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Ayu Majima
Affiliate, Center for East Asian Studies
Visiting Scholar, Center for East Asian StudiesBioAyu Majima is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) at Stanford University and an Associate Professor at School of Global Japanese Studies, Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. She works at the intersection of modern Japanese social and cultural history, the history of sensibilities, and anthropological and sociological approaches to everyday life, family, and contemporary society—grounded in a Japan–U.S. comparative perspective.
Ayu Majima conducts interdisciplinary research on modern and contemporary Japanese society and culture, examining how Japan has reinterpreted and reconfigured its own modernity through encounters with the United States. Her work employs a Japan–U.S. comparative perspective to illuminate the interplay between everyday life, family, and the cultural sensibilities that shape them.
Her first monograph, The Melancholy of Skin Color: Racial Experience in Modern Japan (in Japanese, Chūōkōron-Shinsha, 2014), received the Rengō-Sundaikai Academic Prize and later appeared in a Chinese edition published by the Social Sciences Academic Press (Beijing) in 2021. She has also explored the modern history of meat-eating in Japan, with her research featured in ARTE’s Invitation au Voyage, and has examined the global circulation of Japanese food culture in a cultural policy study commissioned by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs.
Building on her postdoctoral work at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University—where she presented “The Chrysanthemum and the Foot: Civilization, Cleanliness and Shame in Modern Japan”—Majima continues to investigate modern Japanese subjectivity across three interrelated dimensions: everyday life practices such as Japan’s rejection of outdoor shoes and the cultural role of slippers; family structures, including the marginal emotional presence of fathers and patterns of mother–child overcloseness; and cultural sensibilities, especially concepts of cleanliness and shame, through the cultural lens of athlete’s foot.
At Stanford, Majima is developing a new ethnographic and cultural project based on a concept she herself has coined, provisionally titled “The California Paradox.” This term—her original analytic formulation—examines how wealth, competition, and contemporary forms of capitalism, including wellness capitalism and the gendered cultures of the tech industry, are reshaping the conditions, expectations, and trajectories of human life in the Bay Area (and increasingly, the world). Early reflections from this project appear in her monthly essay series “Japan Code,” published in Jiji Press’s financial journal Kin’yū Zaisei Business (Tokyo, Japan).
