Who is John Roos?

While trying to catch up on some news after a week of trying not to catch up on some news, I discovered at GlobalTalk 21 that some fellow named John Roos will (might?) be the next U.S. Ambassador to Japan. Surprising as that was to me and about everyone else, at Armchair Asia I discovered that the White House appears to be in the dark on its choice of Roos too.

The cynical would suspect that Roos' main qualification for the job---if being a U.S. Ambassador requires any qualifications---is that he got folks to fork over big globs of cash to the Obama campaign as a fundraiser.

Roos is little known among U.S. and Japanese officials, raising some doubt about his qualifications. Breitbart.com

On second thought however, one of the main duties of the U.S. Ambassador to Japan seems to be to find a way to get Japan to fork over big globs of cash for various U.S. adventures which makes him a perfectly logical, nearly ideal choice. That plus the fact that he was a Silicon Valley lawyer. If he knows next to nothing about the country, it would strengthen his qualifications even more.

Glad to see yet more "change" from the (no-longer) new administration.

John Roos '80: Lawyering to Silicon Valley's Elite