Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the Paralympic Movement in Japan and its influence on perceptions of the disabled.

Offering the first comprehensive examination of the history of the Paralympic Movement outside a Euro-American context, this project traces the evolution of discourse and practice related to sports for the disabled in Japan, arguing that such sports have played a critical and overlooked role in shaping Japanese approaches to disability. I frame my analysis around five international sporting events held in Japan for athletes with disabilities. Beginning with Japan's initial encounters with the Paralympic Movement in the 1960s and concluding with Tokyo's current preparations to host the 2020 Paralympic Games, this study demonstrates how such events have affected disability-related policies and perceptions both on and beyond the playing field. By examining the impact of these five events in Japan, my work highlights the historically and culturally contingent nature of disability and explains why sporting events have proven a mixed blessing for individuals with disabilities.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on Japan's rise as a donor of development aid on the Asian continent, covering the time from its pre-World War II empire to 1989.

My project examines the history of Japan's overseas development system in Asia from its origins in Japan's colonial rule over much of Asia before 1945 to its rise into the world's leading aid donor by the Cold War's end in 1989. By analyzing how Japan’s international development system evolved at major project sites in East and Southeast Asia, I examine how Japan projected economic and political power as a US Cold War ally through overseas development based on its earlier colonial legacies and networks in Asia. Challenging a Western-focused narrative of the Cold War, I examine the concrete flows of capital, ideas, people, and technology at specific Japanese infrastructure projects throughout Asia, thereby highlighting how regional dynamics and exchanges within Asia over the trans-war era dynamically shaped the Cold War.

Research leading to publication of two peer-reviewed articles and a book on populism in Japanese politics of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Populism is on the rise across the globe. In reaction, scholars are hard at work to develop our understanding of populism. However, Japan has been ignored in the process of concept formation and in investigating causal relationships with populism. This impoverishes our conceptual development and theory building, and at the same time potentially diminishes our understanding of Japanese political phenomena. With the first English-language book on populism in Japan, this project seeks to incorporate the study of Japan into broader discussions to mutual benefit.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the role Japanese imperial administrators in the 1930s played in shaping modern Chinese policies on environmental engineering and ethnic minorities.

This project examines how and why imperial Japan demarcated the nomadic borderlands between Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the 1930s. This mottled landscape of pastoral and agrarian livelihoods posed fundamental problems around governance and legibility for Japanese authorities after they invaded Northeast China in 1931. Japanese planners collaborated with Mongol elites to pursue radical solutions in ethnic cleansing and environmental engineering in order to draw an internal border in this zone of mixed settlement. This border continues to define the eastern limits of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region today. This study therefore offers an alternate understanding to the beginnings of the multiethnic framework of the People’s Republic. Instead of only seeing the origins of Communist rule as forged in the fires war against imperialism, this project points to the significance of Japan in shaping the ethnic and ecological bounds of modern China.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the social history of the Japanese city of Edo (now Tokyo) and its place in the world, based on the surviving handwritten letters of an ordinary nineteenth-century Japanese woman.  

This project uses the history of an ordinary Japanese woman to reconsider the social history of Edo from the perspective of a rural migrant to the city. Aimed at a general audience, it introduces readers outside the field to the history of the city and the position of Japan in the world during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Research and writing leading to a book on how mental health professionals and other researchers understood the psychological consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This project examines the way mental health professionals in Japan, as well as those who studied hibakusha in the West, tackled the long term psychological consequences of the bomb. It places the various responses and clinical approaches taken in the stricken cities within the context of the larger history of trauma in Japan and elsewhere as well as the bigger historical responses of medicine to the threat and reality of nuclear weapons, tests and accidents. Coming out of a chapter I wrote for the Hiroshima book, this project looks, first, at how the A-bomb was understood within Japanese mental health circles and what these responses meant for the history of the survivor and peace movement in Hiroshima, especially in terms of the struggle for compensation and medical recognition in the fifties. Second, I examine the way mental health professionals planned to handle psychiatric effects in the event of a future nuclear attack and the connection of these studies with the history of trauma.

