Gavan McCormack is a researcher specializing in East Asia who is Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow, Division of Pacific and Asian History of the Australian National University. He is also a coordinator of an award-winning open access journal The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Academic career McCormack read Law and Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1955 to 1959, then spent the years 1960–1962 completing an MA in history. He spent the 1962–1963 academic year at Osaka University of Foreign Studies (OUFS), where he took a Diploma in Japanese Language and Culture. From 1963 to 1966 he studied Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, taking a second-class degree. He then spent two years completing a second MA at SOAS in Area Studies (Far East). From 1969 to 1974 he worked on a PhD at SOAS. His thesis was Chang Tso-lin, the Mukden Military Clique, and Japan, 1920–1928: The Development and interrelationships of Chinese warlordism and Japanese imperialism in northeast China. It was later published as a book. McCromack's academic career took him to the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, then to La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, and eventually to the University of Adelaide in South Australia. In 1990 he was appointed Professor in Japanese at the Australian National University. McCormack's main research interest is "modern Japanese (and East Asian) political, intellectual, and environmental history". He has published widely in both academic and popular journals on the "liberation" struggles in South East Asia. In more recent times he has become more interested in environmental issues and in 1996 he published The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, in which he attacked Japanese economic success as a mirage based on environmental exploitation that posed the single greatest threat to stability in the region. He has been a critic of the American government in general and has claimed that North Korea's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons are justified by American belligerence. He has been a visiting professor at Kobe University, Kyoto University, Ritsumeikan University, Tsukuba University, International Christian University and Tokyo Institute of Technology. Editorial career Gavan McCormack had contributed as a guest editorial staff of the South Korean newspaper, Kyunghyang Shinmun from December 2007 to December 2009. Select bibliography Books Japanese Imperialism Today: Co-prosperity in Greater East Asia (co-authored with Jon Halliday), London and New York, Penguin and Monthly Review Press, 1974, 279 pp. .