Dr Chigusa Yamaura

I am a sociocultural anthropologist, specializing in contemporary Japanese and Chinese society.  I received my PhD from Rutgers University in 2013, and since 2015 I have been a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.  I have fieldwork experience in both Japan and China, and in 2017 was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Social Science, University of Tokyo. 

My research investigates the ways in which intimate life intersects with larger social and political ideologies (such as nationalism and gendered life course expectations) and processes (such as transnational flows and demographic change).  My work addresses a broad array of topics, including gender, marriage, cross-border marriage, family, life course expectations, motherhood, reproduction, childcare, and fertility as well as migration, colonial memory, and transnationalism in East Asia.

I have published in the Journal of Asian Studies and Anthropological Quarterly and have a book forthcoming from Cornell University Press titled, Marriage and Marriageability: The Practices of Matchmaking between Men from Japan and Women from Northeast China.

I am currently pursuing a project that examines changes in the expectations for and practices of motherhood against the background of demographic transformations within contemporary Japan, with a particular focus on the topics of childcare provision, “ovarian ageing,” and fertility rate policy.