Yukari Takai

Dr. Yukari Takai is a Research Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research at York University in Canada. Most recently, she was a resident scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan from 2021 to 2023.

Takai is a historian of North America and Japan, with a focus on gender and migration from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. The areas of her expertise also include the history of racial others, of family and work, of marriage and divorce, of border and borderlands, of state formation and authority, and of transnationalism in Canada, the United States and Japan. Furthermore, she is a scholar of the transpacific world, defined broadly as composed of the Americas, Asia and Oceania, through an examination of Japan’s many diasporas. Her ongoing book project, supported by SSHRC, explores the history of gender and migration in the Japanese Transpacific World. She has authored a number of publications, including:

• “Between Migrants and States: Japanese Entrepreneurs and Professionals in Two Port Cities in the Pacific World, 1880s to 1920s,” in Dirk Hoerder and Lukas Neissl eds., Migrant Actors Worldwide: Capitalist Interests, State Regulations, and Left-Wing Strategies (Brill, 2024).
• “Recrafting Marriage in Japanese Hawai‘i: 1885-1913,” Gender & History 31:3 (October 2019): 646-664. [honoured as the best article in Canada in the history of migration, ethnicity, and transnationalism in 2020.]
• Gendered Passage: French Canadian Migration to Lowell, Massachusetts (Peter Lang, 2008).