Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins, Dr

Tutor, Japanese Studies

Biography

Background

Currently I teach Japanese history, politics, society and language at Asian Studies. In the 1990s I worked for the Yomiuri Shimbun and its English-language newspaper in Tokyo as a translator and reporter. I obtained my Ph. D from the University of Edinburgh in 2005 and taught modern and medieval Japanese history, modern Korean history, modern East Asian political thought, and translation at Durham University from 2004 to 2007. I have been teaching at Edinburgh since 2008.  

 

Current research interests

My research interests are in Japanese legal history, especially the Japanese reception of Western law in the nineteenth century, the development of Japanese criminal law, and the law and citizenship. I am also interested in contemporary constitutional debate, war historiography, and women and Japanese history. My publications include: ‘Progress Impeded: Constraints on Legal Equality in Post-Restoration Japan’, Japan Forum 20(3) 2008: 337-360; Power and Dissent in Imperial Japan: Three Forms of Political Engagement. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2013; ‘Facilitating Fascism?: the Japanese Peace Preservation Act and the Role of the Judiciary’, in Fascism and Criminal Law: History, Theory, Continuity, edited by Stephen Skinner. Oxford: Hart Publishing. 2015: 163-189; ‘The Emperor’s Sovereign Status and the Legal Construction of Gender in Early Meiji Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 43(2) 2017: 257-88; and ‘Yukitoki Takikawa (1891˗1962) and Legal Autonomy in Interwar Japan’, in Ideology and Criminal Law: Fascist, National Socialist and Authoritarian Regimes, edited by Skinner. Oxford: Hart Publishing. 2019: 229-54. Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins, interview with Tristan Grunow, The Meiji at 150 Podcast, podcast audio, February 26, 2019. https://meijiat150.podbean.com/e/episode-97-dr-hiromi-sasamoto-collins-edinburgh/.
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