WSJ names new Tokyo bureau chief

Wall Street Journal managing editor Gerard Baker sent out the following announcement on Friday:

We are delighted to announce that Jake Schlesinger and Peter Landers will be taking on new and senior roles in our Asia lineup.

Jake will become Senior Economics correspondent for Asia and Asia Central Banks Editor, playing a leading role in the new central banking vertical. In this new position, Jake will work with reporters and editors across the region, leading our coverage of Asian central banking and economic trends. His experience positions him well to handle ambitious projects and breaking news in this area, drawing on his years writing about the economy and economic policy in both the U.S. and Japan. Our expanded focus on central banking and macroeconomics is critically important for DJX, our new specialized real-time digital news service, and for the Journal.

Jake has served for the past four years as Japan Editor/Tokyo bureau chief, leading our reporting of everything from the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima disaster to Abenomics and rising tensions with China. A graduate of Harvard with a degree in economics, Jake joined the journal from the St. Petersburg Times in 1986. Since then, he has written about cars in Detroit, and the Fed, the economy, and presidential politics in Washington, where he was deputy bureau chief. He is the author of “Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Postwar Political Machine,” and was a member of the Journal team winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

Jake will remain in Tokyo, reporting to Asia Economics Editor Tom Wright in Hong Kong, and working with Global Central Banks Editor Nell Henderson in Washington. He starts his new role in February.

Peter Landers will become Japan Editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief, succeeding Jake. As a reporter and editor in Tokyo for more than 11 years, Peter experienced the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the Japanese economy in the 1990s. After stints at the Associated Press and the Far Eastern Economic Review, he joined the Journal’s Tokyo bureau in 1999. He returned to the U.S. in 2002 to join the health and science bureau and later edited many page-one stories as a page-one editor and deputy national editor.

He arrived in Washington just before the election of Barack Obama and has overseen D.C. coverage of a variety of subjects including justice, energy, and the challenges to the health system created by the passage of the 2010 health-care law.

Peter is a graduate of Yale and with colleagues shared the National Press Foundation’s Online Journalism Award for coverage of the Supreme Court’s health-care decision (2012) and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for international explanatory journalism for his work on the Fukushima nuclear accident. In his new role, Peter will report to Paul Beckett and will focus on taking our Japan coverage to ever-greater heights at a time when Japan is front and center in many of the biggest stories in Asia and across the world.

Please join me in congratulating Peter and Jake on their new assignments.