Yukiko Koga
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology Ph.D. in Anthropology, Columbia University, 2008

Professor Koga’s current research explores the generational transfer of unaccounted-for pasts stemming from Japanese imperialism in China. She explores what it means for both Chinese and Japanese to come to terms with the Japanese imperialism more than sixty years after Japan’s original violence and injustice in China ended with the Japanese defeat and the disappearance of its empire in 1945, and how the introduction of the market economy in China has created a new dynamic concerning the contested yet under-explored past for both Chinese and Japanese.

Koga’s book manuscript, Inheritance of Loss: The Political Economy of Redemption in China and Japan, explores how Chinese and Japanese post-generations encounter and confront catastrophic losses sustained through Japanese imperialism in China in the urban everyday life of Northeast China. Koga’s second book project, Accounting for Silence: (For)given Time and the Politics of Redress in China and Japan, is an ethnographic and historical exploration of compensation for Japanese wartime use of Chinese forced labor. Koga’s third book project, Between the Law: The Unmaking of Empire Through Legal Redress in East Asia, provides legal and anthropological analyses of a series of postwar compensation lawsuits filed by Chinese and South Korean war victims against the Japanese government and corporations in the past two decades in Japanese, Chinese, and South Korean courts.

Books:

• Yukiko Koga, Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
  • Winner of the 2017 Anthony Leeds Prize, American Anthropological Association’s Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA).
  • Winner of the 2017 Francis L. K. Hsu Prize,  American Anthropological Association’s Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA)

Articles & Book Sections in English:

• Yukiko Koga, “Law’s Imperial Amnesia: Transnational Legal Redress in East Asia,” in Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Rederess, edited by Anne Bloom, David Engels, and Michael McCanne (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming March 2018).
• Yukiko Koga,“Between the Law: The Unmaking of Empire and Law’s Imperial Amnesia,” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 41, no. 2(Spring 2016), pp. 402-434.
• Yukiko Koga, “Accounting for Silence: Inheritance, Debt, and the Moral Economy of Legal Redress in China and Japan,”American Ethnologist, vol. 40, no. 3 (2013), pp. 494-507.
• Yukiko Koga, “‘The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country’: Harbin’s Architectural Inheritance,” in Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory, Spectacle, edited by Anne M. Cronin and Kevin Hetherington with a Foreword by Sharon Zukin (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 221-253.