Japanese Studies Teaching Staff
Dr Masaru Tamamoto
Contact Information
Email: kotanu@gmail.com
mt464@cam.ac.uk
Current Position
Affiliated Researcher, East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge
Biographical Details
Tamamoto is a non-resident senior fellow of the World Policy Institute in New York. Born in Tokyo, he was educated in Japan, Switzerland, Egypt and the United States. He is a graduate of Brown University and earned his Ph.D. with distinction in international relations at Johns Hopkins. He was a visiting fellow at Tokyo University, MacArthur Foundation fellow in international peace and security at Princeton, and advanced research fellow at Harvard.
He taught at American University in Washington D.C., where he was also the director of the Center of Asian Studies. There he designed the world's first international dual degree program, which has become a template for university relations around the world. After the stint in U.S. academic life, he returned to Japan in 1994. He was appointed visiting professor in the faculty of law at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. Then he was a director at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, a foreign ministry outfit, where he was founding editor of JIIA Commentary, an online journal.
Also, he has held adjunct teaching positions at Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama and at Florida International University, where he spent winters partaking in the Miami International Relations Group organized around Nicholas Onuf, the father of constructivism in the field of international relations. He offers occasional courses at Aichi University in Toyohashi, which has strong historical ties with China. He is currently a member of the Aichi University research team investigating Muslims in China.
Tamamoto divides his time between Cambridge and Yokohama.
Research Interests and Publications
Tamamoto is interested in the question of national identity and international relations. He uses the Japanese experience to address this general question. He looks at Japan's relations with the West, Asia and Islam.
His "Japan as the Commander of the Faithful" looks at the 1930s and 40s when the country claimed to be the leader of Asia and of Muslims for Islam is an Asian religion. This working essay is an attempt to outline how imperial identities and ambitions are constructed. On the relation between non-West and West, and on how this division continues to uneasily affect Japan that has obviously arrived at modernity, his representative essays are "The Ideology of Nothingness" (World Policy Journal, Spring 1994) and "The Uncertainty of the Self: Japan at Century's End" (World Policy Journal, Summer 1999).
The modern experience of war and empire has created a certain gulf between Japan and Asia. There is the lingering history controversy. There is the rise of China and talk of a potentially destabilizing power shift in East Asia. Tamamoto comments on these issues in "A Land without Patriots: The Yasukuni Controversy and Japanese Nationalism" (World Policy Journal, Fall 2001) and "How Japan Imagines China and Sees Itself" (World Policy Journal, Winter 2005/06).
Tamamoto seeks to understand the three pillars of modernity and how each relates to the others. The three pillars are the state, capitalism and liberalism. His analysis of the state, modernity's highest level of social organization, can be found in "Reflections on the Postwar Japanese State: Amorphous yet Dominant" (Daedalus, Spring 1995). His take on state competition and capitalism, modernity's wealth generator, in the context of contemporary Sino-Japanese relations is "After the Tsunami, How Japan Can Lead" (Far Eastern Economic Review, Jan/Feb 2005).
While globalization has spread a certain understanding of the state and capitalism, liberalism, modernity's core ideology, remains largely undigested in much of our world. In Japan, liberalism has always been defined as individualism and equated with selfishness. There is scant recognition that liberalism is about social construction. In this era of late-modernity, can liberalism as reason and not mere technique become the font of justice and desirable life? "Will Japan Ever Grow Up?" (Far Eastern Economic Review, July/August 2009) is Tamamoto's probe into the question.
Tamamoto is now at work on "Postwar Japan: An Obituary/An Encomium," touching, for instance, on how Japan contributed to the redefinition of our understanding of race and culture in international relations.
