Mr. Fackler is the Tokyo Bureau Chief for the New York Times. A native of Iowa who grew up in Georgia, he was first captivated by Asia more than 20 years ago when he spent his sophomore year in college studying Mandarin and classical Chinese at Taiwan`s Tunghai University. He later did graduate work in economics at the University of Tokyo. He holds Masters degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to the New York Times, he has also worked in Tokyo for the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Associated Press, and Bloomberg News. He has worked in New York, Beijing, and Shanghai. He joined The New York Times in 2005, working first as Tokyo business correspondent before assuming his current position in 2009. He covers Japan and the Korean Peninsula.