Andrew Gordon Conference Program

MODERN JAPAN FROM THE MARGINS: T H E H I D D E N , OV E R L O O K E D , A N D U N S E E N I N J A PA N ’ S P O S T - M E I J I T R A N S F O R M AT I O N S

An International Conference IN HONOR OF ANDREW D. GORDON Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

MAY 8, 2026 (FRIDAY) Tsai Auditorium S010, Japan Friends of Harvard Concourse, CGIS South Building 1730 Cambridge Street, Harvard University

The international conference Modern Japan from the Margins: The Hidden, Overlooked, and Unseen in Japan’s Post-Meiji Transformations is organized by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies with the Department of History and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

The Reischauer Institute extends its sincere thanks to Nick Kapur for his essential role in the conference planning, and to the Korea Institute, the Harvard Asia Center, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute for their generous collaboration and support.

MODERN JAPAN FROM THE MARGINS: T H E H I D D E N , OV E R L O O K E D , A N D U N S E E N I N J A PA N ’ S P O S T - M E I J I T R A N S F O R M AT I O N S

An International Conference IN HONOR OF ANDREW D. GORDON Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

PA RT I C I PA N T S :

Raja Adal, University of Pittsburgh

Konrad Lawson, University of St. Andrews

Daniel Botsman, Yale University

Ian Jared Miller, Harvard University

Jeonghun Choi, Harvard University

Hiromu Nagahara, MIT

Yuting Dong, University of Chicago

Izumi Nakayama, The University of Hong Kong

Sheldon Garon, Princeton University

Emer O’Dwyer, Oberlin College

Rustin Gates, Bradley University

Sean O’Reilly, Akita International University

Amin Ghadimi, Osaka University

Danny Orbach, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Carol Gluck, Columbia University

Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Williams College

David Howell, Harvard University

Jesus Solis, Harvard University

Sara Kang, Princeton University

Michael Thornton, Northeastern University

Nick Kapur, Rutgers University

Catherine Tsai, Yale University

Merle Kartscher, Harvard University

Taro Tsuda, Doshisha University

William Kelly, Yale University

Jun Uchida, Stanford University

Gene Kim, Harvard University

Bohao Wu, Peking University

Conference Schedule 8 : 3 0 - 9 : 0 0

C O N T I N E N TA L B R E A K FA S T

9 : 0 0 - 9 : 0 5

WELCOME REMARKS

9:05 - 10:35

PA N E L 1 – M O D E R N T R A N S F O R M AT I O N S

Chair: Izumi Nakayama, The University of Hong Kong

“Letters from an Accidental Japanologist: Gilbert Attwood and the

First Japanese Students in Boston” Hiromu Nagahara, MIT “Cinematogenic History: Unforgetting the Battle of Tsubakidai” Sean O’Reilly, Akita International University “Learning the West in a Village in Yamagata: Hori Kumatarō’s Reading of

The Principles of the Rise and Decline of Nations, c. 1897” Jeonghun Choi, Harvard University “Sharing Texts in Prewar Japan: Writing Technologies and the Reproduction of

Documents in the Mitsui Mi’ike Mine Archive, 1889-1940” Raja Adal, University of Pittsburgh 10:35 - 10:40

BREAK (5 MINUTES)

10:40 - 12:10

PA N E L 2 – T R A N S N AT I O N A L H I S TO R I E S O F I M P E R I A L J A PA N

Chair: Rustin Gates, Bradley University

“Urban Histories of Japan’s Empire: Tsuishikari, Tokyo, and the Ainu” Michael Thornton, Northeastern University “Labor and Imperial Democracy in the 1885 Ueno-Hibiya Riot” Amin Ghadimi, Osaka University “The Letters of a Japanese Woman in 1936, and Her Surprisingly International Love Life” Merle Kartscher, Harvard University “Japan and the King Crab: An International History” Gene Kim, Harvard University 12:10 - 1:00

LUNCH

1 : 0 0 - 2 : 3 0

PA N E L 3 – E M P I R E A N D A F T E R M AT H

Chair: Emer O’Dwyer, Oberlin College

“A License to Kill? The Japanese Army’s NCO Manual from 1933,

the Banditization of Warfare, and the Roots of the Nanjing Massacre” Danny Orbach, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“Neighborhoods in a Colonial Railway Town—A Spatial Analysis

of the Interaction of Chinese and Japanese in Shinkyo (1932-45)” Yuting Dong, University of Chicago “Kon Wajirō on Domestic Management and the Design of Everyday Life” Konrad M. Lawson, University of St. Andrews “Brokering the Imperial Heritage: Examining the Spread of

the Manchukuo Myth in Postwar Asia” Bohao Wu, Peking University 2 : 3 0 - 2 : 3 5 2 : 3 5 - 4 : 2 0

BREAK (5 MINUTES) PA N E L 4 – P O S T WA R F I S S U R E S

Chair: Eiko Maruko Siniawer, Williams College

“The Tragic Death of Sakai Naka: Constructing a Feminist Archive from Military Waste” Sara Kang, Princeton University “Conspiracy Reality: The 1961 Sanyū Incident and the Rebirth of the Japanese Right” Nick Kapur, Rutgers University “The Conservative Party and the Working Class: the LDP Labor Charter of 1966” Taro Tsuda, Doshisha University “The Deportation of Liu Wenqing (柳文卿): The Immigration Control Act and

the Problem of International Student Rights in Cold War Japan” Catherine Tsai, Yale University “Atomic Autographs: Dark Tourism and ‘Dark Souvenirs’ in Postwar Hiroshima” Jesus Solis, Harvard University 4 : 2 0 - 4 : 3 5

BREAK (15 MINUTES)

4 : 3 5 - 6 : 3 5 PLENARY SESSION:

