christopher gerteis

Biography

Christopher Gerteis is a historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). His research examines the intersection of class, gender, and generation to challenge dominant narratives and highlight marginalized perspectives. Gerteis writes about lived experiences and grassroots voices, perspectives that are frequently excluded from conventional historical narratives. This approach is particularly evident in his analyses of social and political movements, where he utilizes historical archives and personal testimonies to explore the margins of political agency in twentieth-century Japan.

Gerteis came to history and Japanese Studies by way of the water. Through his teens and early twenties, he worked in and around it, beginning at a small suburban SCUBA shop and later serving as a deckhand aboard a topsail schooner. As an undergraduate, he continued working on the water as a dock master, maintenance hand, and sailing instructor for the university's fleet of racing and cruising sailboats.

He was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA) and the University of Iowa, Iowa City (MA, PhD), and also undertook graduate study at Meiji University in Tokyo. Before joining SOAS in 2009, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Hōsei University's Ōhara Institute for Social Research and at the Yale University Council on East Asian Studies, and was a Fulbright Faculty Research Fellow at Sophia University in Tokyo. From 2019 to 2024, he was Project Associate Professor of Japanese History at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia. He has also held research appointments at Humboldt University of Berlin (2015–2016), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2016–2017), and the University of Heidelberg (2014, 2018).

Christopher has supervised doctoral projects on the history of modern Japan, particularly through the intellectual lenses of labor, gender, youth culture, and historical memory. He welcomes interdisciplinary projects that bridge historical scholarship, cultural studies, and digital humanities. Six doctoral students have completed their degrees under his supervision and now hold positions at the University of Sheffield, the University of Bologna, Tohoku University, Seoul National University, and the University of Tokyo. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Research interests

His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Japan since the nineteenth century. His work emphasizes how class, gender, and generation shaped the formation of political consciousness and collective identity. His major publications include Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard, 2010), which won Second Prize in the European Association for Japanese Studies Book Award, and Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (Cornell, 2021), which received the SOAS Best Book Award in 2022.

His next book, 『日本の冷戦世代――青年政治意識の形成と分裂』 [Japan's Cold War Generation: The Formation and Fragmentation of Youth Political Consciousness], a substantially revised and expanded Japanese-language edition of Mobilizing Japanese Youth, is forthcoming from the University of Tokyo Press in 2026.

Recent work includes the article "Engines of Deviance: Newspapers, Traffic Cops, and Youth Rebellion in 1970s Japan" (International Journal of Asian Studies, 2026) and 「選択的記憶と戦略的忘却：日本における歴史の商品化と産業遺産」 ["Selective Memory and Strategic Forgetting: The Commodification of History and Industrial Heritage in Japan"], published in the 『東洋文化研究所紀要』 [Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental Culture] (vol. 186, 2024), which built on his role as co-PI of the Hashima XR Project.

Building on a growing body of scholarship on videogames and historical memory, the HashimaXR Project (2020–2024) used videogame design tools to reconstruct the mid-twentieth-century coal-mining community of Hashima (Gunkanjima), centering everyday experience while holding open histories of wartime coerced labor that official heritage narratives exclude. Its successor public resource, Simulating Silence, extends this work for educators and heritage professionals.

His work in the computational humanities includes the article "Writing Against the Machine: Computational Authorship and Historical Writing" (History, 2026) and open-source research software for Japanese-studies scholarship, including cinii-mcp and jstage-mcp (2026), which open major Japanese academic databases for AI-assisted bibliographic discovery.

His book Japan's Unfinished Empire: Origins and Afterlives, under review at Bloomsbury, responds to an institutional legacy of imperialist historiography by situating the Japanese empire as constitutive of modern state formation rather than as an aberration or a reactive policy. The project foregrounds settler colonialism, transregional labor, and administrative logics that linked domestic reform to colonial governance, emphasizing the recursive "scaled repetition" of imperial techniques across domestic and colonial spaces.

He publishes Past Meets Pixel @ Substack, exploring the intersection of history and video games, and Japanese Modernity @ Substack, focusing on historiography, memory, and global contexts. Both platforms foster collaboration among scholars, developers, and educators to rethink how historical knowledge is produced and shared. He has also advised on historical film and television, and comments on Japanese affairs for outlets including the BBC and the New York Times.

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