Dr. David H. Slater

Communications Manager

David H. Slater is the Communications Manager for the United States-Japan Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is a professor emeritus of Cultural Anthropology and Japanese Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He has also taught at the University of Tokyo, Waseda University, and Hosei University, and was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University.

Slater has an extensive range of publications in both academic and popular venues. His works include Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Sorting, and Strategies (Routledge, 2009), Japan Copes with Calamity: Ethnographies of the Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster of March 2011 (Peter Lang, 2013), and most recently, Alternative Politics in Contemporary Japan: New Directions in Social Movements (University of Hawaii, 2024).

He presents his research globally, at institutions including Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, and the Australian National University (ANU). He currently serves on the editorial board of “Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.”

Slater’s teaching and research address the relationships between state, society, and culture. He has conducted significant research on youth culture and labor during Japan’s economic bubble. Following the 2011 triple disasters, he organized support and research groups in Tohoku, generating Japan’s largest open-source oral narrative archive. Since 2017, Slater has focused on supporting and researching migrant and refugee populations in the Kanto region, assisting with refugee applications and legal integration as Japan confronts its shrinking labor market. His work on this topic can be found at Refugee Voices Japan.

Slater resides in Tokyo with his wife, Ann Tashi Slater, a professor of comparative literature and an author.