ANDREW GORDON’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD OF M O D E R N J A P A N E S E H I S T O R Y

Chair: Jun Uchida, Stanford University Daniel Botsman, Yale University Sheldon Garon, Princeton University Carol Gluck, Columbia University David L. Howell, Harvard University William W. Kelly, Yale University Ian J. Miller, Harvard University

Conference Abstraacts “Letters from an Accidental Japanologist: Gilbert Attwood and the First Japanese Students in Boston” Hiromu Nagahara, MIT

Gilbert Attwood (1825-1881), a banker and broker based in Boston’s financial district, was one of the first Americans to welcome the earliest wave of Japanese students who came to study in Massachusetts, including Honma Eiichirō (MIT) and Inoue Yoshikazu (Harvard Law School). Based on the analysis of correspondences between Honma and Attwood housed in MIT Distinctive Collections’ Eiichiro Honma Papers, this paper highlights Attwood’s importance to the Japanese students as a local guardian as well as these students’ support of Attwood’s emerging intellectual interests in Japan. Years before Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Fenollosa, and William Sturgis Bigelow had even set foot in Japan, here was a Bostonian who evinced profound interest and commitment to both the Japanese students he encountered and the culture of their native country and, in that process, emerged as one of the first Japanologists in the city.

“Cinematogenic History: Unforgetting the Battle of Tsubakidai” Sean O’Reilly, Akita International University

History haunts us, even, or perhaps especially after, the details of a particular historical event have been forgotten. Traces of half-remembered rituals remain in the present, exerting a subtle influence on us even if we can no longer grasp their original context. Kurosawa Akira vividly discovered this as a boy spending his summer in Akita Prefecture in the 1920s, happening to observe a curious little ritual in which children passing by a roadside rock would lay flowers on it. He asked them why they were doing this, but only the oldest villager remembered: it was to placate an ochimusha who died nearby during the Boshin War (1868-69).

Kurosawa later recreated this cinematogenic ritual in his movie Dreams (1990), thereby showing a new generation of people that a warrior who fell in battle long ago used to be honored in Akita. The children in his 1920s recollection and his 1990 film simply continue the ritual without understanding, just as most viewers of Dreams might note this spectacle yet fail to contextualize it. But students of history might find their interest piqued, as the existing historiography pays very little attention to any battles in Akita in the 1860s. Then again, should we actually care about a largely forgotten battle in a forgettable backwater like Akita? How could such a conflict possibly compare in significance to the more grandiose clashes in Ueno or Aizu?

In this article, I use the terminology of film studies to “zoom in” on the historiographically neglected battle of Tsubakidai, arguing that we still can—and should—seek to recover the context for events that are passing out of even indirect living memory. The clash may only have seen hundreds of combatants, but in some ways, Akita’s fate hinged upon its outcome, and it had real-life consequences for many, including the ochimusha whose death inspired the rock ritual. By zooming in close (but not too close) to such seemingly minor events as this battle or the dwindling ways it is (half-)remembered, we will breathe new life into rituals and remembrances of the past, bringing them more sharply into focus.

“Learning the West in a Village in Yamagata: Hori Kumatarō’s Reading of The Principles of the Rise and Decline of Nations, c. 1897” Jeonghun Choi, Harvard University

We know that modern Japan experienced an explosion of information about Western Europe and America after the Meiji Revolution and subsequent educational reforms. But can we determine how people outside formal educational settings learned about the West? By exploring how Hori Kumatarō (1861-1928), a local notable who lived in Kumatejima Village of Yamagata, read The Principles of the Rise and Fall of Nations (1897) by the French writer François Alfred Désiré Ligneul (1847-1922), this presentation aims to illuminate a significant channel through which foreign knowledge reached people living in rural areas with limited access to formal education during the Meiji period. Ligneul disseminated

his evangelistic messages as a Catholic missionary, working primarily with his interpreter and fellow priest Maeda Chōta (1867-1939), through Bunkadō, a Tokyo-based publishing house that distributed his texts via a nationwide bookselling network. Drawing on the biblical paradigm for understanding the ancient empires, The Principles develops a cyclical theory of history that warns against the decadence of flourishing empires and identifies morality as the key to preserving imperial grandeur. Ligneul directed the message towards readers who he believed were at risk of being intoxicated with the victory of the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). While Hori likely benefitted only minimally from the formal education of his time, which increasingly emphasized Western learning while marginalizing classical studies, he read The Principles through a framework shaped by the canon of literary Sinitic. He reached the conclusion that the teaching of Cicero, Ligneul’s intellectual hero, echoes that of Confucius, and that the core argument of The Principles repeats the paradigm expressed in the Sinitic classic Great Learning. This presentation suggests that against the backdrop of Westernization and modernization, some readers acquired knowledge about world history only to reaffirm what they saw as the unchanging nature of history and the timeless veracity of Chinese classics.

“Sharing Texts in Prewar Japan: Writing Technologies and the Reproduction of Documents in the Mitsui Mi’ike Mine Archive, 1889-1940” Raja Adal, University of Pittsburgh

In the twelve years from 1903 to 1916, a revolution shook Japan, a revolution that very few have heard of. Documents in the Mitsui Mi’ike Mine Archive show a rapid decline in the use of the brush from 90 percent of all documents to less than 10 percent. This decline of the brush was paralleled by a simultaneous rise in copying with carbon paper, from less than 3 percent to over 50 percent. In other words, the shift away from the brush as an instrument of textual production was accompanied by a transformation in the circulation of documents. This paper asks how these and other similar insights can help us understand what it meant to share a text in prewar Japan. What did it mean to store a copy of a text for future access, to send a conform copy to a third party, or, alternatively, to write a text with an instrument that made it clear that this was an original with no copies? What did it mean to make a text visible to some and invisible to others?

