Dr. Naoko Kato

Naoko Kato teaches Modern East Asian History at St. Mark's College. She has taught Asian Canadian and Asian Migration courses at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. A former Japanese-language librarian at the University of British Columbia, she works for the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources and is a scholar-in-residence at the University of Victoria for the Past Wrongs Future Choices project.

Her book, Kaleidoscope: The Uchiyama Bookstore and its Sino-Japanese Visionaries is a transnational story of a bookstore in Shanghai, run by a Japanese Christian, frequented by Chinese customers during the war with Japan. Her current research interests are in pre-war to post-WWII Japanese diaspora print culture.

Education

PhD History (East Asia), University of Texas at Austin

MS Information Studies (Archives), University of Texas at Austin

MA Educational Studies (History of Education), University of British Columbia

Graduate Diploma in Education, University of Western Australia

BA Comparative Culture, Sophia University, Tokyo

Select Publications

“Saving China and Admiring Japan: Cultural Traitor Qian Daosun,” Special Issue: Mediating Collaborationism: Cosmopolitism, Asianism, and the Recounting of History, Modern Asian Studies (Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 2024 , pp. 34 - 55).

Kaleidoscope: The Uchiyama Bookstore and its Sino-Japanese Visionaries. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, December 2022.

“Uchiyama Bookstore: Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchanges in the Midst of War,” in Jonathan Henshaw, Craig Smith, and Norman Smith, eds., Translating the Occupation: The Japanese Invasion of China, 1931–45. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021.

Grunow T.R. and N. Kato eds. Digital Meijis: Revisualizing Modern Japanese History at 150. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Library, 2018.

“Reviewing Meiji via Japanese-Canadian Connections,” Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource, 2018.

“Postwar Japanese Texans” in Asian Texans: Our Histories and Our Lives edited by Irwin Tang, 2008.