Faculty and Staff

2008-2009

Director

James Ketelaar will be acting director of KCJS in the academic year 2008-09. He previously served as KCJS Professor in 1995-96, and again in fall 2004. He is currently Professor in History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and its Persecution (1989), and is currently finishing a book on the importance of the barbarian and the frontier in the construction of Japanese national identity and national history, tentatively titled Ezo: A History of Japan's Eastern Frontier.

KCJS Course Instructors

Asli M. Colpan is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, Japan. She obtained her M.Sc. at the Univeristy of Leeds in the U.K. and her Ph.D. at Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan. Her research interests include corporate strategy, corporate governance, and especially the evolution of large enterprises in industrial and emerging economies. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Industrial and Corporate Change, Asia Pacific Journal of Management and Asian Business and Management. She is also the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Business Groups, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2009.  

Claire Cuccio is an independent scholar working on projects related to modern Japanese visual arts and East Asian comparative cultural policy. She completed her doctorate at Stanford University in modern Japanese literature, where her interdisciplinary work in art history produced a dissertation on an arts and literary magazine whose mission was to educate the Meiji public in the arts and humanism. She is currently writing on the collaboration of a group of artist and writers who helped to craft a cultural policy for Japan during the Meiji era of nation-building. She will teach a course on modern Japanese prints.

Sarah Frederick is Associate Professor of Japanese literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Boston University.She received her BA from Harvard and her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2000.She is the author of Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women's Magazines in Interwar Japan (Hawai'i, 2006), and is currently writing a book about 20th century Japan through the works of popular fiction writer Yoshiya Nobuko.

Takashi Hikino is associate professor of industrial and business organization at the Graduate School of Economics at Kyoto University, where he teaches industrial organization, business economics, and corporate strategy, and comparative management. He regularly teaches a course on Japanese business economics.

Ikuo Kume is professor of political science at the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University. His research interest is in comparative political economy focusing on Japan. His publications in English include Disparaged Success: Labor Politics in Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 1998) and Local Government Development in Postwar Japan (Oxford University Press, 2001, co-authored with Michio Muramatsu and Farrukh Iqbal). He will teach a course on Japanese politics.

Junko Minamoto is part of the faculty at Kansai University. A specialist in Buddhism and women studies, she is the author of more than a dozen books including topics in Buddhism, Japanese women’s issues, and human rights. She regularly teaches a course in Japanese on gender studies in the spring semester at KCJS.

Masahiko Okada received a PhD from Stanford University in Religious Studies, and is current Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Tenri University in Nara. He is interested in Buddhist cosmography and in Japanese religious history of the nineteenth century, and has translated James Ketelaar’s Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan into Japanese. He will be teaching a course on Japanese religion in spring 2009.

Karin Swanson teaches at Otani, Kansai Gaidai and Kyoto Universities. An art historian, her specialization, ranging from the 17th-20th c., focusses on Kyoto painters, with emphasis on Zen sect monk-artists. Previous research also includes 19th-20th Japanese folk pottery. She teaches Japanese art history at KCJS.

Language Instructors

Miyuki Fukai received a Ph.D. in Language Education from Indiana University Bloomington in 2004 and taught Japanese at Columbia University from 2004-2008. While teaching, she has been involved in collaborative research projects which investigate blogging, podcasting, and literacy activities from the perspectives of sociocultural theory and critical literacy. Recently she coauthored a chapter in Japanese as a Foreign Language Education: Multiple Perspectives (edited by Yukiko Hatasa). She joined KCJS in summer 2008.

Orie Maeguchi joined the Japanese Language Program at KCJS in 2006. She received her B.A. in Western philosophy from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, and her M.A. in Asian studies from University of Illinois . Before coming to KCJS, she taught at Columbia University, UCLA, the Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Yokohama, and in various other programs. She is the co-author of Shauman's Outline of Japanese Vocabulary.

Itsuko Nakamura joined the Japanese Language program at KCJS in 2007. She received her B.A. in Asian Studies from New York University and her M.A. and Ed.M in Applied Linguistics from Teachers College Columbia University. Before coming to the Center, she taught at New York University, Trinity College, Mount Holyoke College and Harvard University.

Mari Noda will be interim director of the KCJS Japanese language program for 2008-2009. She is Associate Professor of Japanese and director of Ohio State University's Summer Program East Asian Concentration (SPEAC). She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from Cornell University. She is the producer of Japanese: The Spoken Language, Part I CD-ROM (Yale, 1998) and is currently finished a DVD program for Parts 2 and 3 of the same series for intermediate to advanced learners. Her teaching and research is guided by the idea of performed culture, in which language knowledge is viewed as a type of lived cultural knowledge. 

Mariko Uemiya has been at the Center since 1991. She received both a B.A. and a M.A. in English literature from Kobe College as well as an M.A. in teaching a second language from Temple University in Osaka. In addition to teaching at the Center, she has taught at the Illinois Center of Konan University in Kobe, at Japanese schools in Taiwan, and been the coordinator for study abroad programs for high school students.

Chihiro Yamaoka has been at KCJS since 1989. He received his B.A. in German literature from Chuo University in Tokyo and his M.A. in linguistics from Ohio University. Upon his return to Japan and before the establishment of the Center, Yamaoka sensei taught Japanese language at Osaka University for Foreign Studies and at the Illinois Center at Konan University in Kobe. He has also cowritten a series of Japanese language textbooks entitled Workbooks of Japanese Grammar for Upper-Elementary Level I, II, II, and IV. 

Onsite Staff

Yoshiko Hollstein is financial officer of KCJS and oversees all financial matters. She manages the payment of bills, the movement of funds, and regular financial reporting.

Lisa Honda is student services coordinator for KCJS, helping students with extracurricular activities and housing issues, and is in charge of the local Web site. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she double-majored in Asian studies and Japanese language and literature. She joined the staff in 2002.

Michiko Nakanishi is KCJS librarian. She is in charge of the development and maintenance of the collection of books and journals about Japan. She orders textbooks and prepares reading packets and assists students with references questions about resources for their research projects. She joined KCJS in summer 2008. 

Fusako Shore is KCJS assistant director, handling office management, student services, academic reporting, scheduling, planning of enrichment programs, faculty relations, alumni affairs, and cooperative arrangements with Kyoto-area universities and organizations. Shore-san is a native of Kyoto and has been at KCJS since the first class in 1989-90.

Tazuko Wada is KCJS housing coordinator, overseeing all aspects of the housing programs, including homestays and apartments for students and visiting faculty. She also serves as administrative assistant, overseeing facilities, equipment, and inventory. Wada-san has been with the KCJS since 1993.