Jeff Bayliss came to Trinity in 2004, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and a PhD in History from Harvard University.  He also earned a Master’s degree in Education from a Japanese national university, Miyagi University of Education (Miyagi kyôiku daigaku), and has spent over ten years living and working in Japan.

Jeff’s research focuses on minority groups and issues of minority identity in modern Japan.  For his dissertation, he examined the manner in which Japan’s two largest minorities, the Koreans and the Burakumin, viewed and interacted with one another during the 1920s through the end of the Pacific War – years during which both groups faced severe discrimination from majority society.  His research sheds new light on the way that similarly disadvantaged groups, facing similar kinds of discrimination at the hands of majority society, relate to one another, and how they cooperate – or fail to cooperate – in their respective struggles for social equality.

In his courses at Trinity, Jeff challenges his students to question common assumptions about Japanese culture and history, as well as the meanings of common ideas such as “premodern,” “modern,” “Asian,” and “Western.”  By interrogating the labels and unquestioned assumptions that we often use in thinking about Japan and other Asian cultures and societies, students in his classes gain new insights into the dilemmas faced by people in these societies across history, and the rationale for the decisions they made in coping with them.  Ultimately, his aim is to foster a sense of “historical imagination” in his students that will enable them to empathize with peoples of cultures, societies, and eras distant from our own, and envision themselves faced with similar situations.  The understanding they can gain form doing so makes the peoples and cultures they study less exotic, and also gives them new perspectives from which to view their own society.

Books:

• On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, December 2012.

Research-related articles:

• Bayliss, Jeffrey and Hariu, Takashi. "Images of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in the American Press: Toward an Analysis at the Half-Year Mark.", 42 (2011).
• "Minority Success, Assimilation, and Identity in Prewar Japan: Pak Chungum and the Korean Middle Class," Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (Winter 2008).
• Bayliss, Jeffrey. "Grass-Roots 'Multiculturalism': Korean-Burakumin Interrelations in One Community." AsianCultural Studies, 27 (March 2001).
• Bayliss, Jeffrey. "Watashi no zainichi Chôsenjinshi kenkyû e no kanshin – sono 'naze ka' to 'nani o'" (My Interest in the Study of the History of the Korean Minority in Japan – the "Why" and "What" of It). Zainichi Chôsenjinshi kenkyû, 30 (October 2000).

Book reviews:

• Review of Timothy Amos, Embodying Difference: the Making of the Burakumin in Modern Japan (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2011), in The Journal of Japanese Studies, Spring 2012 (forthcoming).
• Review of Ken Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workes in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), in Monumenta Nipponica, volume 65, no. 2 (Fall 2010).
• Review of Kenji Hashimoto, Class Structure in Contemporary Japan (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2003), in Pacific Affairs 77, 2 (Summer 2004).

Journalism/Op-Ed pieces:

• Bayliss, Jeffrey. "Sensô wa 'sabetsu' o saiseisan suru," (War Reproduces Discrimination). Buraku kaihô ("Buraku Liberation," a monthly op-ed publication of the Buraku Liberation Publishing House, Co., Osaka, Japan), 517 (May 2003).

Presentations:

• "A Tale of Two Slums: State Policy, Minority Movements, and Inter-minority Relations in Two Buraku Communities in Postwar Japan." Invited lecture, presented as part of the Japan Forum series at the Center for East Asian Studies, Yale University, February 28, 2011.
• "There Goes the Neighborhood: Disaster and Prosperity in the Making and Remaking of Tokyo," delivered as part of the World Cities Trinity Faculty Public Lecture Series at the Center for Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College, October 20, 2009.
• "The Flames of Rumor: Ethnic Relations in Tokyo during Two Catastrophes, 1923 and 1945," invited lecture, presented at the Phi Alpha Theta (History Honors Society) induction ceremony, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, April 17, 2009.
• "Managing Minorities in Prewar and Wartime Japan: Approaches to Assimilating and Incorporating Koreans and Burakumin Compared," lecture given for the Institute of Asian Cultural Studies' "Asian Forum" at International Christian University, Mitaka, Japan, June 10, 2008.
• "Minority Identity Politics and Interrelations in 1920s Japan: Korean Organizations and the Suiheisha," invited lecture at Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, February 5, 2008.
• "Poster Child for Japanese Imperialism: Pak Ch'ungum and the Wartime State." Presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, San Francisco, April 8, 2006.
• "Minority Identity Politics and Mutual Discrimination in Prewar Japan: The Case of Koreans and Burakumin." Invited lecture at Western Michigan University, May 26, 2004.
• "Living on the Margins of Modern Japan: Korean and Buraku Identities in the Prewar Period." Presented at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies Japan Forum, Harvard University, December 5, 2003.
• "Grass-Roots 'Multiculturalism': Korean-Burakumin Interrelations in One Community." Presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, San Diego, March 10, 2000.
• "Chi'iki shakai ni okeru mainoriti sôgo kankei – Kyôto-shi Higashi Shichijô, Kujô to Yao-shi Yasunaka chiku no rei o kurabete" (Relations between Minorities in Local Society – Comparing the Cases of the Higashi Shichijô, Kujô Area of Kyoto City and the Yasunaka Area of Yao City). Presented at the Kindai Buraku-shi Kenkyûkai (Modern Buraku History Research Society), Tokyo, September 20, 1999.
• "Someone Else's Minority Problem: Japanese Attitudes toward the Korean Paekjông in the Colonial Period." Presented at the Korean Studies Graduate Student Conference, Harvard University, April 12, 1997.

• Appointed Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor, Trinity College, 2013-15.
• Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harvard University, 2003-04
• Committee on Undergraduate Education Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Spring 2002, Harvard University, 2002
• Fulbright Institute of International Education (IIE) Graduate Research grant, 1998-99
• Noma-Reischauer Prize in Japanese Studies, Graduate Category, 1997
• Japanese Studies Scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education, 1986-87