Tomiko Yoda
Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities
Tomiko Yoda is the Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She received her Ph.D. in Japanese from Stanford in 1996 and has taught at Duke, Cornell, and Stanford before arriving at Harvard. She is a recipient of fellowships from NEH, SSRC, Japan Foundation, and National Humanities Center. Professor Yoda’s research focuses on modern and pre-modern Japanese literature, literary history, and media studies; issues of gender in contemporary Japan; and feminist theory. She is the author of Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts and the Constructions of Japanese Modernity (Duke, 2004) and co-editor with Harry Harootunian of Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (Duke, 2006). She has published articles in edited volumes and journals in both Japanese and English on topics of gender issues in contemporary Japanese economy and culture; Japanese literary studies; and the intersection of the two. Her forthcoming work, “Girl Time: Gender and Postmodern Consumer Culture in Japan,” examines gender construction in post-1960s Japanese consumer culture..
In 1916 Rabindranath visited Japan and met the student Tomoko Yoda of Womens' University there. She studied in different universities of America and could translate the lecture of Rabindranath from English to Japanese.
When Rabindranath went to America in 1920, he met Yoda in New York. Rabindranath received a letter from her [ the details of the letter of Tomiko Yoda can be had in " Japani santiniketan written by Amitava Gupta] and replied to it that he would go to Japan after visiting China in 1924. He expected that she would visit Santiniketan as had been done by Miss Flowm, the citizen of Palestine and wrote " I have recently completed a drama which will probably be published in Englishbefore long.I think that you will be interested since you wrote that Japan too is suffering a change which may turn into a "clever commercialisation"
and my tale is concerned with the present [...] of unrighteousness and industrialism."
Tomiko Yoda acted as interpreter of Rabindranath when he visited japan in 1924.
