Professional Biography

Teaching:
My courses introduce students to the particularities of Japanese history while challenging them to think closely about the process of reading and writing history in general. Whether we examine courtier culture in the eleventh century or women's movements in the twentieth, I encourage students to reflect on the assumptions, techniques, and purposes involved when telling stories about the past. The courses introduce a wide range of materials, including history texts, novels, artwork, philosophical treatises, memoirs, and films.
Research:
My research focuses primarily on modern Japan and is driven by a fundamental yet complex question: How do people build and maintain connections to the past in the midst of radical change? In my first book, Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan (2006), I address this broad question by examining how Japanese coped with a brutally specific one: What to do with the dead? Dealing with this chronic problem generally meant relying on ancestral solutions, which took the form of death rites that had developed over the centuries to build continuity in the face of loss. Precisely because these practices were designed to create continuity -- between past and present, present and future -- examining the efforts of various interest groups in imperial Japan to preserve, abandon, or reinvent them proved to be a fruitful way to trace how those living in a time of rapid institutional and social change struggled to find stability in a world that seemed to have very little of it. The question "What to do with the past?" haunts Modern Passings from start to finish, informing such topics as the reworking of cremation from a minority religious practice into a mandated public health measure, the expulsion of temple graveyards from city centers, and the evolution of funeral professionals from suppliers of ritual paraphernalia into purveyors of ritual knowledge. The book explains how these and other changes related to similar developments throughout the industrializing world yet culminated in a "way of death" specific to Japan.
At present I am writing Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, a comprehensive "biography" of Mt. Fuji that explores the dynamic and contradiction-filled relationship between the volcano as a physical product of nonhuman forces and a cultural icon shaped by all-too-human hopes and desires. It is the dissonance between the two Fujis, material and imagined, that most seizes my interest. Fuji is often portrayed as stable, peaceful, and even timeless, but it is a relatively young volcano that has erupted many times in the past (most recently in 1707) and will probably do so again. It is one of Japan's most powerful symbols of national unity, yet competition over its economic benefits has generated centuries of conflict between people living at its base. Finally, it is an icon of "Nature," but mainly as a consequence of its fame, is heavily trafficked and environmentally degraded. My goal is not merely to point out these incongruities, but to examine how Fuji as a physical place and an imagined object mutually constituted one another in response to shifting material, social, and ideological conditions.
Life Experiences:
I was born in Manhattan and raised in White Plains, New York. I began to learn Japanese in my sophomore year of college and spent my junior year bewildered in Kyoto. After graduation, I passed several years in Tokyo working as a correspondent for a financial news wire. Deciding that I would rather not spend my days writing about dollar-yen fluctuations, I returned to the U.S. and started graduate school in 1992. I have been a member of the Lewis and Clark History Department since the fall of 1999. In my free time I like to hike, cross-country ski, play tennis, and cook.