Contributors
Naoko Kato is Japanese language librarian at the University of British Columbia. She completed her PhD and her Master of Science in Information Studies degree at the University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral dissertation, “Through the Kaleidoscope: Uchiyama Bookstore and Sino-Japanese Visionaries in War and Peace” (2013), is a transnational history that focuses on Sino-Japanese networks surrounding a bookstore in Shanghai during the first half of the twentieth century and touches upon Pan-Asianism, Christianity, and the peace movement.
Radu Leca is a Romanian historian of art and cartography, who has studied Japanese literature and art history before engaging with the history of maps in Japan. An extended version of this article is forthcoming as Radu Leca, “Maps of the World in Early Modern Japan,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
M. William Steele is Professor Emeritus at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. He specializes in the social and cultural history of Japan in the late nineteenth century. He is author of Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History (2003). His recent publications focus on mobility and environmental issues, including the role played by natural disasters in modernizing Japan.
Gregory Smits is Professor of History and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. His research includes East Asian intellectual history, the history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan, and the history of Ryukyu (present-day Okinawa Prefecture and parts of Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan).
Kanaya Masataka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Architecture in the Graduate School of Engineering and Design at Hōsei University in Tokyo, Japan. He specializes in the modern architectural and urban history of Tokyo, and is researching the repurposing of former warrior compounds into cultivated fields in the early Meiji Period, early Meiji urban dairy farming and agriculture, and changes to the urban core and suburbs of Tokyo under Shokusan Kōgyō policies.
Tristan R. Grunow is Assistant Professor without Review in the History Department at UBC. Previously, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. He is currently completing a manuscript charting the transformation of Tokyo under the processes of Japanese state-formation and empire-building.
Benjamin Bryce is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Northern British Columbia. He received his PhD and MA from York University (2013, 2008) and his BA from the University of British Columbia (2005). His research focuses on migration, education, and religion in Canada and Argentina. He is the author of To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society (Stanford University Press, 2018). He is also the co-editor of Making Citizens in Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017 and Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada (University Press of Florida, 2015).
Allen Hockley received a BA from the University of Victoria, an MA from UBC, and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He currently holds a joint appointment in the Department of Art History and the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College. His research interests include Japanese prints and illustrated books of seventeenth through twentieth centuries and early Japanese photography.
Joshua S. Mostow is a Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC. In addition to his study of the reception of HNIS, he is also author of Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation. Japanese Visual Culture 12 (Brill, 2014).
Miriam Wattles is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. She has worked on a range of topics in Japanese visual culture from the Edo through the early Shōwa periods. Her present book project concerns the little-known transition from giga to manga from 1870-1930. The gendered history of textiles and garments in Japan during the long twentieth century is a new scholarly interest of hers.
Ayako Yoshimura works as Japanese Studies Librarian at the University of Chicago Library. She earned a Ph.D. in folklore at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her dissertation—entitled “An Autoethnography of Kin-aesthetics: Retrieving Family Folklore Through the Wearing of Used Kimonos” (2015)—investigated what it means for a contemporary Japanese woman to wear kimonos, especially inherited ones. While continuing her kimono research, she offers university lectures and public talks on both folklore and kimono culture.
Dr. Yukari Takai is a professor at the Department of History at the University of Windsor and a Faculty Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) at York University in Canada. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, she completed her PhD in history at the Université de Montréal in Canada. She is a historian of North America and Asia specialized in issues of migration, women and gender, border and borderlands. A former Fulbright Research Fellow at Columbia University in New York, Takai is the author of Gendered Passages: French-Canadian Migration to Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900-1920 (2008). Currently, she is completing a book on Japanese transmigration across the Pacific and across the Canada-U.S. border during the Exclusion Era (1882-1941). She is also conducting a new project on the gender and social relations of Japanese in Hawai‘i in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Dr. Takai is a recipient of grants and fellowships from several organizations, including, among others, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Japan-U.S. Educational Commission (Fulbright Japan).
Eiji Okawa is a social historian specializing in medieval and early modern Japan as well as Japanese diaspora in early to mid twentieth century Canada. He is interested in religious and social institutions, and how people relate to cultural landscapes and organize their society by managing or overcoming conflicts and tensions. He completed his doctoral degree in Japanese history at the University of British Columbia in 2016. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow with Landscapes of Injustice as well as University of Victoria’s history department. Landscapes is a collaborative project on the dispossession of Japanese-Canadian properties by the state during the 1940s.
Ayaka Yoshimizu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and an instructor at the Department of Mass Communication at Columbia College. She completed her PhD in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her areas of interest include transpacific studies, cultural memory, women’s transnational migration, postcolonialism, and critical and creative methodologies. Her postdoctoral project is concerned with cultural memories of Japanese women who engaged in sex work in North America at the turn of the 20th century. She examines different ways in which their experiences are memorialized today through literary, cinematic and other creative forms in Japan, Canada and the United States, and explores alternative ways to engage this history through her critical archival research.
