2022 Cohort VI Participants
Please note that the position and affiliation of each individual are from the time of application.
Noriko Akiyama is a senior political writer at The Asahi Shimbun, the second largest newspaper company in Japan. Before assuming her current role, she served as an assistant political editor, political reporter, and reporter for AERA, a Japanese weekly magazine owned and published by Asahi Shimbun. She is the first female senior political writer and an assistant political editor at Asahi. In addition, Ms. Akiyama has authored eights books on women in non-profits, gender politics in Japan, female bureaucrats, civil society leaders, a guide to Japan’s political history, and a biography on Chiyo Obata, Japan’s first female professional wrestler, and other topics. In 2018, Ms. Akiyama received the Social Journalist Award from the Japan Association of New Public. She is also an alumna of the Japan Women Leadership Initiative (2018), a Fish Family Foundation-sponsored program for Japanese women; and the International Visitor Leadership Program (2016), the U.S. Department of State’s premier professional exchange program. Ms. Akiyama holds a Master of Science in empires, colonialism and globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in sociology from the University of Tokyo.
Benjamin Bartlett is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research interests include comparative cybersecurity policy, cybersecurity in East Asia, and international cooperation on cybersecurity capacity building. He has published in the Journal of Cyber Policy and Asia Policy. His most recent publication was a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Politics on cybersecurity in Japan. He is also a 2022 recipient of an NEH Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
Paul Christensen is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. Much of his past research and publications have focused on addiction and recovery in Japan, including ethnographic fieldwork with Alcoholics Anonymous and the Drug Addiction Recovery Group in Tokyo. In addition to Japan, his research interests include Hawai‘i and Brazil as well as gender, particularly masculinity. Dr. Christensen recently started a new ethnographic project in Tokyo that broadly considers how people conceptualize and create lives they find meaningful and purposeful. He attended the University of Washington as an undergraduate and received his Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
Charles Crabtree is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the politics, sociology, and economics of discrimination. In the past, he has studied this normatively important topic mainly in American politics. He increasingly examines it in Japanese politics, an important but insufficiently examined context. Methodologically, he uses experiments and automatic text analysis to better understand why people treat others differently because of their ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, or religion. Dr. Crabtree holds a BA in History from the University of Colorado, an MA in Public Policy and Administration from Northwestern University, an MA in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan.
Sayako Kanamori is an Associate Professor at the Center for Education in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Osaka University. Before joining Center for Education in Liberal Arts and Sciences, she was a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the Center for the Study of Co*Design and Institute for Transdisciplinary Graduate Degree Programs at Osaka University, a Director of the Research Department at the Japan Institute for Global Health (JIGH), a health specialist at the Global Health Policy Division of the International Cooperation Bureau in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), and a business consultant specializing in finance and accounting management. She obtained her BA in Biological Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, MSc in Medical Parasitology at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of London, and PhD in Health Science at the University of Tokyo. Her main research focuses on health policy, global health diplomacy, global health human resource development, and healthcare business. She has been giving talks and providing various programs to a variety of audiences, from junior high school students to citizens, over the last ten years. She is also managing and providing consultancy to various healthcare projects based on Public-Private Partnerships mainly in emerging countries.
Nick Kapur is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University’s Camden campus, where he teaches Japanese and East Asian history. His research interests focus on modern Japan and U.S.-Japan relations, broadly conceived. His book Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) details transformations in Japanese politics, culture, and society, as well as U.S.-Japan alliance diplomacy and the Cold War international system, that unfolded in the aftermath of the massive 1960 protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. In addition, he has recently published research on Chinese and Japanese environmental policy since 1970, U.S.-Japan relations during the John F. Kennedy administration, and the 1968 centennial celebrations of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Dr. Kapur received his Ph.D. in Japanese history from Harvard University.
Tom Phuong Le is an Associate Professor of Politics at Pomona College. His book, Japan’s Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2021) examines how demographics, technology, politics, and norms shape Japanese security policy. Dr. Le’s research on war memory and reconciliation, military technology, and nuclear non-proliferation has been published by The Journal of Asian Studies and The Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, as well as in popular media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post: Monkey Cage, and The Hill. He is research associate at the PRIME Institute at Meiji Gakuin University and Pacific Forum. He was a Fulbright fellow in Hiroshima, Japan, a CSIS U.S.-ROK NextGen fellow, AFIHJ Next Generation fellow, and Sasakawa Peace Foundation fellow. Dr. Le holds an MA and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Irvine, and BAs in political science and history from the University of California, Davis.
