I study the history of modern Japan, with a focus on how Japanese society has shaped and has been shaped by projects of organized violence and control. My current book project—under contract with Columbia University Press and tentatively titled Garrison Life: Militarization and Everyday Life in Japan at the Dawn of the Postwar American Empire—rethinks the history of the Allied Occupation of Japan. I show that the Occupation was not simply the project of social and political reform familiar to most historians. It was also a vast experiment in military empire building.

Garrison Life offers a street-level view of this imperial project by showing the many, messy, intimate ways that ordinary people were caught up in new processes of militarization. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese signed up to work for the U.S. Army directly, and countless more were attracted by its economic gravity, but historians still know little about how these people used military connections to earn a livelihood. My research has also unearthed surprising new evidence of how the U.S. military regularly employed coercion and even violence in an attempt to control local Japanese populations. Tens of thousands of Japanese civilians were convicted by U.S. military courts, and scores of base town residents were shot and killed by U.S. sentries, usually while unarmed and fleeing. This project significantly revises the existing historical image of occupied Japan while enhancing our understanding of militarization as one of the most important social processes of the twentieth century. We cannot write the history of the last eight decades without understanding how and why millions of people around the globe participated in new projects and institutions that militarized their lives.

I completed my PhD in June 2020 under the direction of Sheldon Garon at Princeton University. I am an Assistant Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas.