I am a historian of modern Japan with interests in democratization, technology, infrastructure, sports, and international relations. I am associate professor in the Asian Studies and History Departments and affiliated faculty of the School of International Affairs, as well as Book Review Editor for the Journal of Japanese Studies.  My current research focuses on postwar Japan to examine the ways in which institutions of daily life (such as the national railway, the public broadcaster, the police, and Parent-Teacher Associations) work to instill democratic practices and attitudes in a population.

My most recent book, Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train (Stanford University Press, 2022) was awarded the 2024 Modern Japan History Association Book Prize. It views 1960s Japan through the window of the bullet train, showing how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use to perform cultural and social functions. The multi-layered dreams surrounding this high-speed railway tell a history not only of nation-building but of resistance and disruption. Though it constituted neither a major technological leap nor a new infrastructural connection, the train enchanted, enthralled, and enraged government officials, media pundits, community activists, novelists, and filmmakers. This history of imaginations around the monumental rail system resists the commonplace story of progress to consider the tug-of-war over the significance of the new line. Is it a vision of the future or a reminder of the past, an object of international admiration or a formidable threat? Does it enable new relationships and identities or reify existing social hierarchies? Tracing the meanings assigned to high-speed rail shows how it prompted a reimagination of identity on the levels of individual, metropolis, and nation in a changing Japan.

My first book,  The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), examines the transwar development of Japanese internationalism. With a broad view of international relations that takes into account but also looks beyond the official sites of multilateral cooperation, this book uncovers a continuous evolution of internationalist thought and activity in Japan that extends across the dark valley of war and the historiographical schism of defeat. Acknowledging this continuity does not mitigate the violence and atrocities of the wartime regime. But recognizing that institutions, activities, and rhetoric that were derived from the Wilsonian internationalism of the 1920s contributed to imperialism and war, as well as to the postwar construction of a peaceful and democratic “new Japan,” does help us understand the enthusiastic participation in war and empire in the years before 1945 by many of the same people in all sectors of Japanese society who eagerly embraced postwar structures of cooperation for peace and shared prosperity.

I have also published on the information society, the Olympics, cultural diplomacy, textbooks, and the history of whaling. These topics inform my teaching, which is aimed at helping students develop a sense of the common experiences shared by diverse groups of people around the world, thus sparking intellectual curiosity about other societies, in addition to prompting them to rethink their own place in the global community.