28/04/2026
Alumni highlight! Takashi Kawamoto arrived at Missouri State University in 2009 with one semester of language study at Boston University behind him and very little else of the United States. He reported the first weeks were difficult — but the difficulty lifted quickly, through professors who pulled him into office-hours conversations and classmates who argued with him until he could argue back.
In his first semester at MSU, he co-authored an op-ed with Dr. Dennis Hickey — a leading voice on Taiwan and U.S.–China relations — published in China Daily. The piece reached the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations in New York, which led to a summer internship there. After graduating with a Masters of Global Studies in May 2011, this internship led directly to entry into Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The career that followed has moved across diplomacy, multilateral institutions, and the private sector: at the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Tokyo and the Consulate General in Honolulu; strategy consulting at Deloitte, where he was named Best Consultant of the Year; strategic adviser to the World Economic Forum; United Nations officer at the Office for Disaster Risk Reduction in Brussels, leading EU advocacy for the Sendai Framework; Director at Brunswick Group in Tokyo and Washington, DC, leading the firm's U.S.–Japan business and advising Fortune 500 and major Japanese corporations on cross-border M&A and crisis response; and Head of Global M&A and Corporate Strategy at Kansai Paint, a Tokyo Prime–listed industrial.
In late 2025, he founded Global Samurai Advisory, a U.S.–Japan advisory practice. Now based in Zionsville, IN with his wife Emiko (BS, Marketing, MSU) and their daughter Emma, and moving regularly between Tokyo, Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York, he advises chairs, CEOs, and founders on cross-border decisions between the two countries. He will begin his Executive MBA at Northwestern Kellogg in September 2026.
