About

Michael R. Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, he specializes in US policy in Asia and geopolitical issues in the Indo-Pacific region. His publications include Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2020). Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the senior adviser for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, a Fulbright scholar, and a Marshall Memorial Fellow by the German Marshall Fund, among other honors.

Toshihiko Kishi is a professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. His research covers twentieth-century Asian history, East Asian regional studies, and media studies. He has published extensively on East Asian history and is the author of Visual Media in Manchukuo: Posters, Postcards and Stamps (Tokyo:Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2010), East Asian Popular Songs Hour: Crossing Boundaries and Crossing Musicians (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2013), and The Postwar History of Sino-Japanese Submarine Cables: Normalization of Diplomatic Relations and the Rebirth of Communications (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2015), and is the coeditor of Enlightening through TV: USCAR Public Diplomacy, 1950–1972 (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2020), and many other books. Professor Kishi is also a member of the Science Council of Japan and a senior researcher at the Research Center for Science Systems, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Hanae Kurihara Kramer is an associate professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she teaches intercultural communication and cross-cultural training. Scott Kramer is a historian residing in Honolulu who has published in English- and Japanese-language journals. Together they have published articles on the Hawaiian diaspora in the Bonin Islands, East Asian cartography, and propaganda. Their works include a translation of the 1942 Japanese-language book Tōa ni tachite (Standing on East Asia), authored by a German propagandist who was a popular University of Hawai‘i professor shortly before the United States entered World War II. The Kramers have amassed more than ten thousand Japanese 78 rpm records and related ephemera over the past decade. With the assistance of a generous grant, they have been studying and organizing these cultural artifacts with the intent of someday making these items available as an “Echoes from the Past” collection to interested scholars and students.

Barak Kushner is professor of East Asian history and the chair of Japanese Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has edited numerous books and written several monographs, including the award winning Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). In 2020 he hosted several episodes of a major Chinese documentary on Japanese war crimes and is currently writing a book titled The Construction of Injustice in East Asia: Japan versus Its Neighbors. Kushner was a visiting fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, 2019–20, and a visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. He is also a guest professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received the fifteenth Nakasone Yasuhiro Award for Excellence in 2019. His research projects have received funding from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Toshiba Foundation, and the European Research Council.

Olivia Morello is a junior at Stanford University studying international relations. She feels passionate about national security issues and current events in East Asia. Morello has been working as a research assistant for Michael R. Auslin since her freshman year, including a project analyzing US-China relations under the Reagan administration. As part of her coursework, she wrote a paper on US-Spanish diplomacy during the Second World War, for which she received Stanford’s 2019–20 Hoefer Prize, which recognizes outstanding undergraduate writing. In addition to foreign affairs, Morello enjoys studying art history. She currently works as a tour guide for Stanford’s art museums: the Cantor Arts Center and the Anderson Collection.

Junichi Okubo is the deputy director and a professor of Japanese art history at the National Museum of Japanese History. He has published extensively on ukiyo-e, including Japanology Collection: Hokusai (Tokyo: Kadokawa Sofia Bunko, 2016), Japanology Collection: Hiroshige (Tokyo: Kadokawa Sofia Bunko, 2017), Thousand Varieties of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 2005), Hiroshige and Ukiyo-e Landscapes (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 2007), and Ukiyo-e Publications: Mass Production and Consumption of “Arts” (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2013). He also coauthored How Nishiki-e Was Produced (Sakura: National Museum of Japanese History, 2009) and A-Z of Enjoying Ukiyo-e (Tokyo: Shibundō, 2000).

Alice Y. Tseng is the department chair of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her research focuses on Japan from the nineteenth century to the present, especially the history of cities, buildings, and the visual arts in response to exchanges with Europe and the United States. Other areas of interest are histories of collections and exhibitions, and the visual and spatial representations of Japan’s modern monarchy. Tseng is the author of The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods: The Arts of Reinvention, coedited with M. Pitelka (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), and Modern Kyoto: Building for Ceremony and Commemoration, 1868–1940 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018). Her research has appeared in major disciplinary journals, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Art Bulletin, the Review of Japanese Culture and Society, and the Journal of Japanese Studies.

Taketoshi Yamamoto is a professor emeritus in Japanese history at Waseda University and the founder of the Institute of Intelligence Studies, Japan. He has published extensively on the history of modern Japanese media, intelligence, and propaganda. His publications include Media Analysis of the Occupation Period (Tokyo: Hōsei University Press, 1996), The Tactics of the Military Intelligence: Intelligence and the Battle of Imphal (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1998), Kamishibai: Street Media (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2000), What Did Japanese POWs Reveal? (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2001), Asashi Newspaper’s Invasion in China (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2011), Censorship, Intelligence, and Propaganda of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2013), Japanese Intelligence Operations: The Nakano School of the Imperial Japanese Army, Unit No. 731, Onodera Makoto (Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2016), and The Nakano School of the Imperial Japanese Army: The Training Center for Military Intelligence Operations (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2017).

Tsuneo Yasuda is a distinguished professor in Japanese history at Kanagawa University and is the principal investigator of Wartime Japan’s Propaganda Kamishibai at the university’s Research Center for Nonwritten Cultural Materials. His publications include Japanese Fascism and Popular Movement (Tokyo: Renga Shōbō Shinsha, 1979), The History of Encountered Ideology: On Shibuya Teisuke (Tokyo: Keisō Shōbō, 1981), and Social Ideology in Daily Life (Tokyo: Keisō Shōbō, 1987). He also coauthored Live the Postwar Experiences: Pre-modern and Modern Japanese Social History (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003), Live the Pre-modern Society: Pre-modern and Modern Japanese Social History (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003), and Japanese War through the Lens of National Policy Kamishibai (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2018).

