Yasuko Takezawa

Yasuko I. Takezawa is a Japanese cultural anthropologist who researches race, ethnicity, and immigration in the United States, Japan, and other countries. She is a professor of cultural anthropology and sociology at the Intercultural Research Institute of Kansai Gaidai University.

Career Takezawa is a professor emerita of cultural anthropology and sociology at Kyoto University. She is a director and professor of Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University. She specializes in the study of race, ethnicity, and immigration, particularly in the United States and Japan. A distinguishing concern of Takezawa’s research is that race is not a modern Western construction but a construction emanating from the Middle Ages at least in Europe and Japan.

She is the author of Breaking the Silence: Ethnicity and Redress among Japanese Americans (1995) which was one of the finalists of Victor Turner Prize of the American Anthropological Association. Its Japanese version, 新装版 日系アメリカ人のエスニシティ (Transformation of Japanese American Ethnicity; 1994), won the Shibusawa Award of the Japanese Ethnological Society (now the Japanese Association of Cultural Anthropology).

Selected works

Books

As author

新装版 日系アメリカ人のエスニシティ (1994) Breaking the Silence: Ethnicity and Redress among Japanese Americans (1995)

As editor

Racial Representations in Asia (2011) Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations (2016; co-edited with Gary Y. Okihiro) Kantaiheiyō chiiki no idō to jinshu : tōchi kara kanri e sōgū kara rentai e (Migration and Race in the Trans-Pacific Region) (2019; co-edited with Akio Tanabe and Ryuichi Narita) Hyokka Ryoran: Hyogo Tabunkakyōsei no 150 nen no Ayumi. (A History of 150 Years Old Multicultural Coexistence in Hyogo Prefecture) (2021; co-edited with Daisuke Higuchi, and Hyoto International Association) Race and Migration in the Transpacific (2023; co-edited with Akio Tanabe) Visibilities and Invisibilities of Race and Racism Toward a New Global Dialogue (2025; co-edietd with Faye V. Harrison and Akio Tanabe))

Articles