Jeremy A. Yellen is a historian of modern Japan based in Hong Kong. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and since 2014 has been teaching at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Jeremy’s research focuses on modern Japan’s international, diplomatic, and political history. His work largely grapples with questions of warfare, empire, diplomacy, and international order, and pair Japanese high policy during World War II with developments in the periphery of Japan’s empire. Much of his work makes use of transnational and comparative perspectives to place Japanese history in its proper global context. His first book, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War, was published by Cornell University Press in April 2019.
Jeremy has two incoming book projects. The first book, tentatively entitled Japan at War, 1914-1972: Empire and Aftermath, is under contract at Routledge Press and will be produced as part of the Seminar Studies series. The second book project is a biography of Japan’s infamous wartime general and prime minister, Tojo Hideki. The multi-archival research for this biography of Tojo has been funded by a generous multi-year General Research Fund (GRF) grant from Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (RGC).
In a few side projects, he has also ventured into the social and cultural history of wartime and postwar Japan. Some projects highlight the jubilation with which Japanese writers, poets, and much of the broader populace met the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941. Others works in progress deal with the rise of men’s magazines in the 1960s and the politics of storytelling in both wartime and postwar Japan.