By William W. Kelly, Yale University David Plath, one of our preeminent anthropologists of Japan, passed away peacefully from illness on November 4, 2022, at age 91. In a long engagement with Japan that stretched over seven decades, he was an ethnographer of deeply humanist intentions, a craftsman of precise and stylish writing, an innovative […]
The Association for Asian Studies and the Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) are grateful to Sumie Jones, Professor Emerita at Indiana University and an AAS member for more than 45 years, for providing the resources, leadership, and inspiration for the establishment of the Sumie Jones Prize for Project Leadership in Japan-centered Humanities. The mission of the […]
Mark Ross Bookman, historian and activist, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on December 16, 2022, in his apartment in Tokyo. His passing creates an enormous gap in the Japanese studies and disability academic and activist communities. Mark was born on April 20, 1991, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, sixteen weeks prematurely. He was diagnosed with a […]
Deadline: January 18, 2023 February 1, 2023 The Japan-US Friendship Commission (JUSFC) has awarded the AAS $5,000 to support the AAS 2023 Annual Conference attendance of up to 5 graduate students in Japan Studies. The aim is to increase the presence and participation of racial and ethnic minorities as well as LGBTQ+ students, students with […]
Nozomi Naoi is Associate Professor of Humanities (Art History) at Yale-NUS College and author of Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth Century Japan, published by University of Washington Press and received Honorable Mention of the 2022 AAS John Whitney Hall Prize. See a media gallery to accompany the book at Art History Publication Initiative. […]
Anne Prescott is Director of the Five College Center for East Asian Studies in Massachusetts and one of four authors (the others are John Frank, Arlene Kowal, and Yurika Kurakata) of Walking the Tōkaidō: A Multi-Disciplinary Experience in History and Culture, an online curriculum created for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia at the […]
Adriana Boscaro, Professor Emerita of Japanese and longtime director of the Department of Oriental Studies at the University Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy, died August 21, 2022 at her home in Venice. She was 87 years old. Professor Boscaro was a major figure in the field of Japanese studies in Italy and a scholar known internationally […]
By W. Puck Brecher We are pleased to share this excerpt adapted from the newest Asia Shorts volume, Animal Care in Japanese Tradition: A Short History, by W. Puck Brecher (Washington State University). In this book, Brecher offers a brief overview of animals in Japanese culture and society from ancient times to the 1950s. Brecher […]
Interviewed for #AsiaNow by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham When two blue-and-ivory “dumpling-nose” engines departed from Tokyo and Osaka train stations and started racing toward each other at 6:00am on October 1, 1964, the world’s fastest train officially became a reality. Japan’s bullet trains took the old-fashioned railroad industry and updated it with new technology and a […]
Barbara Sato (née Wool) came to Asian Studies with little or no Asia in her personal background. However, as a high school student she was chosen to go to Japan under the auspices of the American Field Service, perhaps one of the last cohorts to actually make the journey by ship across the Pacific. This […]
By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham Discussions of how to address climate change frequently note that one of the most important factors will be breaking China’s “addiction” to coal. Coal-fired power plants have provided electricity to the country’s manufacturing sector and growing cities for decades, while at the same time creating toxic air pollution and carbon dioxide […]
Minamata (Andrew Levitas, director, 2020; Sakamoto Ryūichi, music; Benoît Delhomme, cinematography) Inspired by true events in Minamata, Japan, where the Chisso chemical factory poisoned residents by dumping mercury into the sea from 1932 to 1968, Andrew Levitas’ film shows Minamata through the eyes of the great photojournalist W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Smith, who move […]
The Hamako Ito Chaplin Memorial Award Committee is pleased to announce that Dr. Jeff Peterson (Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese, Brigham Young University) is the recipient of the 2022 Hamako Ito Chaplin Memorial Award for Excellence in Japanese Language Teaching. Dr. Peterson has a background in Japanese language pedagogy and linguistics. He has taught Japanese […]
Tom Le is Assistant Professor of Politics at Pomona College and has been a member of the AAS since 2015. A political scientist, Le’s work covers Japan and East Asia more broadly. Why did you join AAS and why would you recommend AAS to your colleagues? I joined AAS to engage with scholars outside of […]
By Paula R. Curtis Since at least the 2008 economic collapse, scholars of all academic disciplines have been anxious about what the future holds for their fields of study. Even before the global pandemic of 2020-2021 exacerbated those concerns, large organizations like the American Historical Association showcased alarming data on the precipitous decline in academic […]
By Vivian Li In 2019, I was generously awarded a Japan Research Travel Grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. The purpose of this funding was to conduct final research in preparation for the exhibition Kimono Couture: The Beauty of Chiso, scheduled to open […]
AAS Member Dennis Frost is Wen Chao Chen Associate Professor of East Asian Social Sciences in Kalamazoo College’s Department of History and East Asian Studies. Frost is also author of More Than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2021). In this book, Frost narrates the development […]
Tatiana Linkhoeva is assistant professor in the Department of History at New York University and has been a member of AAS since 2013. Follow her on Twitter @linkhoeva. What is your discipline and country (or countries) of interest? I received my PhD in History, although my MA and BA were in Philosophy. As a historian […]
By Paula R. Curtis Is Japanese Studies facing a crisis? There have been energetic discussions about the current status and future of Japanese Studies, amplified in no small part by the roundtable “The Death of Japan Studies” at the 2019 Association for Asian Studies conference in Denver. Speakers considered various influences on the field, from […]
Maren Ehlers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan, published by Harvard University Asia Center and winner of an Honorable Mention for the 2020 AAS John Whitney Hall Book Prize. To begin with, […]