Research and writing leading to a book on the history of the typewriter in Japan.

Today, writing is undergoing revolutionary transformations. Letters are increasingly rare while emails, posts, and tweets are growing more common; writing is de-territorialized, produced anywhere in the world including by non-human bots; and the consumption of written texts is often supplanted by other media like video. This project suggests that the improbable success of the Chinese-character typewriter in Japan can help us understand the current transformations in writing. It argues that the Chinese-character typewriter in Japan was successful not because it made writing faster but because it transformed the production, consumption, and circulation of written texts, bringing women into the office, redefining literacy, and enabling the circulation of multiple carbon copies of a document.

Research and writing leading to a book on the history of programs to break up big business during the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-52.

I propose to complete the research and most of the writing for a book on programs to break up big business in occupied Japan and the legacies of those programs for the Japanese corporate world. I am particularly interested in complicating conventional interpretations, for example, that an early reform phase gave way after 1947-1948 to a recovery phase; in highlighting Japanese agency in modifying—and not just resisting and delaying—Occupation orders; and in challenging the common tendency to minimize the long-term significance of Occupation reforms for Japanese business in the decades that followed. Besides historians of modern Japan, this work will be of interest to scholars who work on U.S. foreign policy and international relations, on contemporary Japanese business, and, from a comparative perspective, on U.S. military occupations abroad and on business competition and cooperation or collusion.

Research and writing leading to a book on the role of social media in encouraging civic engagement in Japan, focused on the experiences of resident Koreans in the Osaka area. 

Following the student protests of the 1960s, many believed that public demonstrations had become stigmatized and that Japanese youth, who had no first-hand experience of the war, had grown apathetic to politics. My project analyzes how social media has opened up new avenues for civic engagement in Japan. In particular, I examine how a group of “zainichi” Korean activists were able to use social media to mobilize a counter-movement—bringing together a broad coalition of left-wing activists, LGBT minorities, human rights lawyers, and ordinary Japanese citizens—to block hate rallies from entering their community. By challenging prevailing assumptions that social media movements lack organizational cohesion, I stress how space continues to be important in Internet politics by showing how the Korean ghetto became an important site of politicization, turning haphazard supporters into committed activists.

Research and writing leading to a book comparing the factors that shape cybersecurity policy in Japan and the United States.

Why are some governments better able to adopt and implement cybersecurity policies than others? Despite facing similar challenges, states’ effectiveness in meeting these threats varies. The increasing reliance of governments, firms, and societies on information and communications technology (ICT) makes this a pressing concern for both scholars and policymakers. Yet, there has been surprisingly little work in the social sciences on what governments are doing to improve cybersecurity. This project will address this oversight by advancing our understanding of what determines the policies governments use to reduce the vulnerability of their countries to cyber threats by comparing Japan to a country with a very different approach, the United States. In particular, it looks at the ways in which cybersecurity policy is shaped through the interaction between a common international community of cybersecurity experts and the unique bureaucratic organizations in each country.

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on how the U.S. military presence in Japan and Okinawa during the Occupation (1945-52) and the Korean War (1950-53) affected the daily lives of residents in Japanese base towns. 

This project shows how the U.S. military presence in Japan and Okinawa during the Occupation and the Korean War shaped the everyday lives of the residents of Japan’s postwar base towns. By examining the fundamental effects that the U.S. military had on local communities—the routine prosecution of Japanese citizens by U.S. military courts, the regular commission of crimes by U.S. soldiers, the military employment of Japanese workers, and the military procurement of Japanese supplies and buildings, among others—I show how many Japanese experienced the Occupation as a concrete project that directly impacted their daily lives. By viewing the Occupation as a military project, my research substantially revises existing understandings of the Occupation and uncovers deep links between the Occupation and the Korean War. An accurate understanding of this militarization of postwar Japanese life is vital for addressing some of the most pressing issues in contemporary U.S.–Japanese relations.

