Public History in Japan

Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. He has written numerous books on Japanese history, including A Modern History of Japan (Nihon no 200 nen). He is completing a book on the curation of industrial heritage in 20th and 21st century Japan.

Michihiro Okamoto, Emeritus Professor at Toyo University. He organized the Japanese Association of Public History and became its president in 2024-2025. His main works in Japanese are Past and Histories (2018) and In between Micro History and Big History (2022). He co-edited Western Historiography in Asia: Circulation, Critique and Comparison, De Gruyter (2022)

Tetsuya (Ted) Motohashi is Professor of Cultural Studies at Tokyo University of Economics. He received his D.Phil. in Literature from York University. He is the Japan Section’s president of the International Association of Theatre Critics. His publications include books on theatre, cultural studies, and Japanese translations of Bhabha, Spivak, Butler, and Chomsky.

Akira Ide is a professor at Institute of Liberal Arts and Science, Kanazawa University. He received Ph.D. in Informatics from Kyoto University. His main research theme is dark tourism. He has led the Japanese academic scene of dark tourism and investigates the sites of dark tourism all over the world.

Emi Tozawa is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. Her research interests include the global consumption of Japanese history through historical fiction, particularly since the 1960s, and sensory connections with the past through walking tours and museums. She has published journal articles in both English and Japanese for International Public History and Shiso.

Makoto Goto, Associate Professor at the National Museum of Japanese History (Rekihaku), applies information science to analyze, preserve, and share historical materials. He develops digital methods for encoding and analyzing premodern Japanese texts. As PI of Establishing the Digital History, he leads an open-access platform to engage various stakeholders.

Noriko Ijichi, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University. Vice Director of the Osaka Korea Town Museum. She conducts research on mobility and transformations in the everyday life, with a focus on the Korean region.

Miho Hayashi is Associate Professor at the Center for Fundamental Education, Okayama University of Science. She received her Ph.D. in Literature from Nara Women's University. She is also an archivist certified by the National Archives of Japan. Her majors are modern Japanese history and environmental education.

Masafumi Yokemoto is Professor of Environmental Policy at the Graduate School of Business, Osaka Metropolitan University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Hitotsubashi University. His research interests include damage compensation in environmental problems and regeneration of pollution-devastated areas.

Yumi Kamuro is an assistant professor at Kumamoto University Archives. Her research focuses on community-based archiving and photographic ethnography, especially on photographers who documented Minamata disease and the preservation of their negative film archives.