Welcome to my homepage. I am a scholar of modern Japanese history based at the Institute for Asian Studies at Leipzig University, Germany. I research and teach the social and intellectual history of twentieth-century Japan, focusing on social movements, technology, and environmentalism.
February 27, 2026
Together with Anat Plocker and Ran Zwigenberg, I have started a new research project on the history of Conspiracy Theory in the Global Easts. We are kicking off with a workshop in summer. Have a look under my research.
February 18, 2026
Another text of mine on Ōta Ryū has appeared in Chris Perkins and Ferran de Vargas edited volume named Political Thought and Japan's New Left Movement. The overall project aims at writing something like a compendium on important thinkers and activists of the Japanese New Left. If you are interessted in that topic you should really have a look. I am very greatful for the opportunity to publish among so many fine scholars of Japanese intellectual history.
Recently I have started to look at my notes I took over the years. It is a complete mess, of course, but I think I will publish some of my talks and research notes in the month to come on my homepage. Among them is a talk I made at a conference in Leiden in 2018 that was all about 1968, but since has not led to any publications. With the caveat that this is old research, I have uploaded the text here. It is also available as a bit more nicely formated PDF. For me, the research was important, as I found how influencial the Nazi and antisemite Carl Schmitt was, and still is, for left-wing theory in Japan (and not only there...). The damage the two Nazi/German intellectual charlatans, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, have done to the global Left after 1945 is immense.
January 9, 2026
A short piece of mine on the deliberations between the New Left radical and later ultra-right-winger Ōta Ryū, and the science critic Miyawaki Akira, has been published in a fascinating volume on the politics of animism, edited by my former colleagues at Kyoto University's Jinbunken: Ishii Miho and Fujihara Tatsushi. The book is available via open access, for which I would like to thank Professors Ishii and Fujihara. My contribution was written as a result of research conducted at Jinbunken, and can be read as a precursor to my piece on Japanese hippies from September.
September 22, 2025
My newest research article "Dark Green Religion, Trans-Pacific Counterculture, and the Ethno-environmental Politics of Japanese Hippies on Suwanose Island and Amami Ōshima, 1965–1989" has just been published at the Social Science Japan Journal.
Abstract:
"In the 1970s, the political theory of the Japanese New Left merged with the countercultural and religious practices of the Japanese hippie movement, leading to a successful environmental protest on the Tokara and Amami island chains. A small hippie commune called ‘The Tribes’ (Buzoku) on Suwanose Island was part of a global countercultural network linking the Californian Beat scene, West Coast Zen, the Japanese New Left, and environmental protests. On Amami Ōshima, the same hippies, led by Pon (Yamada Kaiya), played a key role in local environmental protests. They practised Dark Green Religion and successfully opposed East Asian Fuels (Tōa Nenryō KK) from building a refinery on an uninhabited island, gaining the support of the local fishing community. However, their increasing alignment with anti-Japanese activism led to alienation from the locals and violent attacks by right-wing groups in 1988, resulting in the commune’s dissolution. This study highlights the New Left’s contribution to ethno-environmentalism, emphasizing the intersection of Dark Green Religion, counterculture, and anti-imperialist activism. It shows that left-wing hippies were not necessarily bound by notions of ‘victimhood’, but through transnational counterculture and religion developed an essentialist understanding of nature as the cornerstone of their environmentalist activism."
August 4, 2025
I am happy to announce that my paper "Under A Black Sun: Christian Students and Kyoto Intellectuals Challenge the Industrial Modernity of Expo ’70" has been published in early and open access in Japan Review.
Here is the abstract
"The 1970 Japan World Exposition in Osaka is often understood as a spectacle of Japanese ultramodernity. However, recent research suggests that the Expo instead represented the rise of post-modernism in Japan. Abandoning mass politics, the Expo became a space for postmodernist political irony, such as the Black Sun Face that Okamoto Tarō directed at the Shōwa Emperor during the opening ceremony. This article argues that both creators and protesters of the Expo challenged Western-liberal industrial modernity through the politics of diversity. At the forefront of protests against the Expo were the Protestant Christian students of the United Church of Christ in Japan, who banned the participation of their congregations in the Expo. However, the Expo’s actual planners also subverted the western-liberal industrial modernity at its heart. The Kangaerukai—comprising Kyoto University academics, many from the Institute for Research in Humanities, and the science fiction writer Komatsu Sakyō—envisioned the Expo as a festival that would focus on a “diversity” of civilizations, with the “West” at the periphery and Japan as the communicative center. By cooperating with political elites from right and left, the Kangaerukai was successful in creating a high-industrial cultural marketplace, celebrating a capitalist modernity of global diversity,and laying the groundwork for the idea of productivity through cultura self-actualization."
March 18, 2025
I have realized that I have not updated my homepage in quite a while. Since my last entry I have moved away from Kyoto, parting from Japan after living there for six years. This was a bitter-sweet farewell as I have left behind dear friends and collegues who have so much enriched my personal and professional life. I feel very honored to have worked in the last "research-heaven" in Japan, the Jinbunken. So long and thanks for all the fish!
