My research has explored how people establish relationships, both locally and globally, by examining the standards they set for judging what constitutes an unacceptable way of being in the world. In particular, I have investigated how faith, ideology, and shared notions of what is “communal” shape people’s everyday lives, including familiar ways of eating, praying, and relating to others. Through ethnographic fieldwork in New York, London, and Tokyo, I have worked with residents, mosque attendees, café-goers, police officers, NGO workers, barbers, and women involved in transnational Islamic revivalist movements. I have also explored similar questions in prewar and wartime Japan, analyzing how state officials and academics constructed the categories of “Muslims,” “Islam,” “religion,” and Japanese national consciousness to serve particular political and ideological ends.
Currently, I am investigating how best to apply AI and robotic technologies in Japanese nursing homes and in construction/infrastructure maintenance. This project combines ethnographic research with historical and theoretical inquiry to explore how the history of religion and thought, along with structural constraints imposed by capitalism, influence people’s decisions about implementing technology and haping working conditions. It is a collaborative project with engineers, computer scientists, an STS scholar, and consultants.
2025- Project Researcher, Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo
2024-2025 Post-doctoral Fellow, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
2021-2024 Adjunct Researcher, Ryusaku Tsunoda Center of Japanese Culture, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University
2023-2023 Part-time Lecturer, Institute of Japan Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
2021-2022 Adjunct Lecturer, Japanese Language Center for International Students, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
2020-2021 Global Japanese Studies Guest Junior Researcher, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University
2019-2021 Graduate School of International Cultura Studies Fellow, Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Department of
Global Japanese Studies, Tohoku University 2019 Ph.D. in History, The University of Chicago
2016-2016 Teaching Assistance for the undergraduate course “Introduction to East Asian Civilization: Japan”
2015-2016 Teaching Intern for the undergraduate course “Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations,” The University of Chicago
2013-2014 Teaching Intern for the undergraduate course in Social Theory “Self, Culture, and Society,” The University of Chicago
2010-2011 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellow (DC2), Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
2009-2011 Research Assistant, The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, The University of Tokyo
2009 M.A. in Area Studies, The University of Tokyo
2008-2009 Teaching Assistant, The Department of English Language, College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
2008 M.Phil. in Migration Studies, Oxford University
2004 B.A. in Anthropology, Bard College
Books, articles, translations, etc.:
Kanahara, Noriko. 2025 “Demarcating ‘Religion’ in Relation to Islam and Communism: The Japanese Imperial Diet Debates on the Inclusion of Islam in the Religious Organizations Law of 1939,” International Journal of Asian Studies, forthcoming.
Kanahara, Noriko. 2013. “Nihonseishin to isurāmu—1920 nendai ni okeru Tanaka Ippei no daidō no tankyū [Japanese Spirit and Islam: Tanaka Ippei’s Pursuit of the Great Way in the 1920s],” Shisōshi Kenkyū 18, (2013): 70–81.
“Japanese Theologian Uwoki Tadakazu and His ‘Japanese Religious Spirit’ in Wartime.” University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy Booklet
17: Secularization, Religion and the State, edited by Masashi Haneda, 85-96. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy, 2010.
Reviews
“Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and Contest for Hegemony, 1912-1933, by Torsten Weber. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 407 pp. ¥ 8,894 (ISBN 978-3-319-87960-4),” Review of Embracing ‘Asia’ in China and Japan: Asianism Discourse and Contest for Hegemony, 1912-1933, by Torsten Weber, Social Science Japan Journal 24, no. 2 (2021): 419-421.
“Review: The Grounds Between Anthropologist Engage Philosophy,” Review of The Grounds Between Anthropologist Engage Philosophy edited by Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Bhrigupati Singh, Shisōshi Kenkyū 21 (2015): 199–202.
