Ryosuke Maeda

Expertise

• Japanese Political and Diplomatic History
• International History
• Intellectual History
• International Finance
• Imperialism
• Decolonization
• Party Politics

Research interests

• Immigration

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  Ryosuke Maeda

  Visiting Fellow

  Short Bio

  Ryosuke Maeda is associate professor of international history in the Department of International Relations at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. His research centers on Japanese political and diplomatic history, and the international history of East Asia and the Pacific.

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  Ryosuke Maeda is associate professor of international history in the Department of International Relations at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo. He began his academic career as associate professor at Hokkaido University, where he served from 2014 to 2024, before joining the University of Tokyo in 2024. He holds a BA (2008), MA (2010), and PhD (2013) in Japanese history, all from the University of Tokyo. He was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science Department of International History (2017–18) and at the Princeton University Department of East Asian Studies (2018–19).

  His research centers on Japanese political and diplomatic history and the international history of East Asia and the Pacific, with a particular focus on how currency, ideology, and violence shaped the formation of the modern Japanese nation-state and the expansion of its empire. More recently, his interests have extended to the Yokohama Specie Bank and Japanese overseas migrants, security and party politics in Cold War-era Hokkaido, and the intellectual history of historians and political scientists in twentieth-century Japan.

  He has authored and edited several books and articles, notably The Beginnings of National Politics in Modern Japan: The Meiji State Reform Under the Parliamentary System, 1890–1898 (University of Tokyo Press, 2016), which was awarded the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 2017. He also edited Postwar Japanese Scholarly Thought and Imagination (Yoshida Shoten, 2022), a collection of essays on intellectuals and academic thought in postwar Japan. In addition, he played a key role in the publication of the 2025 Contemporary History of Hokkaido: Documentary Volume 1 (Politics, Administration, and Diplomacy), a sourcebook produced as part of a local history project by the Hokkaido prefectural government.

  His current book project primarily aims to clarify the role of international finance in Japan’s continental expansion during the 1930s, through the perspectives of Japanese, Chinese, British, and American bankers and diplomats as well as the activities of Japanese expeditionary forces. Related to this, he is also investigating how Japanese migration within the Pacific was supported diplomatically and economically by the home government, and how overseas Japanese communities navigated tensions with local societies while maintaining relationships with Japanese consulates and branches of the Yokohama Specie Bank. As a Hoover visiting fellow, he intends to complete his research on this book project.

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