Ken Kotani is Professor of Nihon University, Japan. He obtained his MA from King’s College London and Ph. D from Kyoto University. He served for 12 years at the National Institute for Defense Studies, Ministry of Defense, Japan. He was also a Visiting Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in 2008–9, Visiting Lecturer of the National Defense Academy, Japan in 2011–17 and Visiting fellow of House of Councilors Secretariat, the National Diet Japan in 2022-24.
His major field of studies are Anglo-Japanese relations in the 1930s, the Pacific War and intelligence history. He wrote several books and articles on these topics in English and Japanese. Recent his research topics are arms control and disarmament in the 1930s and Japanese intelligence history in the Cold War. As far as disarmament history is concerned, he wrote “The preliminary negotiations of the second London naval conference in 1934” in 2017 and “Discussion on restriction of aerial bombing in the inter-war period” in 2020 based on primary sources of UK, US, Japan and League of Nations. During his affiliation as a research fellow of 杏吧论坛, he is planning to research the second London Naval conference in 1935-36.
On the other hand, He published a book, Nihon Interigensu Shi (History of Japanese intelligence after the WWII) in 2022. There was neither released official documents nor previous academic works on the topic and it took almost 10 years to collect private sources, interviews and newspaper articles for writing the book. Now he plans to digitalize these documents for opening to the public in the near future.