Dr. Takahiro Yamamoto, assistant professor of Cultural Economic History at the HCTS, was awarded a PRESTO research grant by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). During this time, he will work on his project “Historicizing personal identification and its implication for pandemic response: a case study of ID photographs in twentieth-century Japan.”
With this project, Dr. Yamamoto will investigate various measures of personal identification conducted by state authorities and the people’s responses to its impact on their daily lives and social relations. The project forms part of JST’s research area “Social and technological framework for pandemic resilience” that was launched in 2021. This research area aims to create a social and technological framework for a pandemic-resilient society and develop a network of researchers, whose cross-disciplinary approaches may be mobilised in an emergency. Dr. Yamamoto’s project builds on his previous project, "Cross-border mobility and documentary identification in Japan in the age of global networking," funded by Baden-Württemberg Stiftung Eliteprogramm (2019-2021), which investigated the gap between the law and the reality of border-crossing across the Japanese empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Dr. Yamamoto’s project will start in October 2022 and will last for three and half years. JST is Japan’s national research and development agency that plays a central role in the government’s Science, Technology and Innovation Basic Plan and aims to promote science and technology.