Nobuko Yamasaki

Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki is an Associate Professor. Dr. Yamasaki is a core faculty member of the Asian Studies and the Women, Gender & Sexulity Studies. She is a scholar of Comparative Literature, Japanese and Japanophone Literature. Her research is intersectional, being theoretically oriented, grounded in history of thought, multi-lingual, and trans-regional. Her research and teaching focus on literature, literary theory, film, art, and gender and sexuality studies. Her book, Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History (2021), examines women’s bodies as battlefields, where asymmetrical power dynamics meet, compete and complicate one another, producing narratives to be challenged, fragmented, and re-articulated from within. It explores the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" (ryōsai kenbo) in support of male empire-building. While in the graduate school of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, she first came to the United States as an exchange student at Cornell University, where she earned an MA in Asian Studies. She then moved to Seattle. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. Before coming to Lehigh, she taught Japanese language, comparative literature, women’s studies, and academic writing at the University of Washington and Kenyon College. She is now working on her second book (edited volume), Passing, Posing, Persuasion, with members of Zainichi Consortium. The book will be published from the University of Hawaii Press in November 2023.  She is one of the founding members who formed the Consortium. Its inaugural conference took place here at Lehigh University in 2017. She publishes in both English and Japanese. Dr. Yamasaki has been appointed as an executive committee member for the MLA (Japanese since 1900 forum).   

Selected Recent Publications

Books:

• • Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire: Fragmenting History (Routledge, 2021). (https://www.routledge.com/Prostitutes-Hostesses-and-Actresses-at-the-Edg...).
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Book Chapters:

• • Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U of Hawaii Press, 2023). (https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/passing-posing-persuasion-cultural-prod...).   

Articles:

• • “Soshū no yoru (1941) ni okeru ‘konketsuji’ eno kyōfu,” Ekkyō bunka kenkyū (The Anthology of Transborder Cultural Studies).  (Osaka University, 2021): 3-15. (https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/85134/atcs_004_003.pdf).
   
• • “Ukai Satoshi shi no kichōkōen inshōki” on "Bungaku kara yomitoku kansenshō," Shakai bungaku tsūshin vol. 115, 2021. (https://www.academia.edu/78998688/%E9%B5%9C%E9%A3%BC%E5%93%B2%E6%B0%8F%E...)

• • “Body as Battlefield,” Azalea, vol. 12 (Harvard University Korea Institute Publications, 2019): 391-414. (https://www.academia.edu/39531164/Body_as_Battlefield).
   
• •“Hayashi Kyoko ‘Kōsa’ ni okeru nihonjinshōfu o megutte: ‘nihonjin no kuseni,’” Genbaku bungaku kenkyū (Journal of Genbaku Literature), vol. 16 (Genbaku bungaku kenkyūkai, 2017): 2-17. (http://www.genbunken.net/kenkyu/16pdf/1601yamasaki.pdf). 
   
• • “Hayashi Kyōko: Kaku to teikoku to nihonjin shōfu,” Genbaku bungaku kenkyū kaihō vol. 51 (May 2017). (http://www.genbunken.net/kaihou/51.pdf).
   
• • "Nejireta masukyurinitee," Toshoshimbun, Tokyo, July 30, 2016. (https://www.academia.edu/35271024/Toshoshinbun_Mishima_July_30_2016_pdf).
   
• • “A review of The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature, by Kathryn Hemmann,” Dissertation Reviews, January 2016. ​(http://dissertationreviews.org/the-female-gaze-in-contemporary-japanese-...).