“Urban Histories of Japan’s Empire: Tsuishikari, Tokyo, and the Ainu” Michael Thornton, Northeastern University

Two very different cities, two small historical markers, two green spaces that barely conceal the dramatic human transformations of the landscape. The first, Shiba Park, sits at the foot of Tokyo Tower, that gaudy symbol of Tokyo’s postwar growth and a globally recognized icon of Japan’s capital. The second, Enomoto Park, sits on the fringe of an industrial zone in Ebetsu, a desolate bedroom community on the outskirts of the Sapporo metropolitan area. One symbolizes the vibrancy and cosmopolitanism of contemporary Japan; the other evokes the depopulation and economic hardship affecting smaller cities across the Japanese archipelago. These two strikingly different places, however, share a history intimately connected to the birth of Japan’s modern empire. This shared history is one of forced relocation across borders old and new, the destruction of traditional livelihoods, and the sickness and death that these conditions produced. This history is physically marked by small stone memorials and unobtrusive plaques; it is also marked through rituals, ceremonies for the dead that commemorate the tragedies that took place in these far-flung places during the late nineteenth century. The story of these two sites reveals the human costs of Japanese settler-colonialism in Hokkaido. It also reveals the power of that process to create new spatial networks, ones centered on Sapporo, the Colonial Agency’s headquarters, and Tokyo, the newly established imperial capital. These histories illustrate the empire’s wrenching dislocations. Yet, the limited narration and marginalization of these histories today is a reminder of how little these dislocations, and the particular misery they visited upon the Ainu, feature in popular histories of the colonization of Hokkaido. This essay explores these histories and juxtaposes them against the experience of visiting these sites today, in hopes of amplifying the experience of settler-colonialism in Hokkaido in the stories that we tell about Japan’s modern empire.

“Labor and Imperial Democracy in the 1885 Ueno-Hibiya Riot” Amin Ghadimi, Osaka University

In December 1884, amid the Sino-French war over Vietnam, and just months after Japanese revolutionary terrorists associated with the Liberal Party sought and failed to use explosives to assassinate government officials in Tochigi and overthrow the Japanese government, Korean revolutionaries backed by Japanese forces used explosives to topple the Korean monarchy and establish a new Japan-aligned enlightenment regime. The Chinese military counterattacked, reinstated the Korean autocracy, and inflicted indignities on the Japanese side. The next month, the Treaty of Seoul settled the affair between Korea and Japan. Elements of the Japanese public, led by the militant faction of the defunct Liberal Party and the Party of Rickshaw Drivers, staged a mass rally in Tokyo to demand war against China. The demonstration culminated in a violent assault on an anti-war newspaper and, allegedly, an aborted attempt to confront the central government. This presentation asserts the cultural, sociopolitical, and historiographical meaning of this, the 1885 Ueno-Hibiya Riot, which emerged from the origins of terrorism in East Asia and inaugurated Japan’s era of popular violence and imperial democracy.

“The Letters of a Japanese Woman in 1936, and Her Surprisingly International Love Life” Merle Kartscher, Harvard University

In the early summer of 1936, a Japanese woman called Tsuki received a breakup letter from her German lover, G. A. Voss. Their relationship, already strained by the distance, collapsed under the weight of the antisemitic and racist Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which caused Voss to stop working for his Jewish employer in Tokyo. He framed his decision to remain in Germany as one of duty toward his family and his country, but for Tsuki, it was devastating. She chronicled her heartbreak, her efforts to reconnect with Voss, and her eventual decision to leave Japan for the United States, despite the obstacles posed by the Asian Exclusion Act of 1925, in a series of letters to their mutual friend Aoyama Tadakazu.

This presentation reconstructs Tsuki’s story through the intimate archive of her correspondence, exploring how her personal experience illuminates broader global connections and disconnections in the 1930s, and provides a fascinating lens into the entangled forces of race, gender, and empire that shaped the world on the brink of the Second World War. “Japan and the King Crab: An International History” Gene Kim, Harvard University

This paper follows the international history of Paralithodes camtschaticus (the red king crab), tracing how Japan’s king crab fisheries helped transform the North Pacific into a space of imperial rivalry involving Japan, Russia/the Soviet Union, and the United States. As competition over marine resources intensified, disputes over access to crab stocks became intertwined with broader struggles over international law of the sea, sovereignty over natural resources, and even the meaning of what kind of creature a “crab” was. The paper argues that the legal and ecological ambiguity of the red king crab proved central to these conflicts: depending on whether it was classified as belonging to the high seas or the continental shelf, different claims could be made about who had the right to harvest it, and where. Far from being a simple commodity, the king crab became a contested site of geopolitical conflict, revealing that there was nothing natural about “natural resources.” In tracing these struggles, this paper situates the king crab within the broader context of postwar movements towards the nationalization of ocean space and constraints on Japan’s “pelagic empire.”

“A License to Kill? The Japanese Army’s NCO Manual from 1933, the Banditization of Warfare, and the Roots of the Nanjing Massacre” Danny Orbach, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In this presentation, we reexamine the role of the 1933 Imperial Japanese Army NCO manual A Study of Tactics against Chinese Armies in the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre, challenging both traditionalist and revisionist interpretations.

Drawing on a close reading of the full text, rarely consulted directly in prior scholarship, we argue that the manual neither explicitly mandated the execution of prisoners nor reflected simple benevolence. While its instructions generally favored the release and instrumental use of captured Chinese soldiers, they simultaneously placed such prisoners outside a stable legal framework. Situating the manual within the longer evolution of Japanese counterinsurgency doctrine and the “banditization of warfare,” the presentation traces how the tripartite distinction between “good subjects,” “bandits,” and “legitimate enemy combatants” gradually eroded in the early twentieth century. The manual marked a critical stage in this process by effectively dissolving the category of the legitimate combatant in the Chinese context and subjecting prisoners to the discretionary authority of commanders. This discretionary window—where mercy and execution became equally permissible options—proved decisive under the logistical and operational pressures of 1937–1938, when discretion, rather than law, governed the treatment of captives. The presentation thus argues that the manual did not serve as a direct “license to kill,” but helped create the doctrinal conditions that enabled more murderous decisions by field commanders during the Nanjing campaign.

