Tadashi Ishikawa is a historian of Japan and East Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His research and teaching interests include modern Japanese gender and sexuality, empire and colonialism, and law and society. Trained as a scholar of Japan in its regional and international contexts, Dr. Ishikawa has worked on gender and law in Japan and East Asia before and after the end of World War II in relation to the circulation of visions and people; tensions between legal knowledge and practices; and the dynamics of power relations.

Dr. Ishikawa publishes a book titled Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan. The book studies the Japanese empire––including Japan and colonial Taiwan, a settler island near southeastern China and Japan’s first colony from 1895 to 1945––with a focus on gender in the interplay of family and law. By analyzing press records and judicial archives, this study explores how public debates and law courts made the Japanese empire engendered. The book reveals that gender was circular in terms that challenged and reinforced gendered norms and practices in three ways: competing ideals of progress, tension of Taiwanese masculinity, and contested formation of women’s agency.

His second book project is tentatively titled “Japan on the Move: Mobilities, Gender, and Cold War Asia.” This research studies travelers, development assistance, refugees, and migrant workers between Japan and Asia (Taiwan, the Philippines, and Thailand) from the 1960s through 1991. It questions the division of theories and practices on the movement of people with regard to agency and victimhood. The book explores intellectual, manual, and erotic labor in an economically prosperous Japan and authoritarian Southeast Asia, arguing that gendered mobility defined Japan’s Cold War at the intersection of the United States and Asia.

His research has been supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taiwan (R.O.C.), Chiu Foundation, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Matsushita Konosuke Memorial Foundation in Japan, and National Central Library in Taiwan as well as the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.