Professor Ian Neary

I worked at Oxford University between 2004-2019 before which I spent 15 years as a professor of Japanese studies at the University of Essex. My research has mainly been focused on Japanese political and social history in the twentieth century particularly the experience of Buraku communities in the process of industrialization and modernization. However, I have also worked on industrial policy, in particular the pharmaceutical industry, and on broader issues relating to human rights in East Asian and contemporary Japanese politics.

I am currently completing a book which examines how a small town in Kyushu, Soeda, was influenced by the Meiji restoration, the development of its coal industry and its post-industrial experience.

Previous Posts Held:

Lecturer, Department of History and Politics, Huddersfield Polytechnic 1979-84

Lecturer, Department of Politics, Newcastle University 1984-89

Sanwa Professor of Japanese Studies, Department of Government, Essex University, 1989-2004

Professor of the Politics of Japan, University of Oxford, 2004-2019

Media Expertise

Japanese politics

Recent publications include:

Monographs

Dowa Policy and Japanese Politics, Routledge 2022

State and Politics in Japan (second edition), Polity 2019.

The Buraku Issue in Modern Japan: the career of Matsumoto Jiichirō, Routledge, 2010 (published in Japanese translation 2016).

Human Rights in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Routledge, 2002.

Chapters in Edited Collections

‘Burakumin and Human Rights’, in L Hein (ed) The New Cambridge History of Japan, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 622-643.

‘Dōwa Policy Projects as Unfinished Human Rights Business from Dōtaishin to Ikengushin’ in Civil and Political Rights in Japan ed. S J Takahashi, Routledge 2019, pp 84-96.

‘Human Rights’, in The Oxford Handbook on IR in Asia ed. S M Pekkanen, R Foot and J Ravenhill, OUP, 2014.

‘Status and Class’, A Companion to Japanese History, ed. W M Tsutsui Blackwell 2007, pp 389-406.

‘Democracy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War East Asia’ in Chung-Si Ahn and Bertrand Fort (eds.) Democracy in Asia Europe and the World –towards a universal definition, Marshall Cavendish 2006, pp 167-179.

Journal Articles

‘From the (end of) Dōwa Policies to (the start of) an Anti-discrimination Policy?’, Japan Forum, December 2019.

‘Human Rights in the Discourse of Buraku Liberation: from the 1920s to the 1990s,’ Development and Society 39, No. 2 (2010): 285-298.

‘Matsumoto Jiichirō and the making of democracy in postwar Japan,’ Japan Forum 19, No. 2 (July 2007). 

‘Parliamentary Democracy in Japan’ Parliamentary Affairs 57, No. 3 (July 2004): 666-681.

'Japan's Human Security Agenda and its Domestic Human Rights Policies', Japan Forum 15, No. 2 (2003): 267-286

'Burakumin at the end of history', Social Research 70, No 1 (Spring 2003): 269-294

Translation

A History of Discriminated Buraku communities in Japan, Teraki Nobuaki & Kurokawa Midori, Renaissance Books, 2019.