Sharalyn Orbaugh specializes in modern Japanese literature and popular culture and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses at University of British Columbia where she also serves as head of the Asian Studies department. She is the author of Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation (Brill, 2007) and Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen Year War (Brill, 2015) and editor of a forthcoming reference work, The Columbia Companion to Modern Japanese Literature. She received her PhD in Far Eastern Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, and spent six years at UC Berkeley before joining UBC in 1997.

Stephen M. Norris is the Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and the Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University. Norris’s research focuses on modern Russian history with an emphasis on visual culture and propaganda since the 19th Century. He is the author of, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), and Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism (Indiana University Press, 2012).

RONALD SPECTOR (Ph.D, Yale) is Emeritus Professor of History and International Relations in the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. During his thirty years in the Elliott School he taught undergraduate and graduate courses with emphasis on twentieth century military developments and confrontations. He previously taught at the University of Alabama and at LSU and served as Director of Naval History in the U.S. Department of Defense.

Beside his recent book, In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia, he is the author of five other works. His best known books are Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan, which was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and winner of the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Prize in Naval History, and After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. His book, At War at Sea: Sailors and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century received the 2002 Distinguished Book Award of the Society for Military History. His work has also appeared in French, Hungarian, Japanese, and Vietnamese editions.

Spector has been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, Israel and Singapore, “Class of 1957 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Naval History” at The U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Visiting Professor of Strategy at The National War College, and Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War College. He was also Distinguished Guest Professor at Keio University in Tokyo, visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, and visiting professor at Princeton. In 2012, he received the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History awarded for career achievement in that field.

A Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) in the Marine Corps Reserve, Spector served on active duty in Vietnam, 1968-1969, during the 1982-1983 Lebanon-Grenada operations and during the Gulf War. He is a graduate of the Expeditionary Warfare School at Quantico and served two tours on the Adjunct Faculty of the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College.

JONATHAN PARSHALL is co-author (with Anthony Tully) of Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. He is a lecturer for the U.S. Naval War College, and a frequent speaker for the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, National WWII Museum, the National Museum of the Pacific War, and others. He has been widely published in numerous historical journals and magazines, including the U.S. Naval War College Review, Naval History magazine, Naval Institute Proceedings, WWII magazine, Wartime (the magazine of the Australian War Memorial), The Northern Mariner, and others. Parshall has appeared on NetFlix, the BBC, the Smithsonian Channel, National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, and the BBC. He is currently working on his second book, a history of the year 1942.

Richard B. Frank is an internationally renowned expert on the Pacific war. After graduating from the University of Missouri, he was commissioned in the US Army, in which he served for nearly four years, including a tour of duty in the Republic of Vietnam as an aero rifle platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division. Frank completed studies at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, and is the author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Random House, 1999), which received the Harry S. Truman Book Award. He recently published, Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia–Pacific War, Volume I: July 1937–May 1942 (W. W. Norton, Incorporated, 2021).

Professor Reiko Tsuchiya has her Ph.D in Sociology from Hitotsubashi University, Japan, and has been a professor of sociology and media history in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University since 2010. She serves as Director of the 20th Century Media Institute and Editor-in-Chief of the history journal Intelligence. Previously, she has been a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland (2003) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (2017), as well as a visiting professor at Cairo University in Egypt (2018) and the Communication University of China (2013-2015). She has numerous publications, including Chronology of Japanese Media History (ed., 2018),  The Pacific War Read from Propaganda Leaflets against the Japanese (2010), and The Origin of Popular Newspapers in Japan (2002). She also created the Database of Wartime Propaganda Leaflets at https://www.waseda.jp/prj-bira/

Kayoko Takeda is a professor of translation and interpreting studies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. She is the author of Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Trial (University of Ottawa Press) and Interpreters and War Crimes (Routledge).

Karl F. Friday (PhD, Stanford 1989) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia and in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Saitama University. A specialist in the Heian and Kamakura periods, his publications include Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford, 1992), Legacies of the Sword: the Kashima Shinryu & Samurai Martial Culture (University of Hawai’I Press, 1997), Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (Routledge, 2004), The First Samurai: the Life & Legend of the Warrior Rebel Taira Masakado (Wiley, 2008), Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850 (Westview, 2012), The Routledge Handbook of Premodern Japanese History (Routledge, 2017) and numerous shorter works.

Dr. Shaoqian Zhang, is an associate professor of art history at Oklahoma State University. She received her BA in traditional Chinese architecture from Beijing University and MA and Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern University. Professor Zhang’s research touches upon a wide variety of visual materials ranging from traditional East Asian architecture to modern and contemporary art in China. She has published a number of articles that reflect her interests in print culture, military history, medium specificity, and spectatorship in China’s modern period, appearing in journals such as Modern Art Asia, Transcultural Studies, Twentieth-Century China, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy and em>Art in Print. She is the author of “Political Art and Posters” in Oxford Bibliographies of Chinese Studies. Professor Zhang received the 2017 Oklahoma State University College of Arts and Sciences Junior Faculty Award for Scholarly Excellence.