Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba, conservative commentator and columnist, is the chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union (JCU). Jay attended his first CPAC in 2011 and founded JCU in 2015 as a counterpart to the American Conservative Union (ACU). In 2017, JCU and ACU co-hosted the first-ever international CPAC in Tokyo, where experts from across the Indo-Pacific met to discuss such critical issues as the economic and military security of the region in the face of Chinese expansionism, the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, the development and regulation of the cryptocurrency market, and the state of conservatism as a political philosophy in Asia. To date, JCU and ACU have hosted four Japanese CPACs.
Chairman Aeba served as editorial supervisor for the Japanese translations of New York Times bestsellers Clinton Cash (Peter Schweitzer, 2016) and Trump’s America (Newt Gingrich, 2018). He was an adviser to then-Republican National Committee co-chair Sharon Day on Asian-American relations in 2012. Jay has served as a liaison between Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and American conservatives. He graduated in 1990 from Keio University, where he majored in constitutional law.
