Modern Japan, Empire and Imperialism, Japanese-Soviet Relations

My first monograph, Revolution Goes East, dealt with both geopolitical and ideological dimensions of Japanese engagement with Soviet communism. By examining the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Japanese empire during the 1920s, I attempted to challenge Eurocentric understandings of Japanese anticommunism and correct important misconceptions about Japan’s imperial policies in East Asia.

In my second project, I turn to Soviet-Japanese relations in the Mongolian territories between the 1900s and 1950s. There are no studies that compare Soviet and Japanese imperial formations in East Asia. By placing the Mongols in the center of a Eurasian history, the project challenges historiographical compartmentalization in the representations of the Mongols established during the Cold War. To reconsider Eurasian history from the vantage of the Mongols, we can identify strategies, power relations, and policies that great powers (Russia, China, Japan), regardless of their ideological preferences, have deployed in dealing with “small people” caught in the regional power struggles.

“Samurai and Mongols: How a medieval samurai became Chinggis Khan,” Journal of World History 34:3 (September 2023)

“Meiji and October Revolutions.” In 150 Years Since the Meiji Revolution. Edited by Matthew Augustine (Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press, April 2020. In Japanese)

“The Buryat-Mongol National Movement and Japanese Interests in Siberia, 1917–1919.” In Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment and a New Order in East Asia. Edited by Evan Dawley and Tosh Minohara (Lexington Books, 2020)

"The Russian Revolution and the Emergence of Japanese anticommunism," Revolutionary Russia 31:2 (2018)

“New Revolutionary Agenda: the Interwar Japanese Left on the ‘Chinese Revolution,” Cross-Currents (September 2017)

“Der Fremde. Russlandbild und Russlandpolitik in Japan, 1715–2015 (Russian Studies in Japan, 1715–2015: an Overview),” Osteuropa (May–June 2015)

Review, “I. Kalinin: Japan and Russia,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (January 2017)

Japan’s Ministry of Education, the Japan Foundation, UC Berkeley, the Hoover Institute, The Tohoku University Research Fellowship, the German Excellence Initiative