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Position

Professor at Institute of Japan Studies

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Field

Media & cultural studies, tourism studies

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My main academic interest is in understanding modern Japan by looking at the ways in which the government and people talk about the past.

I completed my DPhil in 2004 on the topic of Japanese war memories. I focused particularly on the way that the media (television, newspapers, magazines, museums and so on) represent war history. This became the basis of my first book, Japan's Contested War Memories, which was published in 2007. From 2004-2018 I lived and worked in Hokkaido, during which time I developed a strong interest in how national and regional history is viewed from Japan's northern periphery. I edited two books, one about life in the border zone between Russia and Japan (co-edited with Svetlana Paichadze), and another about local war memories in Hokkaido. From around 2010, I started researching tourism, too. I am particularly interested in how local history can become a useful tourism resource, and then how tourism is boosted by works of popular culture such as television dramas. In 2017, I and three other colleagues (Takayoshi Yamamura, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada and Kyungjae Jang) published a book titled Contents Tourism in Japan. Now, my research now covers a very broad range of topics from mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century Japanese history, and explores how they are represented, consumed and contested within contemporary Japan.

My classes at TUFS are concentrated in the areas of my research. I make classes interactive and try to avoid long lectures. This helps me as a researcher because students are often wonderful sources of information regarding what I should be investigating next! In classes about war history we use debate formats to argue the pros and cons of a particular understanding of war history. In classes about tourism, we think about various tourism issues from the perspectives of travelers, tourism industry practitioners, and local/national government. All my classes really boil down to one key philosophy: whatever topic we are talking about, we must understand what the differing perspectives are, who holds these competing views, why people can think so differently about the same issue, and how these viewpoints affect day-to-day behaviour.

I moved to TUFS in April 2018 to prepare be part of the new School of Japan Studies. The School of Japan Studies will start from April 2019. I enjoy researching and teaching in area studies because it allows great flexibility of topic. We are not limited to "history" or "tourism" or "media" but can explore the connections between them, all within a multilingual environment. This is the attraction of any area studies degree (or what I prefer to call "multilingual liberal arts"). After all, we are not limited to studying Japan: we can study comparative culture or simply use texts in multiple languages to understand a particular issue. All students at TUFS are studying about other languages and cultures, so class discussions can be really interesting as the students bring so many different perspectives, and often travel abroad experience, into the classroom with them.

I have now spent over two decades living and working in Japan. I enjoy life here and have got used to calling Japan home. But, at the same time, I work hard to keep in touch with what is going on back in the United Kingdom. I may spend my professional life thinking, teaching and writing about what is happening in Japan, but by doing so I also get many insights into the country and culture that I grew up in.