The Reischauer Institute is pleased to announce a recent research publication about Marian Anderson's 1953 concert tour of Japan. The article appeared in the Fall 2019 volume of America Music (University of Illinois Press) and "brings a bicultural perspective to a significant moment of postwar cultural exchange between Japan and the United States, contextualizing Anderson’s concert tour and her symbolic presence as an icon of civil rights in relation to the vast Westernization project of the Allied occupation of Japan." The article was researched and written by a team of Japanese and US musicologists, with archival research undertaken on both sides of the Pacific.

The Reischauer Institute supported the cross-cultural research, interpretation, and dissemination of the project, including a ten-day writing workshop organized by Carol J. Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard, and coauthors Misako Ohta, Associate Professor at Kobe University, Katie A. Callam, Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology at Harvard University, and Makiko Kimoto, postdoctoral research fellow at Kobe University. A Japanese translation of the article is available on the University of Illinois Press website.