Julian Ryall studied French, politics, international relations and economics at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the late 1980s, with a year at The University of Aix-en-Provence, in France, key to his ambition to become a foreign correspondent.
He spent much of that formative year in Eastern Europe — Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary — and was in Berlin when The Wall came down in November 1989.
He returned to the UK for a postgraduate journalism course before moving to Japan in 1992.
Julian worked for The Japan Times before returning to London in 1998 to join The Times. He chose to move back to Tokyo in 1999 and became a freelance reporter.
He has contributed to DW's coverage of the Indo-Pacific for more than a decade, reporting from North Korea, China, Myanmar, the Solomon Islands, Vietnam and elsewhere in the region.