Sayaka Chatani

Why do people decide to fight for their nations and people? What turns people into supporters of an ideology? I have been intrigued by these questions for two decades now, which has driven me to study the intersection between the nation, the military, and society in East Asia. I found my academic home in the field of history, but am eager to learn other theories and methods that help me better investigate these issues.

In my first monograph, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, December 2018), I examined these questions through the history of youth mobilization by the Japanese empire. In addition to an analysis of the rise of youth discourse and agrarianism, my book presents ethnographical research on villages in northern Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea, and comparatively fleshes out a grassroots mechanism of ideological indoctrination. I believe this book is in conversation with many subfields, such as the histories of youth, fascism, the everyday, and emotions.

After publishing Nation-Empire, I switched gears from the empire to the postwar period and to the Korean population in Japan (or "zainichi Koreans"), with the help of KumHee Cho. My second monograph, A Nation Within: North Korean Zainichi in Postimperial Japan (Stanford University Press, March 2026), presents an intimate and gendered history of Chongryon, a community of pro-North Korean zainichi. Based on more than 200 interviews, the book shows how powerful their commitment to a diasporic decolonization project was, and how colonial, postcolonial, national, transnational, and familial dynamics intertwined to produce their energy. Chongryon's hegemonic status among zainichi Koreans not only shaped zainichi society's power politics, but also directly and indirectly influenced Japan's postwar politics. Through these Koreans' lens, I propose to see postwar Japan as "postimperial" Japan.

Relying on many scholars’ spirit of collective scholarship, I am gradually developing a website, Grassroots Operations of the Japanese Empire: primary sources translated for teaching purposes (japaneseempire.info), which presents a number of primary sources in English translation, along with an expert’s introduction and questions for discussion in each entry. Please contact me if you are interested in contributing a source from your research.

I also organize and moderate Japanese-English bilingual talk series at the Modern Japan History Association, called "New Books from Japan" and "Research Exchange Seminar."

Website: https://www.sayakachatani.com

TEACHING AREAS:

• East Asian International Relations
• Modern Imperialism and Colonialism
• The Japanese Empire
• Japanese History
• Korean History (modern)

RESEARCH AREAS:

• Ideologies, beliefs, and emotions in history
• Transnational methods
• Social history, especially oral history
• Decolonization and nationalisms in East Asia
• Japanese imperialism and colonialism
• Korean diasporas

PUBLICATIONS:

• A Nation Within: North Korean Zainichi in Postimperial Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, March 2026)
• Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018)
• Co-authored with Chien Wen Kung and Taomo Zhou, “Strategies of Belonging in the Bandung Era: Diaspora and Cold War Asia,” Journal of World History 36, no. 2 (June 2025): 297–324. 
• Co-authored with Amy Stanley, David Ambaras, Hannah Shepherd, and Chelsea Szendi Schieder, “Scholarly and Public Responses to ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’: The Current State of the Problem,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 21, issue 11, no. 3 (November 2023). 
• “Becoming Korean: Japanese Wives in the Boundary Formation of a Leftist Zainichi Community,” Critical Asian Studies 54 no.1 (March 2022): 105–127. 
• “Revisiting Korean Slums in Postwar Japan: Tongne and Hakkyo in the Zainichi Memoryscape,” Journal of Asian Studies 80 no. 3 (August 2021): 587-610.
• Coauthored with Amy Stanley, Hannah Shepherd, Chelsea Szendi Schieder, and David Ambaras, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War”: The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct,” The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus 19 no. 5, 13. (March 2021)
• “A Man at Twenty, Aged at Twenty-five: The Conscription Exam Age in Japan,” contributed to the roundtable “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 2020): 427-437.
• "Between ‘Rural Youth’ and Empire: Social and Emotional Dynamics of Youth Mobilization in the Countryside of Colonial Taiwan under Japan’s Total War,” The American Historical Review 122, no.2 (April 2017): 371-398.
• "The Ruralist Paradigm: Social Work Bureaucrats in Colonial Korea and Japan's Assimilationism in the Interwar Period," Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no.4 (October 2016): 1004-1031.
• “Youth and Rural Modernity in Japan 1900s-1920s” In Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century , edited by Richard Jobs and David Pomfret (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).