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The United States-Japan Foundation (USJF) has selected Qiaoyan Li Rosenberg as the inaugural recipient of the United States-Japan Foundation Scholar Dissertation Award, a new annual competition recognizing the best social sciences doctoral dissertation on Japan produced in the United States.
Rosenberg, a graduate of UCLA’s Department of Sociology, received the award for her dissertation, “Labor Migration Programs in Japan: A Three-Step Pathway to Permanent Residence, but Precarious Labor for All.” It was praised by the award committee as a rigorous, timely, and vital contribution to debates about how advanced economies such as Japan can integrate migrant workers in the face of declining and aging populations. Click here to see Rosenberg’s full CV.
Based on 14 months of fieldwork and more than 100 in-depth interviews with migrant workers, her research traces the arduous process of navigating Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program and Specified Skilled Worker system, highlighting the gap between policy intentions and realities of implementation. The award committee noted that her work demonstrates “how workers’ agency in Japan is in continuous dialectical tension with the control of their mobility, ultimately highlighting the substantial discrepancies between such programs’ intentions and their implementation outcomes.” Click here for a synopsis of the full dissertation.
In its unanimous decision, the award committee stated: “Rosenberg’s work stood out, even within a sizable group of intellectually compelling and empirically rich dissertations nominated from a wide array of disciplines and fields, as a contribution that expertly drew from Japanese sources while speaking to key debates and concerns in the social sciences.” Click here to see the full comments by the judges.
Reacting to the honor, Rosenberg stated, “I am truly honored to receive this dissertation award. It is a meaningful recognition of both my academic training and the importance of labor migration in Japan. I hope this recognition brings more attention to the critical issues of migrant labor protection and social integration.” Click here to see a short video message from Rosenberg.
The 2025 award committee was composed of Sabine Frühstück, Distinguished Professor and Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; David Leheny, Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Waseda University; and Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor of Japanese Studies, Professor of Sociology, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Beginning in 2025, Rosenberg will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, where she will prepare to expand her dissertation into a book manuscript. She will also begin a new research project examining the role of Japanese labor unions in resolving migrant labor disputes and alleviating labor precarity.
“We launched this award a year ago to provide much-needed recognition to Japan studies in the U.S. today, and to offer encouragement to those who have chosen to enter this field,” said USJF President Jacob M. Schlesinger. “The robust selection of excellent submissions that we received is a great sign that scholarship in this area is thriving, with rising academic stars representing the next generation. We hope to see even greater participation from a broader range of disciplines next year.”
A reception honoring Rosenberg and introducing the distinguished award committee will take place at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, held from March 12 to 15, 2026, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the Vancouver Convention Centre. This gathering will spotlight Rosenberg’s groundbreaking research and offer an opportunity for colleagues, students, and prospective applicants to learn more about the USJF Scholar Dissertation Award.
The United States-Japan Foundation Scholar Dissertation Award carries an honorarium of $2,500 and is designed to highlight scholarship that uses Japanese sources and social science methods to provide fresh insights relevant to Japan’s contemporary politics, economy, and society. The United States-Japan Foundation will continue the USJF Scholar Dissertation Award on an annual basis, with details on next year’s competition to be announced at a later date.
The United States-Japan Foundation is an independent philanthropic organization working to strengthen bilateral ties and address shared challenges. We empower next-generation leaders and fund innovative initiatives, catalyzing collaboration and exchanges among stakeholders in search of solutions.
Qiaoyan Li Rosenberg’s Research
Qiaoyan Li Rosenberg’s research on Japan’s guest worker programs has appeared in both leading academic journals and international media. Her article, “The Control and Agency Dialectic of Guest Worker Programmes: Evidence from Chinese Construction Workers in Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program (TITP)”, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2024), won the 2022 Notehelfer Prize for Best Unpublished Paper from UCLA’s Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Based on her 2018 fieldwork following construction workers recruited through the TITP to build infrastructure for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the piece examines the tension between state control and worker agency within Japan’s migration regime.
She has also contributed to public debate, co-authoring with Hilary Holbrow an editorial in Nikkei Asia titled “Japan Has to Do More for Migrant Rights Than Drop ‘Intern’ Label” (March 2024). The article argues that, despite government plans to abolish the TITP and replace it with a new Work Training System, serious concerns about human and labor rights violations are likely to persist.
