Akiko Takenaka is Associate Professor of Japanese history at the University of Kentucky. She specializes in the social and cultural history of modern and contemporary Japan with a focus on experiences and memories of the Asia-Pacific War, war responsibility and restitution, and gender and activism. Her book Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending War (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) is the first book length academic work in the English language on the highly controversial military shrine. She has published in journals including Gender and History, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, The Public Historian, and The Pacific Historical Review. She is currently working on a new book project entitled Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Grassroots Peace Activism in Postwar Japan.