Research and writing leading to a book on Japan's construction and popularization of a culture of hygiene, based on its responses to public health crises from 1858 to 2020. 

My book project, "From Cholera to COVID-19," examines the Japanese responses to public health crises from 1858 to 2020 through an examination of the construction and popularization of a culture of hygiene, from government administrative policies to the social and material practices experienced on the ground and in local communities. The policy-relevant message is that Japan achieved disease prevention without nation-wide sewer systems (which were built later in the 1970s) and its conclusions promise to inform the ongoing challenge of how to deliver health and sanitation to one-quarter of the world’s population that does not have access to flush-toilets, sewer systems or daily sanitation facilities. It is a case study of how policy, education, and the medical marketplace were aligned to create hygienic modernity and will serve as the first English-language book to examine the history of Japanese hygiene from a medical, environmental, and material-culture perspective.

Research and writing leading to a book on how non-central state actors respond to Japan's migration policy as they attempt to ensure a sufficient number of care workers for Japan's aging population. 

I will write a book that unmasks Japanese migration governance outside the national state, by asking how non-central-state actors—such as subnational governments, private businesses, vocational schools, nongovernmental organizations, and foreign governments—are using migration regulations and educational policies to ensure a care work force for Japan’s aging population. The study demonstrates that public and private actors outside the national arena in Japan advocate for national policy changes, manipulate national policies to their advantage, and establish transnational migration conduits with entities in other countries, with implications for the health systems of migrants’ origin countries. To do this, the book uses findings from comparative research on eight prefectures, case studies of recent transnational innovations by subnational public and private actors in Japan, and comparative analysis of conditions in Asian source countries.

This project seeks to understand how Japanese labor standards came to be transformed between the mid-1880s and the mid-1930s, and the extent to which these changes actually improved the welfare of working Japanese. Japan's experience, in particular, can be a laboratory within which competing claims about the relative efficacy of ILO (International Labor Organization) dialogue versus international trade sanctions can be explored.

This project maps the shifting shape of the Nagano highlands across Japan’s twentieth century, in the national as well as the local imagination. Focusing on the core genres through which knowledge of Japanese regions has been transmitted—maps, museums, textbooks, and tourist literature—the study highlights three tensions in this archive: between the insider’s idiom of native place (kyodo) and the outsider’s trope of landscape (fukei); between the competing ways in which Nagano has been located in the nation, Asia, and the world over time; and between the anti-political quality of most regional rhetoric and the ideological work that this genre has historically performed.

“Aristocratic Connections: Creating Imperial Japan, 1869-1900” examines the newly expanded aristocracy of the Meiji period as a key player in the creation of modern Japan. By focusing on the aristocracy as a political tool of the Meiji oligarchs, as a contested symbol of imperial identity, and as a mediating structure between regional elites and metropolitan leaders, this project addresses the key issues of political centralization, social restructuring, and increased identification with the emperor in the Meiji era. Drawing upon qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, the project will produce an historical monograph and a relational database of Meiji-era people and organizations that will be made available to other scholars.

I explore how Japan's transition from a decentralized to an increasingly centralized government altered technical and social responses to widespread flood risk. I examine how local, prefecture and national organizations used old and new technologies along with policy to ameliorate natural hazard risks emphasizing the case of Niigata Prefecture. I explore 1) conditions of successful technology transfer and domestic diffusion (e.g., technological adaptations to accommodate new socio-cultural/political contexts), 2) how users select/modify the technologies they employ and 3) how social policy, e.g., zoning, complements technological solutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. Japan's experience offers insights into social and environmental opportunities/risks faced by developing societies today as they become more integrated and are governed by more powerful governments that undertake riparian projects for social benefit, international prestige, and to enhance their self-image as "modern."

