Gavan McCormack is emeritus professor at Australian National University. A graduate of the universities of Melbourne and London , he joined the ANU in 1990 after teaching at the Universities of Leeds (UK), La Trobe (Melbourne), and Adelaide. He has also been Visiting Professor at many universities in Japan, where he has lived and worked on many occasions since first visiting it as a student in 1962. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities of Australia in 1992. His work has been translated and published in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, and the main European languages. His most recent book is Client State: Japan in the American Embrace,  (Verso, 2007), of which Japanese, Korean, and Chinese editions were published by Gaifusha, Changbi, and  Social Science Academic Press of China. He is the author of Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe. A media commentator on North-East Asia, he is a coordinator of Japan Focus. In 2008 and 2009, he contributed an invited monthly essay published in Korean to Kyunghyang Shinmun (Seoul). He is a regular visitor to Okinawa, and was convenor in December 2009 of the "Nago Conference" held in Nago City, Okinawa, on "Civil Society and Social Movements in East Asia."