Yasuhiro Matsuda

Yasuhiro Matsuda is exactly the kind of person who makes you feel slightly bad about how you spend your days — a political scientist and historian out of Hokkaido who put in the work at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and eventually landed at one of Japan's most prestigious research institutions. No flashy TV appearances, no viral moments, just decades of quietly building a body of scholarly work on East Asian politics and security. Born in 1965, so he came of age during the Cold War's final act and watched the whole regional order shift in real time — that kind of long view tends to produce the most grounded analysis. I have genuine respect for academics who resist the temptation to become pundits and instead stay in the weeds where the actual thinking happens. Matsuda feels like that type to me: slow, careful, deliberate — the intellectual version of someone who always shows their work.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Yasuhiro Matsuda is a Japanese political scientist and historian born in 1965 in Hokkaido, Japan. He studied at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and went on to pursue an academic career in political science and history. A specialist in Chinese and Taiwanese politics and security, he worked at the National Institute for Defense Studies from 1992 to 2008 before moving to the University of Tokyo's Institute of Oriental Culture, where he is a professor.

Name (English)

Yasuhiro Matsuda

Name (Japanese)

松田康博

Reading

まつだ やすひろ

Born

November 29, 1965 (age 60)

Origin

Hokkaido, Japan

Occupation

Political scientist / Historian / University professor

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Snake

University

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

• Official sitehttps://www.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~ymatsuda/en/index.html
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%BE%E7%94%B0%E5%BA%B7%E5%8D%9A
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2153929

Tags

• from Hokkaido
• political scientist
• historian
• university professor

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.