Dr Chigusa Yamaura

Dr Chigusa Yamaura is a sociocultural anthropologist who specialises in Japan and China. Her work examines a variety of topics, including gender, cross-border marriage, motherhood, reproduction, childcare, fertility, migration, colonial memory, nationalism and transnationalism in East Asia.

She is the Course Director of the MPhil in Global and Area Studies programme. Previously, she taught on the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and the Contemporary China Studies Programme in the same department.

Dr Yamaura is the author of "Marriage and Marriageability: The Practices of Matchmaking between Men from Japan and Women from Northeast China," (Cornell 2020), based on her long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Japan and China.

She is currently working on two projects:

The first is a book examining demographic crisis narratives in contemporary Japan and how these narratives manifest in various aspects of people's lives, including women's reproductive health, childcare provision and paternity leave policies. She is currently completing the book manuscript.

The second project takes a 'Comparative Area Studies' approach to explore different demographic crisis narratives in East Asia, focusing on Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan. Funded by the John Fell Open Access Fund, this project examines how demographic changes in East Asia are socially narrated and circulated, and their effect on people's intimate lives. It challenges the universal framework of 'demographic crisis' and explores how different local contexts influence this narrative.

Media coverage: The best books on Japan, recommended by Chigusa Yamaura