“Neighborhoods in a Colonial Railway Town—A Spatial Analysis of the Interaction of Chinese and Japanese in Shinkyo (1932–45)” Yuting Dong, University of Chicago

This paper uses digital humanities tools such as ArcGIS to explore the spatial relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, mainly the Chinese, in Japan’s imperial capital, Xinjing, in the Manchukuo era (1932-1945). Through mapping residents’ location in the railway auxiliary zone based on a telephone directory published in that era, this project shows the proximity of both groups and asks new questions about the social relations between them.

“Kon Wajirō on Domestic Management and the Design of Everyday Life” Konrad M. Lawson, University of St. Andrews

The ethnographer and architect Kon Wajirō, best known for the observational studies on modern life he called “Modernology” (kōgengaku), is also seen as a central figure in the post-World War II development of the interdisciplinary field of seikatsu-gaku, the study of everyday life. While the field is now much broader, in the 1940s, Kon argued that the central focus for the scholar of everyday life should be the home. Understanding it required the analysis of the spatial practices of its inhabitants and their interactions with the people and objects around them. This article focuses on the early years after Japanese defeat, when Kon saw an opportunity to give this research a home in postwar university faculties through a new holistic and human-centered foundation for an existing field: kasei-gaku, home economics or domestic management. Kon later blamed the failure of this attempt on the stubbornness of field insiders, but the alternative vision he offered failed to heed some of his own advice calling for attention to situational context, agency, and the broader structures that govern human interaction.

“Brokering the Imperial Heritage: Examining the Spread of the Manchukuo Myth in Postwar Asia” Bohao Wu, Peking University

This presentation reevaluates Japan’s postwar economic resurgence by examining the Manchuria group (Manshu jinmyaku), a network of technocrats and industrialists who served in Manchuria before the collapse of the Japanese Empire. Drawing on newly declassified diplomatic documents, the manuscript highlights the network’s ties in corporate Japan to facilitate economic outreach to China, the Korean Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. The study argues that these actors transformed prewar imperial ambitions into a postwar reality grounded in technological interdependence, replacing wartime coercion with a softer approach that promoted reliance on Japanese capital goods and industrial standards. By analyzing the development of the “Manchukuo myth” and how it helped Japanese policymakers participating in regional economic planning through the 1980s, the research reveals how the empire’s human and ideological ties extended beyond the 1945 watershed, positioning Japan as a key broker in the Asian economy amid the global Cold War. “The Tragic Death of Sakai Naka: Constructing a Feminist Archive from Military Waste” Sara Kang, Princeton University

This paper examines the 1957 murder of Sakai Naka, a Japanese woman who was fatally shot by a US soldier while collecting shell casings at a military firing range in Gunma. Known as the Girard Incident (named after the soldier), Sakai’s death became a rallying symbol of US military hegemony and female victimization, leading to a series of massive protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960. By focusing on the informal labor and economy of military scrap collection in postwar Japan, this paper proposes a new methodological framework that instead seeks to make Sakai—rather than Girard—visible in the historical record: through a feminist archive of military waste that centers women’s life-making practices across militarized zones in Japan and beyond.

“Conspiracy Reality: The 1961 Sanyū Incident and the Rebirth of the Japanese Right” Nick Kapur, Rutgers University

This paper examines the so-called “Sanyū incident”—a conspiracy to assassinate the entire Ikeda Hayato cabinet and restore the Meiji Constitution—uncovered by Japanese police in December 1961. Police ultimately discovered that more than 1,000 people were involved in the plot, linking a variety of right-wing groups, and confiscated significant amounts of contraband surplus military equipment, including helmets, rifles, swords, and grenades, that the conspirators had been hoarding in anticipation of their planned coup d’état. Among the conspirators were a number of retired Imperial Army and Navy officers, some of whom had previously been involved in the successful assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in May 1932. Reexamining this oft-overlooked incident that captured front-page headlines for several months on end in the winter of 1961-1962 sheds new light on the reemergence of right-wing ultranationalism in postwar Japan, the threads linking 1930s and 1960s right-wing terrorism, and the persistence of transnational networks of former soldiers in the Imperial Japanese military.

“The Conservative Party and the Working Class: The LDP Labor Charter of 1966” Taro Tsuda, Doshisha University

Modern conceptions of politics and political ideology are defined by a dichotomy of “bourgeois right versus proletarian left.” This framing is useful for understanding postwar Japanese politics: while the center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) primarily drew political strength from groups such as farmers, small retailers, and corporate interests, its Socialist and Communist rivals relied on organized labor as their core support base.

However, these binaries should not be overstated. This paper examines the LDP’s engagement with the Japanese working class by analyzing the “LDP Labor Charter,” a seminal party tract promulgated in 1966. This document’s substance, as well as the way in which it was developed and adopted as official party doctrine, reveals the complex relationship between

an ostensibly “bourgeois” political party and notions of labor rights and justice—issues that are typically viewed as the concern of the political left. In particular, the paper will demonstrate how the LDP’s nature as a highly heterogeneous big-tent organization and as an astute actor keenly responsive to domestic conditions as well as international trends led the party to attempt to reach out to a seemingly unlikely constituency.

“The Deportation of Liu Wenqing (柳文卿): The Immigration Control Act and the Problem of International Student Rights in Cold War Japan” Catherine Tsai, Yale University

On March 27, 1968, Liu Wenqing (柳文卿), a 32-year-old Taiwanese graduate student and political activist, was forcibly deported from Japan for overstaying his visa. Members of the United Young Formosans for Independence (台湾青年独立 連盟) attempted to halt the deportation, clashing with immigration officials at Haneda Airport. While the Immigration Bureau maintained it was merely enforcing the Immigration Control Act, subsequent National Diet investigations revealed that Liu had been deliberately targeted as part of a reciprocal agreement between the Japanese government and the Republic of China (ROC) to exchange Taiwanese dissidents for Chinese smugglers.

