- Email:
- kasza@iu.edu
Education
- PhD, Yale University, 1983
Research Interests
- Modern Japanese politics and business
- Japanese social institutions and mass media
- Comparative politics
- State-society relations
- War and politics
Courses Recently Taught
- EALC E100, East Asia: An Introduction
- COAS E104, Japan's Economic Miracle
- POLS Y334, Japanese Politics
- EALC E394, Business and Public Policy in Japan
- POLS Y657, Comparative Politics (various topics)
Awards and Distinctions
- Fellowships from:
- Center for Global Partnership
- National Science Foundation
- Japan Foundation (2)
- Social Science Research Council (2)
- Fulbright (3)
Publication Highlights
- The Conscription Society: Administered Mass Organizations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Japanese edition, Kashiwa Shob?, 1999.
- The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
- “War and Welfare Policy in Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming, February 2002).
- “War and Comparative Politics” (review article), Comparative Politics, 29.1 (April 1996).
- “Bureaucratic Politics in Radical Military Regimes,” American Political Science Review, 81.3 (September 1987).
I was hired in 1985 to enhance the department’s research profile and course offerings in the social sciences, and to strengthen thereby the program’s interdisciplinary and cross-national orientation.My research has produced two books and fifteen articles focused on state-society relations in modern Japan. In the first book, I examined state control over the mass media in interwar Japan. In the second, I expanded a study of Japan’s wartime mass organizations into a comparative project that included China and several other countries. The integration of research on Japan into the broader literature of comparative politics has become something of a mission for me, and my current book project attempts to place Japanese policy toward welfare, industry, and civil liberties in a comparative framework. I regularly do field work in Japan. My teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses on Japanese politics and business. Though business is not my main research interest, I developed courses on this topic because many of our students pursue East Asian studies for vocational reasons. I also teach the introductory course on East Asian civilization from a modern perspective, integrating history, religion, philosophy, economics, sociology, and political science. It is now the most popular East Asian course among students majoring in business. I added the study of Korea to the class, which had previously covered only China and Japan. I have offered a 100-level course in 19 of the 23 semesters I have taught at IU. When my schedule permits, I also occasionally teach generic graduate courses in political science.