Since then I have joined Japanese Studies at the Institute for Asian Studies at Leipzig University. It's different here in Leipzig. But most importantly the collegues are great and the kids are alright.
November 13, 2023
Ran Zwigenberg is giving a book talk at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Research in Humanities on December 15, 2023. 15:00-17:00 (Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, Seminar Room 1 (1F), Jinbunkagaku Kenkyūjo-honkan).
The topic is his newly published book “Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” that came out at Chicago University Press in 2023.
In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts—by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other social scientists—to tackle the complex ways human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. Nuclear Minds traces these efforts and the ways they were interpreted differently across communities of researchers and victims. The book sets out, first, to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints in which researchers and victims were acting and, second, to explore the way suffering was understood in different cultural contexts before PTSD was a category of analysis.
Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on modern Japanese and European history, with a specialization in memory and intellectual history.
October 2, 2023
The struggle between the students of Yoshida Dormitory and the Kyoto University administration has been going on for years, and a decision by the Kyoto District Court on the university's lawsuit against the residents is expected in early October. Lola Simon of Brown University (US) has written a great article about the situation there, after her stay in Kyoto to research the memory politics of Yoshida Dormitory.
August 4, 2023
I had a fantastic time on Wednesday listening to Edward Jones-Imhotep's talk here at Kyodai on the social history of technology in the United States. Presenting on the scientific management ideology of Henry Gantt and Frederick Taylor in their efforts to overcome human-machine "failure," Jones-Imhotep showed how Gantt and Taylor both sought to bust unions in the factories where they were employed as consultants. Taylor strategically hired black workers to break up labor gangs organized around machines and along ethnic lines to break their ability to bargain collectively. His student, Henry Gantt, on the other hand, came from a former slaveholding family and was convinced of the racist notion that black workers did not belong in the industrial North. Therefore, Jones-Imhotep argues, he applied his scientific management theories, like the "Gantt-Chart," with the goal of increasing productivity among non-black workers, breaking social cohesion by individualizing the measurement of productivity, without hiring black workers like Taylor. Very fascinating story that the fact that socio-ethnic discrimination, union busting, and efforts to increase productivity always go hand in hand.
July 21, 2023
Update with my latest publications and talks. I intend to upload some of the drafts of papers I have written, and eventually link to my published work (since I do not command legions of lawyers or live in the Bahamas to protect me from copyright claims, I will not make published material available for download). Anyway, you can now find more information about my research projects that I am currently working on.
July 19, 2023
I recently started to reconstruct my homepage. For now there is not too much content on this site and the list of publications is incomplete. You can refere to my work at Researchmap, although the entries are in dire need of an update as well.
With Anat Plocker and Ran Zwigenberg.
The project “The Politics, Knowledge, and Technology of Conspiracy Theories in the Global Easts” deals with the emergence of “modern conspiracy theories” in East Asia and Eastern Europe since the end of World War I and their political practice and implications. Since the First World War, a series of theories emerged in Europe, North America, and Asia that attributed the blame for an alleged societal decline on a small group of people, often “the Jews,” but, depending on location and time, other groups also occupied this position in different societies. Conspiracy theorists assumed a global dimension and connection through secret “networks” and “machinations”, and groups could often alternate between enemy and friend attributions: “Jewish capital” or “Jewish Bolsheviks” could be classified as either “allied,” or “hostile,” or one and the same, depending on political positioning. In this context, political actor-dependence was not a one-way street. While our political-historical approach to global conspiracy theories focuses on the trans imperial space of the Global Easts, mainly Poland and Japan, it follows the theories and the groups, individuals, and networks that pursued them globally.
Furthermore, our project seeks to take these groups and theories seriously as representations, as wild as they sometime are, of genuine and political interest. The global spread of technology and scientific knowledge was followed by the spread of conspiratorial knowledge, an intention-based and functional rationalism, allowing the popularization of conspiracy theories thorough telegraphy, radio, newspapers, television, telephone, computers, and the internet. Conspiracists often understand conspiratorial knowledge as a rational counterargument against the perceived non-rational chaos of opinions in modern society, or as “truth.” Not an “irrationality” or “non-factuality” of conspiracy, but the instrumental rationality of actors such as social and natural scientists and engineers could be used just as well for the spread of conspiracy theories.
The modern Japanese Empire and the postwar Japanese nation is one excellent case study for the investigation of the “Global Politics of Conspiracy Theories,” as Jews, which unlike in Europe were almost nonexistent in Japan, played a small but persistent part in the imagination of Japanese conspiracists. Jews, of course, were not the only group. Closer to home, in 1923, the confrontation with the Soviet Union in East Asia and the annexation of Korea as a colony were summarized in a conspiracy theory that led to a pogrom against Koreans, Chinese, and socialists in Tokyo during the Kanto earthquake. Jews, however, were ever present, during the occupation of China until 1941, Japanese military officers were also convinced of the importance of “Jewish-American capital” and the “influence of the Rothschilds.” The Post-war Japanese left produced its own share of conspiracy theories that, in the 1970s, amalgamated with New Age theories and environmentalism, and were proliferated by the first computer networks in the 1980s.
