Published papers

This nonfiction narrative follows coffee shop own Jun Akazaki as he and his mother try to get to safety in the minutes and hours after the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. As they watch the waves batter Otsuchi, their hometown, they begin to realize how thoroughly their lives have changed in an instant.

This nonfiction article, published in the online magazine "Catapult," focuses on the struggles of Masami Yoshizawa, a cattle rancher from Namie Town in Fukushima Prefecture. The article centers around his struggles to keep his herd of cattle alive and preserve his farmer after the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

This essay focuses on Keitaro Matsumoto, a hair stylist who, after the initial earthquake on Friday, March 11, planned to go to the low-lying district of Ryoishi to help his elderly mother evacuate. This piece also examines Keitaro’s personal history to show how he started his own salon, which he had been operating for over two decades before it was devastated by the disaster, like so many small businesses in the region.

This essay is based on my experiences volunteering with the relief effort in Kamaishi City and Otsuchi Town in Iwate Prefecture, in the summer of 2011. The piece depicts the kinds of work volunteers were tasked with, which included cleaning photographs recovered form the rubble and stripping the inside of buildings so that they could be renovated. This essay also deals with processes of grief on both the individual and collective level, and examines how both volunteer activity and religion provided important spaces for dealing with the trauma of disaster.

This article looks at the competing conceptions of gender in Pearl S. Buck’s Pavilion of Women. Using the work of prominent gender scholars as a lens to examine the text, I argue that the novel is a rich portrait of female subjectivity in early twentieth-century China, which should be given more attention.