Andrew Horvat
Facilitator - Tokyo, Japan

Visiting professor at Tokyo Keizai University and lecturer at Showa Women’s University, Andrew Horvat teaches courses on cross-cultural communication, language policy, and Northeast Asian regional issues. Born in 1946 in Hungary, Horvat escaped from his homeland in the aftermath of the abortive uprising of 1956. He and his family emigrated to Canada where he graduated in 1968 from the University of British Columbia and obtained his M.A. in Japanese literature in 1971. His thesis was on the short stories of novelist Kobo Abe. Returning to Japan, Horvat covered Asia as a Tokyo-based journalist working for the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the London Independent, and American Public Radio’s “Marketplace” business program. He served as president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in 1988-89. Horvat was a visiting scholar at Simon Fraser University’s David Lam Center for International Communication in 1990, at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies in 1994-95, and at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington DC in 1997. His research at Stanford and the NFLC on the increasing use abroad of the Japanese language was supported by an Abe Shintaro Fellowship. Between 1999 and 2005 he was Japan representative of the Asia Foundation. Horvat is competent in English, Japanese and Hungarian and has studied Korean, Russian and Spanish. He has written and translated nine books including “Kaikoku no susume” (Open Up, Japan!” (Kodansha 1998) and Japanese Beyond Words (Stone Bridge Press 2000).

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