People
Angela Yiu
Angela Yiu is professor of modern Japanese literature in the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, and her research interests include modern and contemporary Japanese literature, plurilingual literature, utopian studies, and urban studies. Representative publications include Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Sōseki (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911–1932 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), Sekai kara yomu Sōseki “Kokoro” [Reading Kokoro: An Anthology of Critical Essays from a Global Perspective], (Bensei Shuppan, 2016), and Literature in Heisei Japan (Sophia University Press, 2024). Yiu has served as director of MN from 2023.
Edward R. Drott
Edward R. Drott is professor of Japanese religions at Sophia University. His work explores the role of the body in religion and the role of religious ideology and practice in producing knowledge about the body. He is the author of Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016) and the editor of Biolust, Brain Death, and the Battle over Organ Transplants: America’s Biotech Juggernaut and Its Japanese Critics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Drott joined MN as associate editor in 2023 and has served as chief editor since the spring of 2024.
Yoshitaka Yamamoto
Yoshitaka Yamamoto is an associate professor at the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) and at SOKENDAI, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies. He specializes in Edo and Meiji (seventeenth- to nineteenth-century) Japanese literature and cultural history, with a focus on Literary Sinitic, or Classical Chinese, texts by Japanese-speaking authors. He is the author of Shibun to keisei: bakufu jushin no jūhasseiki [Sinitic Poetry, Prose, and Ordering the World: The Eighteenth Century through the Eyes of Shogunal Confucian Scholars], (Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2021). He joined the MN team as a research assistant in 2015 and took up his role as associate editor in 2024.
Bruce L. Batten
Bruce L. Batten is resident director of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) and emeritus professor at J. F. Oberlin University. He is the author of To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003) and Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006) and the coeditor, with Philip C. Brown, of Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands: From Prehistory to the Present (Oregon State University Press, 2015). Batten joined MN as book review editor in 2016. He writes about his role in the essay “A ‘Thankless Task’? My Work as a Book Review Editor” (Journal of Scholarly Publishing 53:2 [2022], pp. 63–74).
Esther Sanders
Esther Sanders joined Monumenta Nipponica in 2009 and served as managing editor for fourteen years prior to becoming the journal’s chief copyeditor in 2024. Her career has centered on editing and translating in diverse fields including corporate communications, journalism, education and psychology, and the humanities. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Vassar College.
Azusa Chiba
Azusa Chiba received her bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Sophia University and graduated with an MA in art history. She has a particular interest in artistic depictions of Japanese yōkai fairies and oni monsters. She joined the MN team as office assistant in 2018 and became journal manager in the spring of 2024.
Seiko Tasaki
Seiko Tasaki is a graduate of Ochanomizu University’s MA program in European philosophy. As an Erasmus Mundus scholarship holder, she obtained a second MA in German philosophy at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She has a particular interest in Scottish and German Enlightenment thought. She joined the MN team as office manager in the spring of 2021.