Has Japan's dream of taking regional leadership ended with its economic downturn and the rise of China? After more than a century of mixed results, it may appear that Japan has given up and retreated. I argue that this is not the case. To the contrary, the Japanese government is more interested than ever in engaging in East Asia, especially in the form of building regional economic institutions. My book, "Fragmented Regionalism," will be the first to examine in depth Japan's emerging strategy to influence the "regional economic architectures" of East Asia. These regional architectures include free trade agreements, and funding and currency cooperation, which are crucial to securing East Asia's continued stability and prosperity. By focusing on Japan's initiatives in building institutions in these areas, my book examines the sources of Japan's policy priorities, the implications of those priorities on the regional economy, and the future of Japan's leadership in the region.

The burakumin, an "invisible" Japanese minority, present a paradox about Japanese identity, with implications for the study of stigmatized identities more generally. My longitudinal project examines how youth learn of their buraku background, and explores the negotiation of identity from youth to adulthood. The first completed stage, based on interviews with 40 youth, examined the role of school and community in shaping a buraku identity. In the second stage of research, I will resume interviews with the 40 informants (now in their early 20s) and pay particular attention to issues surrounding marriage and employment, where previous research suggests discrimination is at its most severe. I will use the remaining time to complete the book manuscript. Providing a study of how minorities manage a stigmatized identity over time broadens the audience of the work beyond Japanese studies to a wider social science audience.

Discourse in Japan on suicide prevention has focused almost exclusively on the state of the Japanese economy and mental illness. Increasing evidence suggests that a lack of positive mental health may be more important than the presence of mental illness in predicting future suicide attempts, and also that treatment of mental illness alone may not address the lack of psychological and social well-being implicated in suicidality. This book project intends to mend the current gap in our understanding of suicide and its prevention by making several contributions: it will provide accounts of subjective experience currently lacking in the study of suicide in Japan; it will provide a culturally-situated account of positive mental health in Japan by employing ethnographic methods alongside survey data; and it will critically assess the potential of traditional Japanese practices to bolster positive mental health and thereby play a role in suicide prevention.

The early twentieth century was a critical moment in the production of social knowledge in Japan as elsewhere. Scholars, government leaders, activists, and journalists created the core categories, institutional foundations, and circuits of production and exchange that would shape the study of society for decades to come. The rise of sociology closely tracked the emergence of "social problems" as a central political concern. Early concepts of "society" were linked to "social problems," and both became a code for fault lines in Japanese politics and society. My book project, Sociology and "Social Problems" in Prewar Japan, argues that interlinked intellectual and social developments within three sites of knowledge production—the academy, government bureaucracy, and social movements—profoundly shaped ideas about society and their political impact. Based on primary research conducted in Japan during 2010-11, this proposal seeks support for write-up of the book manuscript.

The Fukushima nuclear crisis has inspired the largest citizens' movement in Japan since the 1960s. Based on fieldwork and musico-textual analyses, my monograph-in-progress examines how musicians are communicating the antinuclear message. Eyerman and Jamison have observed that social movements engage music from the past. I take this observation a step further by proposing a typology of intertextuality—a recurrent feature of Japanese antinuclear songs, which incorporate music from past movements and quote recent announcements. I examine the role of music in different venues—demonstrations, cyberspace, festivals, and recordings—and the evolution of sound demonstrations with the stage of the movement. I consider the range of roles taken by musicians, who see themselves as ordinary citizens rather than representatives of their fans (cf Street). Drawing from ethnography, musical analysis, sound studies, and literary theory, I consider how music communicates messages in contentious politics.

This project uses the Japanese experience to uncover and explain which environmental advocacy strategies are the most successful in generating pro-environmental behavior change among governments, businesses, and individuals. The study combines the quantitative analysis of two original large-n datasets of environmental organizations and events with qualitative case studies of environmental politics in Japan, the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea. It finds that the strategies that have been most effective in Japan and East Asia are also the most common and effective environmental advocacy strategies around the world although they have gained less academic attention than the strategies more prevalent in North American and Western Europe. The work will be a contribution to Japanese studies, comparative politics, and environmental studies, demonstrating how Japan can be a starting place for new theories and understandings of environmental politics.