Yu Sakai

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Japan and East Asia, with an emphasis on a transnational and anti-disciplinary perspective. I am particularly interested in the concept of nature, the place of culture in politics, visual culture, non-imperial transnational encounters, and the history of natural science. After completing a DPhil in History at Oxford, I was a JSPS Research Fellow affiliated with Nichibunken and Waseda University. Before returning to academia in 2014, I spent several years working in business and the UN Refugee Agency in Japan.

Whilst I strive to contribute to knowledge-making in the specialised subdivision of modern Japanese history, I believe it is equally important to be able to relate to and engage with research projects that come from other academic disciplines and deal with other geographical areas and historical time so that my research will have a global significance and much wider implications for human activities. It is my objective to use history of Japan and East Asia to contribute in a unique way to the emerging field of global and transnational history.

By focussing on the thought and extensive activities of Kunikida Doppo, arguably the most celebrated Japanese literary figure in the early twentieth century, my doctoral dissertation, which I am currently turning into a monograph, gives a unique insight into the dynamics of politics and culture. Whilst formal political institutions are generally credited as the vehicle and arena of historical change, curiously, at the turn of the twentieth century in Japan, a great many people began to pursue the betterment of society and mankind in the realm of culture and thought outside the apparatuses of the state. Ultimately, this research joins the recent scholarly effort to effect the seismic shift in the focus of the historical narrative in the non-Western world from the singular unifying historical narrative based on the historical experience of the West to the diversity and multitude of global historical experiences.

My article, 'Survive to be Critical: The Wartime Graphic as a "masquerading" media in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-05', appeared in War in History.

I also recently published a book chapter, ‘The “Second Ishin” and Kunikida Doppo’s Misunderstood Nature’, in the groundbreaking volume Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Japan and the Wider World (Leiden: Brill, 2024), which seeks not only to place modern Japan in the context of global history but to rethink approaches to global history altogether.