Naoko Wake
Professor
Naoko Wake is a historian of gender, sexuality, and medicine in the Pacific region.
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Naoko Wake is a historian of gender, sexuality, and medicine in the Pacific region. She teaches courses related to her interest in international and interdisciplinary understandings of health, illness, and disability that emerged in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She has written on the history of the medical and social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century with a focus on scientific approaches to sexual diversity. Her current work is a historical inquiry into Japanese-American ... and Korean-American memories of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By focusing on this particular group of survivors in the United States, and by comparing their experiences to those of Japanese and Korean survivors, she illuminates a history of the bomb that complicates the better-known story of international rivalries and brings to light women’s and patients’ activism.
Read MoreEducation
Indiana University: Ph.D., History
Indiana University: M.A., History
Kyoto University,: M.A., Education
Kyoto University: B.A., Education
Selected Press
Oppenheimer won Best Picture. Its new reception in Japan was very different.
Vox | 2024-04-02
Naoko Wake, a Michigan State University historian who has interviewed survivors of the bombings, notes that thoughtfully including such images could be vital for awareness when there has been so little understanding of Japanese civilians’ perspective.
Remembering Asian American Women Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Ms. Magazine | 2021-08-05
Today the U.S. government still does not recognize its own citizens as casualties of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Is This the Start of World War III or Cold War II?
Voice of America | 2022-02-24
Naoko Wake, Michigan State University associate professor of history, concurs.
“This appears to be one of the beginnings of a second Cold War, which we have been seeing so many manifestations of around the globe in the recent decade,” she says.
The Overlooked American Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Time Magazine | 2021-10-01
Hoping to raise awareness of this community, historian Naoko Wake conducted 86 interviews with members of this community for her recently published book American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, Wake, an associate professor of History at Michigan State University, talks to TIME about why American and Asian-American survivors have had to fight to be recognized in the U.S. and how the divergent American and Japanese responses relate to ongoing conversations on anti-Asian racism.
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