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Richard Irving is Professor at the School of Policy Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University in Hyogo, Japan. He previously taught in the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Hong Kong. In 1991 he walked from Kyoto to Tokyo along the old Nakasendo highway, which led to a collaboration with Dr Tom Stanley to produce a CDRom called Journey to the Heart of Japan and to cofound the tour company ‘Walk Japan’. Richard gained his PhD at the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield; his research was on the topic of rural depopulation in Japan and he has maintained his data base on population change in the villages of the Kanbayashi Valley ever since. He is currently researching the life of William Adams in Japan.
Thomas Jones is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Governance Studies at Meiji University. He gained his PhD in Forest Science from Tokyo University, after which he carried out fieldwork for Matsumoto City in the Japan Alps. His research revolves around social science approaches to natural resource management, focusing on national parks and other protected areas. He has published on themes related to nature-based tourism, place branding and regional revitalization.
John Knight is Reader in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. He completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics on the theme of social change in Japanese mountain villages and has held research fellowships in Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford and at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has undertaken extensive field research in rural Japan on a range of topics, including migration, forestry, and tourism, and has published widely in these areas. He is the editor of Natural Enemies (Routledge 2000), Wildlife in Asia (Routledge Curzon 2004) and Animals in Person (Berg 2005), the coeditor (with John Traphagan) of Demographic Change and the Family in Japan’s Aging Society (SUNY 2003), and the author of Waiting for Wolves in Japan (OUP 2003) and Herding Monkeys to Paradise (Brill 2011).
Sachie Mizohata is the cofounder of social-issues.org, a collaborative online community platform for social scientific research. Her research