On the other edge of the Russian Empire lay Poland, partitioned until the end of World War I. In many ways it is an epicenter of antisemitic conspiracy theories, which have shaped political life in Poland since it gained its independence in 1918. Jews, a substantial minority already seen through the Christian prism as Christ killers, became central to Polish self-definitions and political culture. The most influential nationalist party in pre-independence Poland, Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic Party promoted the idea that Polish and German Jews were “conspiring with Germany” against Polish independence. During the Soviet-Polish war (1919-1921), Polish forces unleashed unprecedented pogroms on Jews, accusing them of “supporting the Bolsheviks.” The interwar years saw rising political antisemitism and the spread of Judeo-Bolshevism, the idea that communism was a Jewish conspiracy to control the world’s population. World War II and the Holocaust intensified the spread of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, amplified by the Nazi propaganda machine. The postwar communist takeover only served to confirm these theories, as Jews, visible in government for the first time, were blamed for bringing Stalinism to Poland. And this continues through the communist and post-communist periods. Imaginary Jews, either Polish or “global,” are present in every election campaign, in every online forum, as the hold of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories has not waned. Gains in reducing anti-Jewish sentiments in the 1980s and 1990s have been wiped by the rise of social media. In 2025, during the Polish presidential elections, one of the candidates, who won 6.34% of the votes, proudly announced that he was fighting against the “Judaization” of Poland. Karol Nawrocki, the election winner and the current president of Poland, is a historian who led efforts to advance a Polish nationalist view of Holocaust history, which sees Jews as conspiring to blame Poles for the Holocaust. Like Japan, contemporary Poland has a tiny Jewish population alongside persistent, increasingly mainstream, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that play a substantial role in politics and society.
In sum, our project breaks new grounds for understanding conspiracy theory and its challenge to social stability as a global phenomenon. Is aims at excavating knowledge, politics, and technology based modes of conspiracy, using several cases of transimperial spaces of the Global Easts, like Japan or Poland as a focal point for understanding the phenomenon in general.
Between the 1970s and the mid-1990s, millions of Japanese microcomputers, also known as personal computers (pasokon), home computers (maikon), or word processors (wāpuro), were sold to Japanese consumers. For two decades, Japanese computer technology from dozens of manufacturers and hundreds of software houses transformed society by making consumer-users and shaping current and future uses of technology. This history of Japanese computer technology, remembered with nostalgia for "the nation's personal computer" (kokumin no pasokon), peaked in the mid-1990s. After 1995, the globalizing force of the Internet and U.S.-made corporate computer standards prevailed in the form of the Web browser and Microsoft Corporation's Windows 95 operating system.
Early proponents of computer technology, some from the Japanese radical New Left, constructed an ideology about the artistic nature of the computer in making art or "things" (monozukuri) that was instrumental in propagating the use of the computer and that differed significantly from the "California ideology" that has framed the ideology of Silicon Valley since the late 1970s. Japanese computer users sought to gain agency over the computer machine by making it, reconstructing it, using it, and resisting it. Their interest in doing so was based on pure enthusiasm, but also on notions of class, gender, and national ideology. In the process, they invested their available social time in the computer machine, which ultimately accelerated the process that made the computer a universal tool of labor, but failed both in technological and national idealism and in the drive to overcome class and gender differences. Thus, in the second half of the 1980s, the Japanese microcomputer was "normalized" by bringing it to the consumer. Japanese families bought microcomputers for professional, educational, business, or recreational purposes. While some of the uses were quite different from those in other industrialized nations, the normalized use of the computer machine distanced the user from mastering the technology. Computer technology became a universal tool that, in Japan's liberal capitalism, served not only to automate and rationalize, but also to universalize labor time. The universalization of labor means that waged labor time and unwaged disposable social time ("leisure time") intermingle until the latter can become fragmented and insignificant. Through these universalizing efforts, which were not tied to the physical location of the factory but could integrate labor into production down to the family unit, capitalist agencies could extract more time from workers' social time without (in the short term) lowering wages for highly specialized knowledge labor.
In the mid-1970s, religion, counterculture, and Third World anti-imperialism intersected in a small hippie commune on the island of Amami Ōjima and its involvement in local environmental protest. This group, led by the hippie "Pon," or Yamada Kaiya, had evolved from the "Buzoku," or "tribes," the mainspring of the small but even more influential Japanese hippie movement. Although the hippies numbered only a few hundred "members" in their heyday, between 1965 and 1989 they forged transnational connections with key actors in the California counterculture, US environmentalism, the Japanese peace movement, local Communist Party mayors, and networks of support for imprisoned members of the left-terrorist Anti-Japanese Front. These environmental activists, members of small hippie communes on the fringes of the Japanese New Left, were entangled in a global personal network that linked countercultures such as California Beat and Westcoast Zen in the United States with environmentalist protest, postwar religiosity, and New Left theory and practice in Japan. However, the impact of the Japanese New Left on Japanese environmental politics from below after the student protests and street battles of "1968" has been surprisingly understudied. My research aims to fill this gap by focusing on how essentialist notions of a "nature" to be protected actually influenced environmental movements in the 1970s, and how the New Left contributed to theory and practice.