On November 17, 2023 the Japan Society of Northern California lost one of its longest-serving Board members and a great champion of US-Japan friendship with the passing of John Thomas. John was an amazing leader of JSNC for the past quarter century and was deeply loved and respected by all who knew him.
He joined the JSNC board in 1997 after returning from a five-year stay in Japan as the head of JP Morgan Trust Bank, one of the first foreign banks to enter the asset management business in Japan after the industry was opened in 1985. It was a challenging assignment in a challenging business, but John prospered and at the same time developed a deep attachment, respect and affection for the people and culture of Japan. When he returned to the US and moved to the Bay Area he wanted to share that passion with everyone he met. The Japan Society of Northern California was the vehicle he chose to do that.
Soon after meeting John, he explained to me the role of the Society as a place where people who loved Japan could talk to others with a similar passion without their listeners’ eyes glazing over. It was a diverse community that shared a fascination with Japan and a strong commitment to US-Japan friendship. He explained it was also a way for him to try to repay all the kindness he had been shown in his travel and life in Japan. As a retired diplomat and business expat whose Foreign Service war stories have bored countless family members and who also benefited greatly from Japanese friends, John’s words resonated strongly with me.
John became a passionate supporter and board member of the Japan Society for more than 25 years. In his early years with the Society he focused on building out our programs in the area of corporate governance and corporate restructuring in Japan that drew on his expertise in the asset management world. It was an exciting time of deregulation and corporate reform under Prime Minister Koizumi that had US asset managers looking at the Japanese market with renewed interest.
From 2002 to 2008 John chaired the Board of Directors of the Society, our longest serving Board Chair since the end of World War II, and under his leadership the Society prospered. One highlight of those years was a highly successful 100th year anniversary celebration, which included a wonderful Board visit to Japan and a special grant from Toyota of $100,000 which funded the Society’s first financial reserve, allowing the Society to navigate later financial swings.
John made his biggest impact in the area of innovation. Not long after John Roos arrived in Japan in 2009 to become the US Ambassador, the first native San Franciscan to serve in that position, John Thomas and venture capitalist Allen Miner met him to broach the idea, cooked up with his old JP Morgan colleague Stephen Leist, of a new annual innovation program that would connect the dynamic creativity and advanced technology of Japan with the unique entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley. The Ambassador, who had spent a career as one of the top lawyers in Silicon Valley, strongly endorsed the idea and in partnership with Richard Dasher at Stanford’s US-Asia Technology Management Center, the US-Japan Innovation Program was born, with the annual US-Japan Innovation Awards Symposium at Stanford as its cornerstone. John and Richard built the program, creating the structure, marketing it to Japanese and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, finding the needed corporate sponsorship, and identifying impressive award winners which have (for the most part) stood the tests of time – including Tesla, San Bio, Line, Euglena, Bloom Energy and many others. Today the Symposium in its 14th year is the longest running program celebrating the connections between Silicon Valley and Japan and is one of the Society’s signature events.
About a decade later John spotted another opportunity for the Japan Society to expand its reach and mission, this time in the area of medical technology. Over apres ski beers at Alta in 2019, he and his friend, Jack Moorman, who headed US-Japan Medtech Frontiers that connected US medtech start-ups with Japan, decided to collaborate on programs that three years later resulted in a full partnership of the two non-profits. Today the US-Japan Healthcare Connection has become another pillar activity of the Society which expands our reach in the health care sector, substantially expands our programming in Japan and has attracted significant corporate interest. Like the Innovation Program, this initiative is a testament to John’s vision and relentless hard work.
John was also instrumental in steering the Society through challenging times. In 2015, facing declining corporate support and gaps in leadership. John and other Board members organized a comprehensive strategic review of the Society that examined mission, priorities, finance, structure, and human resources. Through that process, the Society made some important changes, in particular an increase in focus on business and technology related programming in order to become more relevant to companies.
John applied for a grant to help fund the compensation for a new President and lobbied Board members to make a special contribution to match those funds. That allowed the Society to hire a new President after a lengthy gap in leadership that John personally helped fill despite his business responsibilities. Thanks to the efforts of John and many other Board members and the tireless work of COO Miho Greenberg, the Society began to turn around in 2016, more than doubling its programming, expanding the Japanese language program and gaining back corporate sponsorships. In no small part thanks to John’s leadership, by 2022 the Society had rebuilt its reserves and was able to hire Steve Pollock, who John had earlier brought onto the Board, as full-time President, our first since 2015.
John was a man of strong character. His long-time friend and former Board member Howard Hoover points to his mid-western values, his commitment to the rule of law he inherited from his father, a judge, his obvious love of his family, and his deep attachment to Cleveland, Ohio Wesleyan University, and the Cavs and the Browns (for which we forgave him). Barbara Bundy, who also served on the Board with John for many years, recalls his generosity and humility. She called him the perfect “servant leader,” always ready to shine the light on others but never looking for recognition of his own many accomplishments over his long career.
He was a wonderful mentor for me, as I am sure he was for my successors Takahide Akiyama and Steve Pollock, and the rest of the staff. John and I spent many intense but enjoyable dinners and lunches talking through Society issues and went on countless calls to seek corporate support, especially for the Innovation Program. He was a consummate salesman, always pushing and probing to figure out how to get to “yes.” And while we worked to raise funds, he always remembered the importance of the mission – to foster friendship between America and Japan which is the bedrock of one of the most important alliances in the world.
We will miss John’s leadership, his realistic optimism, his constant support, his sense of humor, his humility, his unending fascination with Japan, and his generosity. His legacy will continue to inspire the work we do to build enduring connections between the people of the Bay Area and Japan.
With the strong support of Allen Miner, the Japan Society of Northern California is proud to honor John’s memory by instituting the Sunbridge/John Thomas Emerging Leader Award to be given at the annual US-Japan Innovation Awards Symposium and to launch a new annual lecture series – the “John Thomas US-Japan Innovation Lecture”. Through these modest steps we hope to carry on John’s memory and contributions he has made to US-Japan friendship for many years to come.
