The Author
Johnson was born in 1931 in Phoenix, Arizona. He earned a B.A. degree in Economics in
1953 and a M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science in 1957 and 1961 respectively.
During the Korean War, Johnson served as a naval officer in Japan. He taught political
science
at the University of California from 1962 until he retired from teaching in 1992.
He was best known early in his career for scholarship about China and Japan.
Johnson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.
He served as Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies and Chair of the Political Science
Department at Berkeley, and held a number of important academic posts in area studies.
He was a strong believer in the importance of language and historical training for doing serious research. Late in his career he became well known as a critic of "rational choice" approaches, particularly in the study of Japanese politics and political economy.
Johnson is today best known as a sharp critic of American imperialism. His book Blowback
won a prize in 2001 from the Before Columbus Foundation, and was re-issued in an
updated version in 2004. Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, updated the evidence
and argument from Blowback for the post-9/11 environment and Nemesis concludes the trilogy. Johnson was featured as an expert talking head in the Eugene Jarecki-directed film
Why We Fight, which won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
In the past, Johnson has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the London Review
of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and The Nation
