Philippines, South Korea and North Korea, countries which he visited twenty times between 1979 and 2020. As a specialist he is the author of many books and articles on the history, culture and politics of Japan and North Korea, and with the historian Pierre Fran�ois Souyri, of a volume about the history of sexuality and eroticism in Japan (all publications in French). Aside from five years spent in Rome, he has lived in Tokyo since the late 1970s. See less