About the Consulate General

Patrick Joseph Linehan
United States Consul General, Osaka-Kobe

Patrick Joseph Linehan was raised in the Boston area and graduated from the public schools in Tempe, Arizona. He earned a BA in Political Science and Russian at Arizona State University (1974) and an MA in Political Science and Finnish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1977). He then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki (1979-1980). In 1984 he joined the U.S. Foreign Service and specialized in public diplomacy. In addition to postings in Washington, he has been posted abroad in Finland, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Canada. He speaks Japanese, Korean and Portuguese. Mr. Linehan is a member of the Career Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Minister-Counselor. He took up his duties as Consul General in Osaka-Kobe, Japan in August 2011.

Mr. Linehan first came to Japan in 1988 when he studied Japanese at the Department of State's Japanese Language Institute in Yokohama. From 1989-1993 he served as the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Sapporo. He then worked in Washington in the East Asia Bureau where he was in charge of public affairs programs for Japan. In 1999 he returned to Japan for a four year assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo as Embassy Spokesman. In his free time Mr. Linehan enjoys learning about Japanese food and nihonshu, singing karaoke especially "enka," watching Ozu films and Tora-san films, and enjoying the Boston Red Sox, Japanese baseball and sumo.

Mr. Linehan is married to Emerson Kanegusuke, originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Mr. Kanegusuke served in the Brazilian Air Force for seven years where he was an Air Traffic Controller. He holds a BS in Computer Studies from the University of Maryland, and is currently working on an advanced degree in the Global MBA Program at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Mr. Linehan and Mr. Kanegusuke live in Nishinomiya, Japan. They have two beagles.