July 28, 2008

Faculty member wrote chapter recently translated into Japanese

Greg Guelcher, associate professor of history at Morningside College, wrote a chapter for “Japanese Diasporas,” a book published in 2006 by an academic press, and his chapter was included in a Japanese translation of the book that was published recently by Shinsensha Publishing Company of Japan.

Guelcher’s chapter grew out of a research paper he wrote while an undergraduate student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The chapter examines the rise and abrupt fall of a Japanese government scheme between 1932 and 1945 to colonize and assimilate resource-rich Manchuria, China, with tens of thousands of indigent Japanese farmers and their families.

Masanori Yoshida, an anthropology professor at Nihon University in Japan, was one of three Japanese academics chosen to help translate “Japanese Diasporas.” Yoshida chose to translate Guelcher’s chapter out of personal interest.

"It took many, many e-mails between Professor Yoshida; my Japanese wife, Yumiko; and myself to complete the project properly," Guelcher said. "We Americans typically do not reflect on how ambiguous our native language seems to outsiders!"

Guelcher joined Morningside’s faculty in 1996. He specializes in Asian and Middle Eastern history and culture and has studied in Tokyo, Yokohama and Hong Kong. He served as a visiting research scholar at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Oriental Culture and as a guest lecturer at the Toyama City International Center’s International Speech Academy in Japan. Guelcher has a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.