Yoshimura’s Ghost: Essays on Rural Japan is a collection of six essays exploring the cultural phenomena and daily life of rural Japan. The collection represents my experiences of living as an educator, wife, and mother living in a post 9/11 world. Although not chronological, the essays flow episodically and illustrate examples of the social and cultural concepts that struck me as elements of otherness. Some of the essays in this collection examine the parallels between the exclusion and isolation I felt in Japan as compared to other marginalized groups. Several of the essays describe the culture of Japanese schooling, perhaps offering a perspective only accessible to a foreigner seeing the ways in which a centuries old culture, which is in many ways the most “modern” of any on the planet, absorbs and makes its own cultures from around the world.

published_or_final_version / History / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy