William M. Tsutsui

Offices: 3606 Wescoe Hall / 200 Strong Hall
Phones: 864-3661
or 864-9435
Email: btsutsui@ku.edu

Professor of History and Associate Dean for International Studies, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (A.B. Harvard, 1985; MLitt Oxford, 1988; M.A. Princeton, 1990; Ph.D. Princeton 1995). Major interests in modern Japan, business and economic history, environmental history, Japanese popular culture, World War II, U.S.-Japanese relations.

He has served as Acting Director of KU’s Center for East Asian Studies (1999-2001, 2004), founding Executive Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Kansas (2006-2008), and Chair of the Department of History (2007-2008).

Professor Tsutsui is the author of Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan (Princeton, 1998), Banking Policy in Japan: American Efforts at Reform During the Occupation (Routledge, 1988), and Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Japanese edition, Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2005) as well as numerous articles on Japanese business, environmental, and cultural history. He has also edited Banking in Japan (3 vols, Routledge, 1999), In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (with Michiko Ito, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and A Companion to Japanese History (Blackwell, 2006). He has received Fulbright, ACLS, and Marshall fellowships, and was awarded the Newcomen Society Award for Excellence in Business History in 1998, the John Whitney Hall Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2000, and the William Rockhill Nelson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2005. He has presented invited lectures at universities across the nation, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, UCLA, Princeton and Alaska-Anchorage. He is a past president of the Kansas State Historical Society, former program committee chair of the Kansas Humanities Council, a member of the national advisory committee of the Japan-America Student Conference, and an elected member of the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.

Professor Tsutsui’s research focuses on the business, environmental, and cultural history of twentieth-century Japan. His current projects include studies of the environmental impact of World War II on Japan, the globalization of Japanese popular culture, and sports in Japanese history. Professor Tsutsui has been a faculty fellow at KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, received a 2001 William T. Kemper Award for Teaching Excellence, and has won KU’s Steeples Faculty Award for service to the people of Kansas and the Woodyard International Educator Award.

Professor Tsutsui teaches a variety of courses in modern Japanese history, including the lower-level survey (HIST 118 “History of East Asia”), two courses in the upper-level Japan sequence (HIST 588 “Japan, 1853-1945” and HIST 589 “Japan since 1945”), and topics courses (such as HIST 596 “Defining Japan: Marginalized Groups and the Construction of National Identity”). Since 1995 he has chaired twelve M.A. thesis committees in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department and two in the M.A. in International Studies program on topics ranging from the Yasukuni shrine and Japanese nationalism to the cultural construction of AIDS in Japan . He is currently the major advisor for seven Ph.D. and M.A. candidates in the History Department (who are pursuing research on topics as diverse as organizations for the blind in modern Japan , Japan ’s postwar military policy, and sexual education in contemporary Japan ).