Spring is here! Let’s Yoshino!  The UW webcams bring the beauty of the Seattle campus to you wherever you have an internet connection. Keep watch on the quad Yoshino cherry trees as they bloom over the next several weeks, and enjoy the season. The UW Seattle campus has an impressive and well known stand of

Lecture recording available HERE. REGISTER NOW for the April 12, 2023 special lecture event ‘Stagnation or Renewal? Japan’s Energy and Climate Change Policy’ with Phillip Y. Lipscy as he walks us through Japan’s response to climate change. Once heralded for responding effectively to the 1970s energy crisis through  ambitious energy conservation and diversification —  which

UW Japan Studies Program Affiliate Faculty Walter Hatch‘s latest book Ghosts in the Neighborhood: Why Japan is Haunted by its Past and Germany is Not, is now available.  In his book, Hatch debunks the conventional wisdom about why Japan remains haunted by its militarist past in Asia, but Germany does not face such ghosts in

Alice Tseng investigates the multiple demands on architectural design and expression at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Whereas architectural nationalism, which Mitchell Schwarzer defines as design that advances ideas of a nation, may have been a dominant concern for scholarship up to now, diplomacy, commerce, and amusement deserve in-depth investigation as well.

When the U.S. demanded Japanese “boots on the ground” to support its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi responded by deploying a small contingent of Self-Defense Forces in the first significant display of SDF force. On the day following deployment, three antiwar protesters demonstrated by walking the corridors of SDF buildings in Tachikawa.

Read the annual newsletter of the UW Japan Studies Program! We are excited to share what our faculty, alumni, and students have been doing over the past year. We wish you a safe and healthy holiday season, and appreciate you being a part of our community.

Ghosts in the Neighborhood: Why Japan is Haunted by its Past and Germany is Not is now available for pre-order. In his newest book Walter Hatch debunks the conventional wisdom about why Japan remains haunted by its militarist past in Asia, but Germany does not face such ghosts in Europe. Read about it in his

The Indo-Pacific region is facing big demographic change. Core US allies Japan and South Korea – and adversaries Russia and China — are rapidly aging and have shrinking working-age populations, while other regional states are growing. Despite demographics, Japan’s military is the most powerful it has ever been…

Hafu (2013 Producer/Director/Videographer Megumi Nishikura) With an ever increasing movement of people between places in this transnational age, there is a mounting number of mixed-race people in Japan, some visible others not. “Hafu” is the unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experience in modern day Japan.

In the 1950s, high-rise housing projects called danchi appeared on Japan’s urban perimeters to address the nation’s urgent housing crisis after World War II. With modern kitchens, private baths, and steel doors that locked out intrusive neighbors, and inhabited by aspiring middle-class families that could afford refrigerators, washing machines, electric rice cookers and other new objects of