Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University

Wilson Center Project

"The Role of Japanese Social Scientists in Creating and Commemorating Japan's Economic Growth"

Project Summary

This book explores how social scientists conceive of and affect the two worlds of policy and public memory; that is, events both as they occur and as they are later recalled. It argues that postwar Japanese debates over economic policy and achievement -- and memories of them -- tell us much about competing Japanese visions of nationalism, citizenship, the past, and the imagined future. It recasts the strategy of high-speed economic growth as a contested site over which different groups of Japanese have negotiated their stances toward both international social science and the national polity.