Fumiaki Kubo is President of the National Defense Academy of Japan since 2021. He was the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of American Government and History at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, the University of Tokyo from 2003 to 2021. He is affiliated with the Keidanren Policy Research Institute as the Director of the US Studies Project as well as with the Japan Institute for International Affairs as a Senior Adjunct Fellow. He studied at Cornell University in 1984-1986, at the Johns Hopkins University in 1991-1993, and at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland in 1998-99. He was also an Invited Professor at SciencesPo in Paris in the spring of 2009 and a Japan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2014.

Kubo received his B.A. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Tokyo. He is the author of many books which include: The Japan-US Alliance of Hope: Asia-Pacific Maritime Security, The History of US-Japan Relations, A History of American Politics, Ideology and Foreign Policy After Iraq in the United States, A Study on the Infrastructure of American Politics, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1989, he received the Sakurada-Kai Gold Award for the Study of Politics and the Keio Gijuku Award. Kubo was the President of the Japanese Association for American Studies from 2016 to 2018. He bacame an Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo in 2021.