This paper examines the Liu Wenqing Incident to analyze the intersections of immigration law and human rights in postwar Japan. While Liu embodied multiple identities—dissident, husband, and father—his status as a student garnered the most significant public and transnational attention. The violent imagery of his deportation, along with the revelation of the reciprocal agreement, sparked intense public debate about legal protections for international students and raised fundamental questions about the nature of Japanese democracy. Ultimately, this paper argues that the Liu Deportation Incident provides an alternative lens to view the 1960s student movements, catalyzing new forms of activism and solidarity among Japanese intellectuals and international students.

“Atomic Autographs: Dark Tourism and ‘Dark Souvenirs’ in Postwar Hiroshima” Jesus Solis, Harvard University

This essay examines the role that souvenirs and mementos played in the development of Hiroshima’s dark tourist industry and the controversy surrounding the secondary market for “dark souvenirs.” Hiroshima is perhaps one of the most famous dark tourism sites in the world today, but the city was a site for dark tourists long before the city’s infamous Genbaku Dome became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. American servicemen became the first dark tourists to visit Hiroshima during the early occupation period, and their insatiable appetite for dark souvenirs led to the growth of the dark souvenir industry in the area. Local residents scavenged the rubble for items impacted by the blast. Melted glass, cracked tiles, and broken pots were popular souvenirs among American soldiers and sailors. The demand for such “dark souvenirs” persisted beyond the years of the American occupation as local merchants continued selling such items to American service members stationed in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s.

During the 2000s, many dark souvenirs from Hiroshima were sold at auctions and on online marketplaces. The secondary market for these artifacts upset local residents in Hiroshima and atomic bomb survivors who believed that such items should not be bought or sold. Many of them argued that it was more appropriate to donate them to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Recent controversies over auctions involving high-end Hiroshima artifacts suggest that the tension between collectors and survivors continues to be a problem today.

Conference Bios R A JA ADAL received his PhD from Harvard University in 2009 and is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Director of its World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a historian of technology, empire, aesthetics, and the materiality of writing whose work has explored global connections and comparisons, using archives in Japanese, Arabic, French German, and Turkish, as well as global and local datasets. He is currently writing his second book about global scripts and the instruments for writing them, from the brush to the typewriter to Unicode.

As part of this project, he has co-edited (with Christopher Lowy) a special issue of the Journal of Asian Studies entitled “Unicode and the Humanities,” which is scheduled to appear in October 2026. This issue includes his article “Big Tech, the Big State, and the Battle for Encoding all of the World’s Languages.” His research on writing systems, typewriters, and Unicode is also appearing in a forthcoming chapter on “Technology and the Savior Myth of Sinographs,” in the Cambridge History of Technology.

DAN IEL BOTSMAN is the Sumitomo Professor of History at Yale University. His publications include Saburo Okita: A Life in Economic Diplomacy (translation, 1993), Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (2005), Meiji 150 nen de kangaeru (co-edited with Yoshida Nobuyuki and Tsukada Takashi, 2018), and Commemorating Meiji: History, Politics and the Politics of History (co-edited with Adam Clulow, 2021), as well as articles in journals including the American Historical Review, Nihonshi kenkyū, Rekishigaku kenkyū, Shigaku zasshi, and Buraku mondai kenkyū. He is currently working with Michael Thornton, Sabine Frühstück, Sakurai Ryōju, and Yoshida Nobuyuki on a People’s Guide to Tokyo for the University of California Press, and on a monograph titled Untouchable Freedoms: Caste, Cattle and Liberation in Nineteenth-Century Japan. He received his PhD in History from Princeton University in 1999.

JEON GHU N CH OI is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Studies at Harvard University, where he studies the book history and intellectual history of modern Japan and Korea. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Formation of Historical Knowledge and Ignorance in Meiji Japan,” explores how knowledge of world history was shaped and how established historical knowledge suppressed certain ways of accessing the past in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

YUTIN G DON G is an Assistant Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History and the College at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2021. She is interested in topics related to Japanese empire, imperialism and colonialism, history of technology, infrastructure studies, and the history of labor and expertise. She has published in Technology and Culture, Modern Asian Studies, and International Journal of Asian Studies. Her first book discusses how Japan erected its empire through building physical and knowledge infrastructure in Northeast China, which will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

SHELDON GARON is the Nissan Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. A specialist in modern Japanese history, he also writes transnational/global history. Awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant, he currently directs the five-year collaborative project, “The Global War on Civilians, 1905-1945,” hosted by Sciences Po in Paris. His publications include The State and Labor in Modern Japan (1987), Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (1997), Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (2012), and “Transnational History and Japan’s ‘Comparative Advantage,’” Journal of Japanese Studies (2017). His efforts to write a global history of the Second Word War include “On the Transnational Destruction of Cities: What Japan and the United States Learned from the Bombing of Britain and Germany in the Second World War,” Past & Present (2020), “Operation STARVATION, 1945: A Transnational History of Blockades and the Defeat of Japan,” International History Review (2024), and “Toward a Global History of Bombing in the Second World War: Taking Japan Seriously,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2025). He received his PhD in History from Yale University in 1981.

RUSTIN GATES is an Associate Professor of History at Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois. He received his MA in 2000 and PhD in 2007 in Modern Japanese History from Harvard University. A specialist in the history of Japanese international relations, his research has appeared in numerous outlets, including scholarly journals, book chapters in anthologies, online blogs, and popular magazines. Publications include a research article on Pan-Asianism published in the Journal of Japanese Studies; a research article on the “Manchurian Problem” published in Diplomacy and Statecraft; a research article on Japanese medical modernity in China published in Studies on Asia; a chapter on World War I Japanese diplomacy in The Decade of the Great War (Brill); and a chapter on Japanese diplomacy in the early 1930s in Tumultuous Decade (University of Toronto Press); and a reference article on Japanese war aims in World War I published in the International Encyclopedia of the First World War.

