Research Expertise and Interest

social thought, social sciences in modern Japan, marxism, Japanese history, Japanese-Russian relations

Research Description

Andrew Barshay received his A.B. in Oriental Languages, his M.A. in Asian Studies, and his Ph.D in History from the University of California, Berkeley. His first book explored the notion of the “public” in imperial Japan, finding it to have been hegemonized by the state, and left open to remaking by Japan’s defeat. The second turned to the idea of developmental backwardness or lateness in Japan and tracked its persistence among social thinkers and social scientists from the 1890s and across the divide of 1945. The most recent delved into the experience of imperial collapse through a study of the internment in Siberian labor camps and eventual repatriation of some 600,000 captured soldiers of Japan’s Kwantung Army. His current book project, entitled "MacArthur's Parting Gift," uses the postwar history of Japan's national railways as a prism for exploring the reconstruction of Japan from the ground up following the country's catastrophic defeat in 1945.