Reading Room
Books, published research, lectures, and public writing, grouped by the questions they pursue rather than by the year they appeared.
Youth, Deviance, and the Policing of Social Order
How postwar institutions sorted the young into categories — delinquent, radical, worker, consumer — and what those categories were built to do.
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Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation
The state, employers, and unions each tried to organise young Japanese into a political constituency they could speak for. The generation that resulted did not hold together, and the book follows the seams along which it split.
Cornell University Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 2021. Best Book Award, SOAS Research and Knowledge Exchange Prizes, 2022. Japanese edition, 『日本の冷戦世代——青年政治意識の形成と分裂』, University of Tokyo Press, 2026, translated with Nishida Masayuki.
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Engines of Deviance: Newspapers, Traffic Cops, and Youth Rebellion in 1970s Japan
Traffic police and the daily press converted motorcycling teenagers into a governable category of delinquency, and the category did its work well before anyone had measured what the young were actually doing.
Special issue “Governing Deviance in Japan,” ed. Gabriele Vogt and David Chiavacci. International Journal of Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2026. DOI: 10.1017/S1479591426100680
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Recruiting Japanese Youth: The Rise of Dark Part-Time Jobs
Yakuza recruitment moved from the waiting room to the job board, and the documents collected for verification — My Number cards, driving licences — became the instrument that held recruits in place. What survived the move intact was disposability: 2017’s expendable junior is the 2020s’ 使い捨て要員.
Japanese Modernity, Substack, 17 October 2025.
Labour, Gender, and the Cold War Order
Wage-earning women, male-dominated unions, and American labour diplomacy — the occupation as an apparatus that assigned people to organisational slots and then defended the assignment.
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Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan
Postwar unions claimed to speak for working women while organising them into a category that could be represented without being heard. The book reads that arrangement from the shop floor upward.
Harvard University Press, Harvard East Asian Monographs 321, 2009. Second Prize, European Association for Japanese Studies Book Award, 2011.
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The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor’s Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan
Strike propaganda at the Tōhō studios in 1948 rallied the nation through a gendered iconography — the pan-pan girl, the fat capitalist, the endangered 民族 — and the anti-imperialist discourse it built subordinated, then eliminated, union roles for women.
Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (2007): 3–34. DOI: 10.1080/14672710601171392. PDF · 1.6 MB
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Labor’s Cold Warriors: The American Federation of Labor and “Free Trade Unionism” in Cold War Japan
The AFL’s anti-Communist campaign in Japan was both ill conceived and poorly executed, and its failure pushed American strategy toward influencing corporate managers instead — which exposes how little the interests of U.S. foreign policy and organised labour ever had in common.
The Journal of American–East Asian Relations 12, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2003): 207–224. DOI: 10.1163/187656103793645252. PDF · 943 KB
Empire, Memory, and the Afterlives of Industry
What gets transmitted as heritage, what gets withheld, and who performs the sort.
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選択的記憶と戦略的忘却：日本における歴史の商品化と産業遺産 [Selective Memory and Strategic Forgetting: The Commodification of History and Industrial Heritage in Japan]
Industrial heritage sites perform a prior sort on the imperial past, separating what can be rendered as attraction from what must be left unsaid, and the sort happens before any visitor arrives.
『東洋文化研究所紀要』第186冊 [Bulletin of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, vol. 186], 2024.
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History and Memory — a five-part series
Historical memory operates as institutional infrastructure in East Asia — not sentiment but categorical apparatus, determining which political claims become legible and which remain administratively invisible. The series follows that apparatus from imperial expansion through to the heritage site.
Chapters 1–5. Japanese Modernity, Substack.
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The High Price of Hospitality
Inbound tourism policy converted a labour and infrastructure problem into a success metric: eight million foreign visitors in 2012 became thirty-two million by 2019 and a target of sixty million by 2030, while Kyoto’s bus timetables collapsed and temp workers took ten-hour shifts in record heat.
“The Social Cost of Mass Tourism: Exhaustion, Burnout, and Fatigue.” Japanese Modernity, Substack.
Maritime Asia: Ports, Commodities, Empire
Five lectures on how the sea organised the region before the nation-state claimed to.
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Lecture 01 — The Pirate Coast
Illustrated lecture slides. PDF · 1.75 MB — with companion guide, PDF · 322 KB
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Lecture 02 — The Islands Everyone Wanted
Illustrated lecture slides. PDF · 1.57 MB — with companion guide, PDF · 128 KB
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Lecture 03 — Sugar Power
Illustrated lecture slides. PDF · 1.19 MB — with companion guide, PDF · 122 KB
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Lecture 04 — Three Capitals
Illustrated lecture slides. PDF · 4.68 MB — with companion guide, PDF · 326 KB
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Lecture 05 — From Treaty Port to Global Metropolis
Illustrated lecture slides. PDF · 3.00 MB — with companion guide, PDF · 203 KB
The Machinery of History-Writing
Archives, periodisation, and now retrieval systems — the apparatus that decides what a historian can find before the historian starts looking.
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Writing Against the Machine: Computational Authorship and Historical Writing
Generative systems produce prose that reproduces the surface forms of historical writing while bypassing the compositional labour those forms were evidence of — which makes machine authorship a problem of disciplinary accountability rather than of disclosure.
History, journal of the Historical Association of the United Kingdom, 111, no. 396 (2026): 442–459. Published 19 February 2026. DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.70092
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Beyond the Bubble, Beyond Fukushima: Reconsidering the History of Postwar Japan
Written with Timothy S. George, against the periodisation that had made 1989 and 2011 the hinges of postwar Japanese history, and against the myths of failure and success each hinge was built to carry.
With Timothy S. George. Asia-Pacific Journal 12, no. 8 (February 2014): e3. DOI: 10.1017/S1557466014027454
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大原社研アーカイブと社会史研究 [The Ohara Institute of Social Research Archive and Social History Research]
What the Ohara collection makes findable, and how that has quietly organised what Japanese social history has been able to argue.
『大原社会問題研究所雑誌』591号 [Journal of the Ohara Institute of Social Research, no. 591], February 2008, 10–14.
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Theorizing History
Halbwachs’s social frameworks, Nora’s shift from lived memory environments to constructed sites, Hirsch’s postmemory and Morris-Suzuki’s three forms of implication, assembled into a working answer to a practical question: what a historian owes a past they did not live through.
“How do societies remember? And what responsibilities do we bear toward pasts we did not experience?” Japanese Modernity, Substack, 30 January 2026. Also chapter 2 of the History and Memory series.
