Islands of Protest
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ALISA FREEDMAN is an associate professor of Japanese literature and film at the University of Oregon. Her books include Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road (2010), an annotated translation of Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (2005), and the coedited volume Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan (2013). She has authored articles and edited collections on Japanese modernism, popular culture, urban studies, youth culture, gender discourses, television history, and intersections of literature and digital media, along with publishing translations of Japanese novels and short stories.
JON HOLT is an assistant professor of Japanese at Portland State University. His research interests include modern Japanese poetry, Japanese Buddhism, and manga. Recent publications include “In a Senchimentaru Mood: Japanese Sentimentalism in Poetry and Art” (Japanese Language and Literature) and “Ticket to Salvation: Nichiren Buddhism in Miyazawa Kenji’s ‘Ginga tetsudō no yoru’ ” (Japanese Journal of Religious Studies). Currently he is translating the poetry of the contemporary writer Hayashi Amari.
MASAKI KINJO is an instructor of Japanese in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of California, Riverside. He is completing his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Capitalism, Colonialism, and Sovereignty in Okinawa” for the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He publishes in English and Japanese on postcolonialism, poetry, memory, and violence.
SHI-LIN LOH is a Singaporean who ended up studying Japan in the United States. Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, with a major field in modern Japanese history and a minor in science and technology studies. She is working on a dissertation about x-rays as related to the history of radiation in modern Japan.
AIMÉE MIZUNO graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor’s degree in Japanese studies. For the past ten years, she has worked in early-childhood and elementary education in Massachusetts and California. She holds an elementary teaching credential and a master of arts in education from California State University at Monterey Bay. She lives and works in Watsonville, California.
CAROLYN MORLEY, a professor of Japanese literature and theater at Wellesley College, specializes in premodern Japanese literature. She is the author of Transformations, Miracles, and Mischief: The Mountain Priest Plays of Kyogen (1993), as well as chapters and articles on noh and kyogen in English and Japanese. Her most recent publication is “Introduction and Translation: Kiyotsune” (in Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of No Plays of the Genpei War, 2013).
STEVE RABSON is a professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Brown University. He began publishing translations of Okinawan literature with “Cocktail Party” (1967) by Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and “Child of Okinawa” (1971) by Higashi Mineo in the book Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas (1989). He is coeditor with Michael Molasky of the anthology Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), which includes his translations. His book The Okinawan Diaspora in Japan: Crossing the Borders Within (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012) is a history of Okinawans who migrated to the mainland in which he translates their personal accounts of acclimations they made to life on the mainland and discrimination they encountered there.
KYOKO SELDEN was a senior lecturer in Asian studies at Cornell University, where she taught Japanese language and literature. With Noriko Mizuta, she edited and translated Japanese Women Writers and More Japanese Women Writers. She edited and translated The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Mark Selden. She also translated Kayano Shigeru’s Our Land was a Forest and Honda Katsuichi’s Harkur: An Ainu Woman’s Tale. A special issue of the Josai Review of Japanese Culture and Society bringing together her most important writings, translations, calligraphy, and art appeared in January 2015 together with a special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal.
TAKUMA SMINKEY (né Paul Sminkey) has been living in Japan for over twenty years and acquired Japanese citizenship in 2010. He received a master’s degree in English literature from Temple University and a master’s in advanced Japanese studies from Sheffield University. He teaches at Okinawa International University in the Department of British and American Language and Culture. His translations include A Rabbit’s Eyes by Haitani Kenjirō (2005) and Ichigenan—The Newcomer by David Zoppetti (2011).
ROBERT TIERNEY is an associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent publications include Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (2010) and “Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in Early Twentieth Century Japan” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 2011). He has completed a translation of Kōtoku Shūsui’s Imperialism: Monster of the Twentieth Century and a monograph on Japan’s first anti-imperialist movement.
VICTORIA YOUNG is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Leeds. Her thesis is provisionally titled “In-citing Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yoko.” Her primary research interest is contemporary literature from mainland Japan and Okinawa, which she approaches from a perspective informed by gender, postcolonial, and especially translation theories. She also served as managing editor of Japan Forum from 2011 to 2014.