His first research project studied the career of prewar Foreign Minister Uchida Yasuya to understand the development of Japanese diplomacy from the Meiji period through the 1930s. His current research examines Japan’s Self-Defense Forces in the context of US-Japan relations during the Cold War. A current side project of his examines Japanese American resettlement to the Midwest during the Pacific War. AM IN GHADI MI is an Associate Professor in the Course on Interdisciplinary Cultural Formations in the Graduate School of Humanities, University of Osaka. He works primarily on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of social and political disorder in Japan’s 1870s and 1880s. He has recently been collaborating on different endeavors with the African Association for Japanese Studies and the Moroccan Association for Japanese Language and Culture. His research has appeared in Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan, Journal of Social History, Modern Intellectual History, and other venues. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2019.

C AROL GLUCK is the George Sansom Professor Emerita of History at Columbia University. She specializes in modern Japan, from the late nineteenth century to the present; international relations; World War II, and history-writing and public memory in Asia and the West. She received her BA from Wellesley College in 1962 and her PhD from Columbia University in 1977. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society; former President of the Association for Asian Studies; currently co-chair of the Trustees Emeriti of Asia Society and member of the Board of Directors of Japan Society. She is a founding member and now chair of Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought.

DAVID L . H OWE LL is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History at Harvard University. He received his PhD in History from Princeton University in 1989. His research focuses on the social history of Japan in the Tokugawa (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. He is particularly interested in the ways that changing political and economic institutions affected the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people over the course of the nineteenth century.

His latest book is The Meiji Restoration: Japan’s Gradual, Then Sudden, Revolution (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press). He is now working on a history of human waste and garbage in the cities of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.

SAR A K ANG is a Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Her research investigates histories of sexual exploitation and violence under overlapping Japanese and American imperial formations in East Asia. At Princeton, she is developing her first book project, “Operation Relax: Empires of Sex in Japan, South Korea, and the Asia-Pacific (1945-1995).” Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Asian Studies, AsiaPacific Journal: Japan Focus, Fukuoka Joseitachi no Sengo, and Harper’s Bazaar. In July 2027, she will join the East Asian Languages and Civilizations department at the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2024.

N IC K K APU R received his PhD in Japanese History from Harvard University in 2011 and is presently Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University’s Camden campus, where he teaches Japanese and East Asian history. His book Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) details enduring transformations in Japanese politics, culture, and society, as well as US-Japan alliance diplomacy and the Cold War international system, that unfolded in the aftermath of the massive 1960 protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty.

His recent article on dissent and resistance among kamikaze pilots won the Vandervort Prize from the Society for Military History. He has also published articles on topics such as US-Japan relations during the John F. Kennedy administration, the 1968 centennial celebrations of Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and Japan’s postwar student movement. In recent years, he has been significantly involved in the founding of the Modern Japan History Association (mjha.org).

MERLE K ARTSCH E R is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Harvard University, focusing on modern East Asian history and gender history. Her research interests encompass the transnational history of the Japanese Empire, the cultural and social dimensions of Japanese imperialism and colonialism in East Asia, and women’s intellectual and social projects within this context. In her dissertation, she examines the participation of women in the Japanese Empire through their membership in women’s organisations in colonised Taiwan and Korea, 1895-1945. She is currently on fieldwork leave in Tokyo, where she is based at the German Institute of Japanese Studies (DIJ).

WILLIAM W. KE LLY is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and the Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies. After receiving his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Brandeis University, he joined the faculty at Yale in 1980, serving as chair of the Council on East Asian Studies for four years and chair of the Department of Anthropology for ten years. Working within the social and historical anthropology of Japan, Kelly has done continuous fieldwork in the Shōnai area of Yamagata Prefecture for over fifty years. Among his publications from this project are books on Water Control in Tokugawa Japan and Deference and Defiance in 19th-Century Japan, and numerous articles on the broader dynamics of regional society and class formation in 20th-century Japanese society. In other research, he explored sport and body culture and their significance in modern Japan, and his book The Hanshin Tigers and the Practices of Professional Baseball in Modern Japan was published in both English and Japanese.

Prof. Kelly has long been involved with US-Japan educational exchanges, serving for many years on the Governing Board of the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies and on the Advisory Board of the Japan-US Student Conference. He has served on the Japan Committee of the Social Science Research Council and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. He was a member of the American Advisory Committee of the Japan Foundation for eight years, and in 2009, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, by the Japanese government. At Yale, he received four awards for undergraduate teaching and graduate mentoring.

GENE KIM is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University, focusing on modern Japanese and Korean history. His dissertation explores the oceanic history of Japan-Korea relations from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, tracing how attempts to govern coastal waters and manage marine resources in both contexts drove the terrestrialization and colonization of littoral spaces, and set the stage for conflicts of oceanic decolonization after 1945. His work has appeared in Yŏksa pip’yŏng and is forthcoming in the Journal of Korean Studies. He will earn his PhD degree in May 2026, and beginning in August 2026, he will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy.

KONR AD M . LAWSON received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2012. He is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His research interests are the aftermaths of Japanese empire in East and Southeast Asia, intellectual history and the histories of space and place in the region. He co-edited Doing Spatial History and the open access resource A Guide to Spatial History with Riccardo Bavaj and Bernhard Struck. He has published on the early postwar debates on wartime treason in the Philippines in the journal Comparativ. His current project is restoring life to a long-neglected book manuscript based on his PhD thesis on the relationship between treason and war crimes after Japanese empire.

IAN J . M ILLE R is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Environmental History and Faculty Dean of Cabot House at Harvard University. He received his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2005, arriving at Harvard in 2007.

