Naoko Wake
Professor | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Naoko Wake is a historian of gender, sexuality, and medicine in the Pacific region.
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Biography
Naoko Wake is a historian of gender, sexuality, and medicine in the Pacific region. She teaches courses related to her interest in international and interdisciplinary understandings of health, illness, and disability that emerged in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She has written on the history of the medical and social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century with a focus on scientific approaches to sexual diversity. Her current work is a historical inquiry into Japanese-American and Korean-American memories of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By focusing on this particular group of survivors in the United States, and by comparing their experiences to those of Japanese and Korean survivors, she illuminates a history of the bomb that complicates the better-known story of international rivalries and brings to light women’s and patients’ activism.
Industry Expertise (2)
Education/Learning
International Affairs
Areas of Expertise (2)
Gender, Sexuality, and Medicine in the Pacific Region
Scientific Approaches to Sexual Diversity
Accomplishments (2)
Wallis Annenberg Award, University of Southern California Libraries, for Bombing Americans (professional)
2018
Oral History Association Best Article Award, for “Surviving the Bomb in America: Silent Memories and the Rise of Cross-national Identity” (professional)
2018
Education (4)
Indiana University: Ph.D., History
Indiana University: M.A., History
Kyoto University,: M.A., Education
Kyoto University: B.A., Education
Links (1)
News (4)
Oppenheimer won Best Picture. Its new reception in Japan was very different.
Vox online
2024-04-02
Naoko Wake, a Michigan State University historian who has interviewed survivors of the bombings, notes that thoughtfully including such images could be vital for awareness when there has been so little understanding of Japanese civilians’ perspective.
Remembering Asian American Women Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Ms. Magazine online
2021-08-05
Today the U.S. government still does not recognize its own citizens as casualties of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Is This the Start of World War III or Cold War II?
Voice of America online
2022-02-24
Naoko Wake, Michigan State University associate professor of history, concurs. “This appears to be one of the beginnings of a second Cold War, which we have been seeing so many manifestations of around the globe in the recent decade,” she says.
The Overlooked American Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Time Magazine online
2021-10-01
Hoping to raise awareness of this community, historian Naoko Wake conducted 86 interviews with members of this community for her recently published book American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, Wake, an associate professor of History at Michigan State University, talks to TIME about why American and Asian-American survivors have had to fight to be recognized in the U.S. and how the divergent American and Japanese responses relate to ongoing conversations on anti-Asian racism.
Journal Articles (3)
Asian American Disability: A History and Its Archives
Journal of American Ethnic History2024
The ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ on Different Shores: De-centralizing Scarred Japanese Femininity in the A-bomb Victimhood,
Gender and History2022
Lack Of Empathy Takes The United States Deeper Into The Second Cold War
The Asia-Pacific Journal2020 This essay examines a history of US reports on pandemics, which has made it difficult for Americans to feel empathy for affected Asians and Asian Pacific Island Desi Americas (APIDAs). Key examples from the times of HIV/AIDS and SARS show how Asians and APIDAs remained misunderstood in America because of the black-and-white binary that obscures the wide spectrum of others. The resultant lack of empathy is foundational to the current, Cold War-like mentality of fear. The escalation of US-China tension around the pandemic today, then, may be seen as taking both nations deeper into a Second Cold War. By letting ourselves not feel for each other, we miss an opportunity to collaborate globally for virus eradication.
