The report by Adam Liff, a leading scholar on Japanese politics and foreign policy at Indiana University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, states that there has been a “precipitous drop-off in the value of America’s ‘top 100’ universities on teaching and research about contemporary US-Japan relations and Japanese foreign and security policy”.

Liff cautioned in the report, published in November by the United States-Japan Foundation, that the cost of failing to address this drift away from a nation that the current and previous administrations had named as Washington’s “most important Indo-Pacific partner and ally” would quickly extend beyond academia.

US research universities were “not only the education and training grounds for a disproportionate share of future scholars and leaders across all levels of government, industry and civil society, they are also the key to giving many young Americans … exposure to and familiarity with Japan and its importance for America that most would otherwise lack,” he wrote.