His research is focused on the cultural dimensions of scientific, technological, and especially environmental change. He is working on a new book, Fueling Tokyo: Japan in the Age of Global Energy, which recasts the history of the world’s largest city—Tokyo—as a history of energy. His early research for that project was supported by a multi-year Mellon New Directions Fellowship focused on “Carbon and its Discontents.” That grant allowed him to pursue training in Earth and Planetary Sciences as well as Applied Science as he sought to better understand the Earth and energy systems at the center of Japan’s experience of climate change.

HIROMU NAGAHAR A is the Mitsui Career Development Professor in Contemporary Technology and an Associate Professor of History at MIT. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2011. A cultural historian of modern Japan, he is the author of Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017).

His next book, The Emperor’s English: Language and Identity Among the Rulers of Imperial Japan, explores the history of anglophones and anglophiles among modern Japanese elites. He is also the curator of the MIT Libraries digital exhibit, “From Samurai into Engineers: Eiichirō Honma and MIT’s First Japanese Students,” which marks the 150th anniversary of the graduation of MIT’s first Japanese student, Eiichirō Honma (SB 1874), and highlights the experiences of Honma and other Japanese students at MIT who followed in his footsteps.

IZU MI NAK AYAMA is a Senior Lecturer in the Japanese Studies Programme at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2007. She teaches courses on gender studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), culinary studies, and visual cultures. Her research interests include global studies of menstruation and menopause, as well as the history of Japanese soy sauce.

EM ER O ’DW Y E R is an Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She received her PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2007. She specializes in 20th-century Japanese history with research interests in imperialism, industrialization, de-imperialization, and postwar economic high-growth.

Prof. O’Dwyer is the author of Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria (Harvard University Press, East Asian Monographs Series, 2015) and has published on social reform efforts within the South Manchuria Railway in Modern Asian Studies, on Manchukuo in manga in Roman Rosenbaum’s edited Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, as well as on Japanese empire in Manchuria for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. She is currently at work on a modern history of Ise Bay that aims to focus on the century-long tensions of modernization in a specific region. Structured around the entangled geographies of the military/naval industrial complex, the fishing industry, and the petrochemical industry in Japan’s central region, it covers the period from 1870 through 1970.

SEAN O ’RE ILLY received his PhD in 2015 from Harvard University’s History and East Asian Languages doctoral program and completed a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. His research, which began with a Fulbright Scholarship to Japan in 2012, concerns the ways Japanese history has been reinvented in film and popular culture.

Publications include The Advent of Sound in Japanese Cinema: a Handbook (Routledge, 2026) and Re-viewing the Past: the Uses of History in the Cinema of Imperial Japan (Bloomsbury, 2018). As Professor of Global Connectivity at Akita International University, he teaches about the history, popular culture, and cinema of Japan and is also coordinator of the Japan Studies program. His latest work, forthcoming from Lexington in late 2026, is A Critical Companion to Akira Kurosawa.

DAN NY ORBACH is a military and legal historian, and an Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2015. His research explores military history, political assassinations and coups, military adventurism, illegal orders, the dynamics of military atrocities, and the history of intelligence and espionage.

His publications include The Plots Against Hitler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan, Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries during the Cold War, and (with co-authors) Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel–Hamas War, October 7, 2023–June 1, 2025. His work has been translated into numerous languages, including Thai, Japanese, Hebrew, French, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish.

His next book, Punishment: Behind Japanese Military Brutality, is forthcoming with Hurst in summer 2026. He is also currently working on a new research project, “Why Do Soldiers Rape in War, 1931–1953?”, a comparative study of the Japanese, German, Soviet, and American armies across the wider Second World War era, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria to the Korean War. He is also working on the question of looting and international law during the Boxer War (1900-1901).

EIKO MARU KO SIN IAWE R is the Charles R. Keller Professor of History and current Provost at Williams College.

She is the author of three books: Tokyo (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), and Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860-1960 (Cornell University Press, 2008). Prof. Siniawer has also written about Meiji-era politics in The New Cambridge History of Japan, the toilet paper “panic” of the early 1970s in the American Historical Review, and wastefulness in millennial Japan in the Journal of Asian Studies. Her current project is a global history of the early 1970s. She received her PhD in History in 2003 and AM in Regional Studies East Asia in 1999 from Harvard University.

JESUS SOLIS is currently a teaching assistant at Harvard University. He received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2024. Before entering the PhD program at Harvard, he received an MA in Economic History from the University of Tokyo, a dual MA in East Asian History and Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Colorado, and a BA in History and English from Adams State University. His main fields of interest are modern Japanese history, Japanese economic history, the United States in the world, and military history. He is currently working on his first book project, Japan and America’s Black Market Empire in Asia, 1945-1975, which examines how the US military presence in Japan after World War II led to the development of illicit economies around American base towns. His article on dark tourism in Hokkaido was published in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.

MIC HAEL TH ORNTON received his PhD from Harvard University in 2018 and is currently Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Northeastern University, Boston, where he teaches courses on Japanese, East Asian, urban, and public history. His research focuses on the history of Japanese cities during the early-modern and modern periods.

His first book, Mito and the Politics of Reform in Early Modern Japan (Lexington, 2022), explored the rise of Japanese nationalism in the castle town of Mito during the Tokugawa period. His current projects include Unsettled City, a study of the northern city of Sapporo and its role in turning Hokkaido into a Japanese colony. He has published parts of this work in the American Historical Review and Urban History. He is also working on A People’s Guide to Tokyo (forthcoming, UC Press), a co-authored historical guidebook to the Japanese capital that foregrounds how ordinary Tokyoites have contested and shaped power and place across the metropolis. Born and raised in Japan, he now splits time between Boston and New York.

