John D. Montgomery Postdoctoral Fellowship

2026-2027 John D. Montgomery Post-Doctoral Fellow

Conrad Hirano received his PhD in History from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL), where he wrote his dissertation on the history of air pollution and anti-smoke campaigns in urban Japan from the 1880s to the 1990s. His interest in the history of air pollution began in 2011, when he spent three months living in Beijing, China, as a junior at Soka University of America. Witnessing the ubiquitous and suffocating presence of airborne pollutants and their effects on human health and the environment inspired him to dedicate his scholarship to the understudied field of air quality history. Before pursuing his PhD, he examined the century-long history of smoke abatement efforts in modern Japan in the MA History program at Montana State University (Bozeman, MT). His research has been supported by numerous awards, including the Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship from the Japan Foundation. Conrad returned to Soka after teaching at Northwestern University, Northeastern Illinois University (Chicago, IL), and North Central College (Naperville, IL). He is particularly interested in exploring the intersections of energy and environmental history with the history of science and technology.

Conrad’s doctoral dissertation offers the first comprehensive study of how Japanese people perceived and addressed urban air pollution from the 1880s to the 1990s. His research demonstrates that anti-smoke initiatives emerged from multiple sites and actors, including corporate executives in Osaka, metropolitan police authorities in Tokyo, and influential Japanese settlers in Dalian, all of whom led surprisingly intensive efforts to mitigate the harmful effects of industrialization. Osaka, the earliest center of pollution control, remained a leading hub and, by the 1930s, helped establish an intra-imperial network of experts dedicated to improving air quality across the Japanese Empire. Advocates of coal smoke abatement understood pollution as both a domestic and a global problem—intertwined with resource scarcity, imperial expansion, and public welfare—and actively engaged with counterparts in the West, introducing international scientific knowledge, technological innovations, and policy frameworks to Japanese audiences. By foregrounding these cosmopolitan and scientifically grounded policy efforts, this project recovers an overlooked dimension of imperial governance often obscured by Tokyo-centric narratives and contributes to scholarship on the global circulation of progressive reform ideals in response to the rise of carbon-intensive economies and widespread urban air pollution.

Conrad participated in several collaborative research projects while conducting archival research and writing his dissertation chapters in Japan from 2022 to 2023. Particularly valuable were his regular study meetings with scholars in Osaka, where he identified significant pollution-related documents and exchanged ideas about their contributions to understanding the urban and industrial history of Osaka and other economic centers. One outcome of these collaborations was a co-authored book chapter titled “Air Pollution Lawsuit and ‘Community Development for Environmental Regeneration’: The Case of Mizushima District in Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture,” published in Environmental Pollution and Community Rebuilding in Modern Japan (Springer, 2023). Conrad continues to maintain and expand his professional network in Japan through ongoing scholarly collaboration.

In addition to revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, Conrad has begun preliminary research on three new projects that extend his interest in Japan’s energy and environmental history. The first examines the environmental costs of the service sector—including schools, hospitals, and public bathhouses—which was essential to the development of modern states. The second traces the global spread of coal smoke measurement techniques in the early twentieth century. While historians have examined the use of the Ringelmann smoke scale in the Atlantic world, this project demonstrates that it was also widely adopted and legally enforced throughout the Japanese Empire to balance economic development with environmental protection. The third project turns to Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960), one of Japan’s most influential Christian social reformers, and his untranslated 1922 novel about anti-air pollution activism, analyzing it as a work of social criticism that connects Christian ethics, environmental concern, and popular literature. Together, these projects bridge history, cultural studies, and the environmental humanities to illuminate the entanglements of technology, social reform, and transimperial connections in modern Japan.

For the Fall 2026 semester at Soka, Conrad will teach a course on East Asian history that emphasizes how China, Japan, and Korea developed, from antiquity to the present, through continual interaction with the wider continental and global worlds. Conrad will also lead a seminar, Introduction to the Pacific Basin, which first examines how political, cultural, and economic boundaries have defined and shaped the region, and then explores how natural disasters, animals, humans, cultural commodities, and ideas have crossed these boundaries and contributed to the Pacific Basin’s transnational character.