Tom Mason is a specialist in study abroad, international higher education, and Chinese & Japanese language pedagogy. Since 2020 he has served as executive director of United States-Japan Bridging Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides undergraduates from across the United States, especially those from historically underrepresented communities, with scholarships for study abroad in Japan as well as mentorship and networking opportunities. In 2003 Dr. Mason founded the ALLEX Foundation (Alliance for Language Learning and Educational Exchange), an organization that enables universities to establish and enhance Asian language programs by providing them with professionally trained, native-speaking Chinese, Japanese, or Korean instructors. To date ALLEX has trained more than 1,200 lecturers in language pedagogy and led Asian language instruction for tens of thousands of American university students at over 230 partner universities. Outside of ALLEX and the Bridging Foundation, Dr. Mason has held leadership and teaching positions at Columbia University, Cornell University, and several institutions in Japan. He is a passionate mentor, as well as a frequent speaker, in the fields of social entrepreneurship and international education. Dr. Mason earned his B.A. and M.A. from Cornell University in Asian Studies, and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in East Asian Languages.
Mihoko Matsubara is Chief Cybersecurity Strategist, NTT Corporation, Tokyo, where she is responsible for cybersecurity thought leadership. She previously served at the Japanese Ministry of Defense. Prior to joining NTT, she worked as VP and Public Sector Chief Security Officer for Asia-Pacific at Palo Alto Networks. She served on the Japanese government’s cybersecurity R&D policy committee between 2014 and 2018. Ms. Matsubara is a prolific writer and has published articles from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, Lawfare, New America, the RUSI Journal, etc. She published a cybersecurity book from the Shinchosha Publishing Co., Ltd in 2019, which won an award from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. She has spoken at various international engagements such as the NIST Cybersecurity Risk Management Conference 2018 in Baltimore, the RSA Conference 2018 and 2019 in San Francisco, Singapore International Cyber Week 2019 and 2021, the EU Cyber Forum 2019 in Brussels, and CyCon 2015 and 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia. She is Adjunct Fellow at the Pacific Forum, Honolulu, and Associate Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She earned an MA at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, under a Fulbright program.
Ryo Morimoto, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, is a first-generation college student and scholar from Japan. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things. Regionally centered on coastal Fukushima in Japan, his research creates spaces, languages, and archives through which to think about nuclear things, along with other not immediately sensible contaminants, as part of what it means to live in the late industrial and postfallout era. Dr. Morimoto is finishing up a book project, tentatively titled The Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihood in Fukushima’s Gray Zone (The University of California Press, Spring 23). Based on multiyear ethnographic fieldwork in coastal Fukushima, funded by the Japan Foundation and Toyota Foundation, this book explores the struggles of representing and experiencing low-dose radiation exposure in coastal Fukushima, where individual, social, political and scientific determinations of the threshold of exposure are often inconsistent. In 2022-23, Dr. Morimoto will be working on research that explores the U.S.-Japan collaborations on building a society enriched by science and technology. In particular, he will examine the development of remote technologies (robots) to address two urgent issues in Japan and beyond: decommissioning aging nuclear reactors and the aging population. He holds a Pd.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University.
Charles T. McClean is the Japan Foundation Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies. Previously, he was the Toyota Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. His research focuses on the politics of age, institutions, representation, social policy, and Japan. His work has been published (or is forthcoming) in Comparative Political Studies, Nature Medicine, Political Psychology, PS: Political Science & Politics, and other venues in political science and public policy. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Silver Democracy: Youth Representation in an Aging Japan, that explores the causes and consequences of youth underrepresentation in democracies. He holds a BA in International Relations and Japanese from Tufts University (summa cum laude), an MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego.
Lauren McKee is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian Studies at Berea College in Berea, KY, where she teaches classes on comparative and East Asian politics. She first joined the faculty of Berea in 2014 as an ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow after receiving a Ph.D. in International Studies from Old Dominion University. Dr. McKee regularly works with the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia, has published in the Association for Asian Studies’ journal Education About Asia, and is currently working on a volume for the AAS series Key Issues in Asian Studies on Japanese politics and government. In addition to pedagogy, Dr. McKee’s research interests are energy policy and security, especially nuclear energy policy in the United States and Japan.
Cindi Sturtz Sreetharan teaches in the Anthropology and Global Health programs the Arizona State University School of Human Evolution and Social Change. She joined ASU in 2015, after teaching for 12 years at CSU Sacramento. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation, KCCJEE, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Japan Foundation, and the Abe Fellowship (Social Science Research Council) for her work on issues relating to Japanese language, gender, and weight stigma. Dr. SturtzSreetharan works at the intersection of everyday language practices, weight, and stigma. She recently published a team-based ethnography Fat in Four Cultures (University of Toronto Press), a comparative project that reveals the shared struggles and local distinctions of how people in Japan, the United States, Samoa, and Paraguay are coping with and managing anti-fat messages from public leaders and peers. Currently, Dr. SturtzSreetharan is working to understand the ways that everyday language practices contribute to felt weight stigma. Dr. SturtzSreetharan received her PhD in linguistic anthropology (言語人類学) from UC Davis.