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About Nathan Hopson
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen. He is currently completing a manuscript on the social history of nutrition science in modern Japan as a technology of nation building, focusing on school feeding (gakkō kyūshoku) and government-led nutritional activism as its central case studies. Recent publications from this research include- “Nutrition as National Defense: Japan’s Imperial Government Institute for Nutrition, 1920-1940” (Journal of Japanese Studies 2019)
- “Ingrained Habits: The ‘Kitchen Cars’ and the Transformation of Postwar Japanese Diet and Identity” (Food, Culture & Society 2020)
- “‘Humans Bring Food to Their Mouths, Animals Bring Their Mouths to Food’: The Morality Politics of School-Lunch Sporks in 1970s Japan.” (Food & Foodways 2023)
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
NBN Episodes hosted by Nathan:
February 7, 2026
Samurai
Samurai (British Museum Press 2026) is a richly illustrated volume co-authored by exhibition curator Rosina Buckland (British Museum) and Oleg Benesch…
January 18, 2026
Globalizing the Soybean
Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean …
January 5, 2026
Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance
Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that…
August 31, 2025
Give and Take
Maren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which …
July 27, 2025
Designing Modern Japan
Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twent…
April 13, 2025
Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan
In Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (Hawaii 2024), Laura Miller examines the intersections of ludic capitalism with formal and informal r…
April 1, 2025
Green Star Japan
Ian Rapley’s Green Star Japan: Esperanto and the International Language Question, 1880-1945 (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is a sociopolitical history of the…
November 29, 2024
Selling the Future
Ryan Moran’s Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance (Cornell UP, 2023) is a history of the li…
November 23, 2024
Music and the Making of Modern Japan
Margaret Mehl’s Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (Open Book 2024) examines the ways in which Western classical (or “ar…
June 14, 2024
The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism
Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of “M…
April 14, 2024
The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales
Adam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the …
February 29, 2024
The Gods of the Sea
Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-…
February 21, 2024
Thought Crime
Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the …
January 17, 2024
Wombs of Empire
In 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and p…
December 26, 2023
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnat…
November 27, 2023
Nuclear Minds
Ran Zwigenberg’s Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores early effor…
November 10, 2023
From Label to Table
Xaq Frohlich’s From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (U California Press, 2023) is a biography of the Nutrition Facts…
November 4, 2023
The Work of Gender
The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022) is an edited volume of ethnographic research organized a…
October 4, 2023
Being Dead Otherwise
In contemporary Japan, death isn’t what it used to be. Anne Allison’s Being Dead Otherwise (Duke UP, 2023) examines the changing realities of death as…
October 2, 2023
Toward a Gameic World
Ben Whaley’s Toward a Gameic World: New Rules of Engagement from Japanese Video Games (U Michigan Press 2023) examines the pathbreaking engagement str…
August 15, 2023
The Time of Laughter
David Humphrey’s The Time of Laughter: Comedy and the Media Cultures of Japan (U Michigan Press, 2023) examines the roles of mediated laughter in the …
July 16, 2023
The Arts of the Microbial World
Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration of …
July 11, 2023
Tōhoku Unbounded
Anne Giblin Gedacht’s Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) centers cross-border mobility in its na…
May 16, 2023
Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan
Garrett Washington’s Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan (Hawai’i 2022) brings a fresh perspective to the question of Protestant Christianity…