How many APSA members know that APSA and its Japanese counterpart, JPSA, have been sending delegates to each other's meetings for 13 years? Each association pays for two scholars from the other country to present papers at its respective annual convention. Discussions are underway regarding an expansion of the APSA-JPSA relationship. Word has it, for example, that more Japanese departments are considering institutional APSA membership to make use of APSA's advertisement and placement services.

The exchange program's selection process is relatively straightforward. The JPSA board reviews multiple proposals from its membership for the invitation of U.S. guests, selecting two each year. The JPSA board also undertakes a similar review of applicants from potential Japanese delegates to APSA; in turn, APSA screens the nominated candidates and, upon their acceptance, forwards their proposals to the relevant division chairs.

The three Japanese delegates to the 2003 APSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia were:

This year, JPSA invited John Ferejohn and Frances Rosenbluth to attend their annual meeting, held October 4–5, 2003. Frequent visitors to Japan such as Rosenbluth are not the usual kind of delegate, but she agreed to pinch hit for Nancy Burns (University of Michigan) who was originally selected but could not attend.

The exchange organizers on the Japanese side—Junko Kato (University of Tokyo), Masaru Kohno (Waseda University), Hideo Otake (University of Kyoto), and Ikuo Kume (University of Kobe)—were gracious hosts. They put us up in a comfortable hotel in central Tokyo and arranged for graduate students to ferry us about as needed. The graduate student assigned to John, Yuki Takagi (University of Tokyo), turned out to be the daughter of the vice minister of the Financial Services Authority of the Japanese government. The vice minister gave Yuki and John use of a hired limo and driver for the day to sightsee around Tokyo on Saturday. Frances arrived in Tokyo a couple of days early and happily made some progress on a new research project.

JPSA meetings are typically held in some picturesque place (last year's meeting was held in Matsuyama, which lies in the shadow of a hilltop medieval castle and is the setting for Natsume Soseki's novel, Botchan). This year, the current JPSA president, Fukashi Horie, wanted to showcase Shobi University—of which he is president—in Kawagoe City, Saitaima Prefecture, a commuter town about an hour and a half away from Tokyo by train. A 10 minute bus ride from the Kawagoe train station brought us to the university campus, a set of more or less Bauhaus-style buildings only a few years old surrounded on all sides by rice paddies. On Saturday evening we participated in an opening reception at a local hotel, at which a delegate from the Korean political science organization and John Ferejohn, on our behalf, greeted our hosts. (It says something about modern geopolitics that the speech of Japan's closest geographic and genetic neighbors had to be translated into Japanese, while understanding John's English language speech was taken as a natural part of being a Japanese political scientist.)

The next day we took the train to Kawagoe once again to participate in a panel that featured our two papers and the comments of two discussants who were also our sponsors, Junko Kato and Otake Hideo. The only obvious connection between our papers (John's on Greek and Roman governance as prototypes of legislative and executive forms of constitutionalism; Frances's on the political economy of low fertility) was that we both presented in English. Frances never did figure out the high tech projector equipment, but there were plenty of Shobi students to help deal with this sort of thing. The discussants gave us useful comments and several of the 30 or 40 political scientists in our audience wrote comments on JPSA's standard “audience comment sheets” from which we were to formulate a response for the second half of our session. JPSA attendance seemed to us somewhat sparse—perhaps 500–600 participants. Apparently, annual meeting attendance varies quite a lot by the perceived desirability of the meeting's location.

All in all, it was a rewarding experience, and for John, for whom this was a first trip to Japan, a unique one. He was inspired to turn his sights to Japanese constitutionalism, and even has the long plane ride to thank for putting him in close contact with a financial backer for a future conference on the subject. We think the intellectual aspects of the exchange might be enhanced if the Japanese side invited guests working on similar topics and matched them with similar papers from the Japanese side. For Japanese delegates to APSA, who are expected to participate fully in English in whichever panel they are assigned, this is hardly necessary. As political scientists, we can appreciate the effects of American political power on global language usage.