Team

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka is Chair of Modern Japan Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She is an established expert on the food history of modern Japan and her key publications include Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity (Reaktion Books, 2006), Himerareta washokushi (Shinsensha, 2016), and Branding Japanese Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku (University of Hawai'i Press, 2020). In recent years she has expanded her research to the social history of food packaging and the consumption of plastic in Japan. Details of her activities can be found on her website: www.cwiertka.com.

Riikka Länsisalmi is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki. She holds the title of Docent in Japanese Studies. Her current research and teaching activities cover a wide range of topics pertaining to the Japanese language in and outside Japan, including language (education) policies, multilingualization, language and nationalism, Japanese as a heritage language, and institutional discourse. She is Advisory Editorial Board Member of Studia Orientalia, published by the Finnish Oriental Society (Societas Orientalis Fennica). Details of her activities can be found at: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/riikka-länsisalmi/.

Andrea Giolai is University Lecturer in Ethnography and Performing Arts of Japan at Leiden University. He works on sound as a cultural artifact in both ancient and contemporary Japan. His research has been published in journals like Asian Anthropology and the Journal of Religion in Japan and in collections like the Handbook of Performance in Japan (Routledge) and the Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology. He co-edited the book Textual Heritage (Berghahn Books, 2025); produced an episode of Artery, a podcast on art and anthropology (2023); and contributed to the online exhibition Field/Works II (2024) with his artistic research group, the Sound Loss! Collective.

Keiko Yoshioka is Lecturer in Japanese Linguistics and Head of the Japanese Language Programme at Leiden University. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and multimodal communication, with a particular interest in Japanese ideophones and gestures. Her recent publications include work on iconicity in L2 Japanese multimodal language use (John Benjamins, 2019) and gesture size and ideophone use in L2 Japanese (Routledge, 2024). She serves on the Editorial Board of International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (De Gruyter) and Acquisition of Japanese as a Second Language (Daini gengo toshite no Nihongo no shūtoku kenkyū, Bonjinsha).