C ATHERINE TSAI is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. She received her PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2025. Her current book project, “Marginal Development: Tropical Agriculture in the Yaeyama Islands under Japanese Colonialism and American Occupation, 18791972,” focuses on the archipelagic history of agrarian development, tropical science, and labor migration. Continuing her intellectual interest in the transnational legacies of Japanese and American imperialism, her second research project focuses on international student activists in Japan during the Cold War.

TARO TSU DA is an Associate Professor in the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, where he teaches courses on politics, political history, and international affairs. His research focuses on Japanese political and diplomatic history, contemporary Japanese politics, US-Japan relations, and the Cold War in East Asia. Publications include an article on Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei and regional development in the Journal of Contemporary Asia and an article on the role of elder statesmen in Contemporary Japan. He is currently working on a book project about political leadership and political party development in postwar Japan. He received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University in 2019.

JUN UC HIDA is the Asian Cultures and Society Professor and Professor of History at Stanford University. Her research and teaching focus on the Japanese empire in Asia, colonial Korea, comparative colonialism, the history of immigration and diaspora, transpacific history, settler colonialism, and the politics of memory and decolonization. Her publications include Provincializing Empire: Ōmi Merchants in the Japanese Transpacific Diaspora (2023), Cheguk ŭi pŭrok’ŏ dŭl: Ilche kangjŏmgi ŭi Ilbon chŏngch’angmin singminjuŭi, 1876-1945 (2020), and Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (2011). She received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 2005.

BOHAO WU is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Peking University, and he received his PhD from Harvard University in 2023. He researches and teaches on the global Cold War, with a focus on East Asia’s role in shaping the neoliberal economic order. Prof. Wu has published in various peer-reviewed journals, including an article on Japan’s collaboration with the Soviet Union on the development of Siberia in Modern Asian Studies, and a paper on China and Japan’s competition for economic influence in Cold War Burma in Cultures of Science. He also has manuscripts forthcoming in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Cold War History, and the Journal of Cold War Studies.

He is currently working on a book project entitled Fabricating Prosperity: Economic Diplomacy and the Making of Cold War Asia, 1950-1985.

Andrew D. Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. He has also taught courses on the premodern history of Japan, the comparative history of labor, and the United States as a colonial power and nation builder. He has written, edited, and translated numerous books and has published articles in journals in the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. His most recent monograph, Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2011), examines the making of the modern consumer in 20th-century Japan, using the sewing machine as a window into that story. This book was translated into Japanese and published by Misuzu Shobo in 2013. Prof. Gordon has also recently published several articles on the historical context of Japan’s so-called “Lost Decades” from the 1990s through the 2010s, and during the pandemic, he published a co-authored article with Michael Reich on the history of vaccination and vaccination hesitancy in Japan, as well as several blog postings on Japanese policies and societal responses to COVID-19. In 2023, he contributed a chapter titled “Japan’s Transwar Political Economy” in the third volume of The New Cambridge History of Japan: The Modern Japanese Nation and Empire, c. 1868 to the Twenty-First Century, and in 2025, he co-edited a volume titled Public History in Japan: Theory and Practice. He is currently completing a book tentatively titled Making Modern Memories: Industrial Heritage in Japan.

Prof. Gordon’s first book was The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955 (Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies Monographs, 1985). A Japanese translation and expanded edition was published by Iwanami Shoten in 2012, with two additional chapters covering the period from the 1960s to the present. His second book, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (University of California Press, 1991), won the John King Fairbank Prize in 1992 for the best book on modern East Asian history and was a finalist for the 1992 Arisawa Hiromi Prize for the best book on Japan. He later wrote The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Fabricating Consumers: The Sewing Machine in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2011). His textbook, A Modern History of Japan (Oxford University Press), which is widely used in college classes, was originally published in 2002, with subsequent editions in 2008, 2013, and 2020. He is currently preparing a fifth edition for publication in 2027.

Combining the perspectives of a fan and an academic, in 2007, he published (in Japanese only) The Unknown Story of Matsuzaka’s Major League Revolution (Asahi shinsho, 2007), a book tracking Daisuke Matsuzaka’s first season with the Boston Red Sox and placing it in a cross-cultural and historical context. He also edited the book Postwar Japan as History (University of California Press, 1993), published in Japanese in 2002, and he translated Portraits of the Japanese Workplace by Kumazawa Makoto (Westview Press, 1996) and The Ashio Copper Mine Riot by Nimura Kazuo (Duke University Press, 1997).

In 2011, while serving as director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Prof. Gordon led the Institute in founding the Japan Disasters Digital Archive, a digital archive project that aims to preserve the vast array of digital records concerning the March 11, 2011, disaster in Japan and its aftermath. The archive makes those records available to a global community of citizens, students, and scholars in close partnership with many organizations in Japan, including the National Diet Library and Tohoku University.

Prof. Gordon has served as Chair of the Harvard History Department (2004-07), Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (1998-2004 and 2010-2011), Acting Director of the Asia Center (2016-2017), and Acting Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (2018-19). He has also been a member of the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (1994-97) and the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies (1994-1996). Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1995, he was a faculty member of the history department at Duke University for ten years. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981 in History and East Asian Languages after completing an AB from Harvard in 1975.

Prof. Gordon has traveled numerous times to Japan, including a year of language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies and ten extended research trips, for a total of roughly 10 years living in Japan. These visits were supported by fellowships from the Fulbright program, the Japan Foundation, the Center for Global Partnership, and the Social Science Research Council, as well as visiting teaching appointments at Hosei University and Tokyo University. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale in Paris and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies. Since 2024, when in Japan, he has been an Ushioda Fellow (visiting scholar) at Tokyo College, an institute of advanced study at Tokyo University.

In 2014, Prof. Gordon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in 2014, for his contributions to the development of Japanese Studies in the United States, and the National Institute for the Humanities Prize in Japanese Studies in 2020, for his broad-ranging research activities on Japanese modern and contemporary history.

Organized by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies with the Department of History and Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University