Elisabeth Rubinfien
Consultant - Northern California, USA

Elisabeth Rubinfien has long experience living and working in Japan, and describing Japanese business and culture for a Western audience. A veteran journalist, she was a correspondent based in Tokyo for the Wall Street Journal and for Reuters in the 1980s, writing frequently about politics, trade relations and business ties between Japan and the United States. Prior to that, she co-managed a small business importing antiques from Japan and Korea to the U.S. Some of her earliest memories are of Japan, where she spent most of her childhood years from the age of 6 until she graduated from high school. She learned Japanese as a child attending international schools and traveled widely throughout the country.

Following her assignment in Japan, Elisabeth moved to Moscow, where she covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the new Russia for the Wall Street Journal newspapers, from 1990-94. As a foreign correspondent, Elisabeth also wrote for other publications, including the International Herald Tribune, the National Review and Euromoney magazine. Selected pieces from her time in Tokyo are included in Let's Talk Turkey: About Japanese Turkeys And Other Tales from the Asian Wall Street Journal, a volume of the newspaper’s best writing on Japanese culture.

Elisabeth moved to Silicon Valley in 1994 to attend Stanford University on a John S. Knight Fellowship for mid-career journalists, and subsequently to teach a graduate level course in journalism. Following that, she joined the San Jose Mercury News as an assistant business editor, where she was responsible for award-winning coverage of the local economy during the late 1990s and the dot-com boom. She then moved into more senior editing positions, finally spending several years as Metro Editor in charge of a large department responsible for covering the politics, culture and public life of the local region. In that management capacity, Elisabeth gained first-hand experience with common business practices, staff motivational issues and cultural attitudes in a major American corporation. She was called upon to conduct training for groups of mid-career professionals at the newspaper, and has considerable experience guiding brainstorming and idea development sessions with staff from various departments with diverse expertise.

Elisabeth holds a B.A. in Zoology/Cellular Biology from Pomona College, and an M.S. in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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