Minami Nishioka

I’m a cultural historian of the United States specializing in U.S. and the World, U.S. imperialism, missionary, U.S.-Japanese relations, and Okinawa. Probably due to my background as an international scholar who suffered but enjoyed cultural differences in the United States, I find exploring early (and often awkward) interactions between individuals from different cultures intriguing. I attempt to see such interactions by tracing the footstep of American Protestant missionaries who actively reached out to people in non-Christian countries. I majored in religious studies at International Christian University, Tokyo, attained M.A. in Area Studies North America at the University of Tokyo, and finished my Ph.D. in history at the University of Tennessee Knoxville before joining the Ozarks in 2023.

Special Projects/Initiatives

I am currently working on a book manuscript titled The Gospel of Civilization: Missionaries and Okinawans under U.S. and Japanese Empires, 1846-1939. This project situates the U.S. encounter with Japan’s peripheral island of Okinawa in the broader context of imperial competition for the Pacific in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores American and Japanese Protestant missionaries’ everyday interactions with Okinawans in Okinawa, which was originally an independent kingdom but forcefully annexed by Japan in 1879. By doing so, my project shows that while American missionaries’ actively sustained Japan’s colonial scheme in Okinawa, Okinawans also leveraged American and Japanese missionaries’ ambitions for their own benefit at the turn of the twentieth century.