I am Associate Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where I teach courses on Japanese and Korean history. I came to Trinity after a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, which is also where I received my PhD in 2003.
This blog was established for a very singular purpose: to chronicle my trip to survey the social, cultural, and political aftermaths for the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, during the summer of 2011. My own connection to Miyagi – and more specifically to its capitol city of Sendai – date back to 1986, when I lived there for a year as an exchange student at Miyagi kyōiku daigaku (Miyagi University of Education). I eventually returned to Sendai to earn a master’s in education at the same institution. Although I have spent more time away from Sendai than in it since finishing my master’s in 1992, as the first place I ever lived in Japan and the place where some of my fondest memories and closest friendships there were formed, I felt impelled to return and take stock of the efforts to cope and rebuild. As the disaster rapidly faded from focus in the international news, the idea of sharing these observations also seemed to take on the force of a necessity.
I really can’t say at the outset what this will become, but I hope you will find it worthy of your attention. Please feel free to post comments. I may not always be able to respond in a timely manner – or even a tardy one – but I would appreciate any feedback, just the same.
Jeff Bayliss