Michiko Takeuchi

Michiko Takeuchi, Ph.D.

Takeuchi2

Associate Professor

Dr. Michiko Takeuchi Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan.

Dr. Takeuchi’s research focuses on women’s roles and sexual politics in the Japan-U.S. relationship. She is currently working on two book projects. The first project is about prostitution during the American occupation period in Japan (1945-1952) and is based on interviews with Japanese women who associated with American GIs, as well as on ethnographic field research in Yokosuka, Japan, where the largest U.S. Navy base outside of the United States is located. The second project investigates the little-known relationship in the first half of the twentieth century between Japanese and American feminists, a relationship that centered on the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). By tracing the women’s correspondence, deposited at YWCAs in Japan, the United States, and Switzerland, Dr. Takeuchi reveals that the vaunted “liberation of Japanese women” during the U.S. occupation of Japan, rather than being invented on the spot, was actually the result of decades of collaborative labor activism between Japanese and American women. 

Dr. Takeuchi teaches a lower-division U.S. history course in the Active Learning Classroom; upper-division Japanese history, Asian women, and pop culture courses; and research seminars on transnational history. Dr. Takeuchi is a CSULB 49er whose adviser, the late Dr. Sharon Sievers, former chair of the History Department and director of the Women’s Studies program, wrote the book, Flowers in Salt (1981), which has inspired her to follow in Siever’s footsteps. 

Dr. Takeuchi is on leave for the academic year 2018-2019. 

Publications 

“Sexual Politics: Pan-Pan Girls in Postwar Manga and Graphic Arts” (forthcoming)

“At the Crossroads of Equality versus Protection: American Occupationnaire Women and Socialist Feminism in US Occupied Japan, 1945-1952.” In “The ERA in the 21st Century,” special issue, Frontiers: A Journal for Women’s Studies 38, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 114-47. 

“Cold War Manifest Domesticity: The ‘Kitchen Debate’ and Single American Occupationnaire Women in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952.” The U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 50 (Autumn 2016): 3-28. 

“Negotiating Respectability: Intersubjectivity in Interviews about Military Prostitution in US Occupied Japan.” Oral History 43, no. 2 (Autumn 2015): 70-90. 

“‘Pan-Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan (1945-1952).” In “Over There”: Living with the U.S. Military Empire, edited by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, 78-108. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

「占領期における日米相互売春制度の確立」Senryōki ni okeru Nichi Bei sōgo baishun seido no kakuritsu [The establishment of the bilateral prostitution system in occupied Japan] 占領•戦後史研究会ニュースレター Senryō Sengoshi Kenkyūkai Newsletter [Japan Association for the Study of the History of the Occupation and Postwar Period Newsletter] (Tokyo) 21 (June 2008).

External Grants & Fellowships

2018-2019 – NEH Fellowship for Advanced Social Science Research on Japan

2010 – Travel Grant, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai) 

2009 – Travel Grant, War and Peace Workshop Group, Sokendai 

1998 – Eleanor Roosevelt Scholarship Award, the United Nations Association of the United States of America 

Internal Grants & Fellowships

2014-2018 – CLA Research and Scholarly Activities Award 

2016-2017 – CLA Humanities Research Stimulation Award 

2013-2015 – CLA Scholarly Intersections Grant (co-applicant)

2007-2010 – Researcher, War and Peace Workshop Group, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai)

2008-2009 – Ann Tober Charitable Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship, UCLA 

2006-2007 – George Aratani Dissertation Research Fellowship, UCLA 

Honors

Excellent Scholarly Book for 2017 in the Social Sciences, the South Korean Academy of Arts and Sciences for “Over There”: Living with the U.S. Military Empire (Duke University Press, 2010). This volume was translated into Korean and published in South Korea by Green Bee Publication in 2016 as 오버데어: 2차세계대전부터 현재까지 미군제국과 함께 살아온 .

Best Teacher award, Most Helpful to Students category, 2015 US Higher Education Faculty Awards, Fine Arts, Humanities, Liberal Arts and Social Science

 

(Last updated: August 2018)