Research Team Member, Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation "Examining Japan's Lost Decades" Book Project (Routledge, 2015)

Visiting Scholar, The University of Tokyo Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies

Visiting Scholar, Tōyō University Institute of Human Sciences

Thanks to the Waseda University Grant for Special Research Projects (category A), I was able to lay the groundwork for my next major research project, which focuses on the history of growth ideology in postwar Japan. This project aims to clarify and problematize the process by which postwar Japanese society has come to accept continual economic growth as orthodoxy, and lays out some future possibilities for questioning this powerful ideology, especially in a post-3.11 world. In March 2014, I will travel to the U.S. to meet some leading scholars in the field of post-growth studies at the University of Southern California and UCLA, as well as some local post-growth practitioners and community organizers in the Los Angeles area. I hope to begin to build a collaborative network that will serve as the basis of an international, multi-disciplinary project for which I plan to apply for a JSPS (kakenhi) grant in 2015.

Thanks to the Waseda University Grant for Special Research Projects, I was able to bring my book manuscript, "Lost and Found: Recovering Regional Identity in Imperial Japan," closer to publication. This book examines the history of regionalism and nation-state formation in modern Japan through the example of the Aizu region from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. The most important aspect of the grant was in covering the cost of indexing the manuscript, which was one of the final steps toward publication. I was able to hire a professional American indexer who was accustomed to working with English-language manuscripts on Japanese history. Without the help of this specialist, I would have had to spend an inordinate amount of time indexing the manuscript myself. Thus the grant greatly facilitated the production of the manuscript. In addition, the grant provided me with a multi-lingual computing environment that I needed in order to complete the manuscript. The grant also covered the production cost of maps and illustrations, which are helpful additions to the book. The book is scheduled to be released by Harvard University Asia Center in 2013.