Yuko Nagasawa

Yuko Nagasawa is a historian of diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan, specializing in foreign policy during Japanese colonial rule, the division of the Korean Peninsula, and the Korean War. Trained as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard-Yenching Institute, she received her Ph.D. in Politics from Korea University. After serving as a Project Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo until 2023, she has working on several research projects as a Visiting Researcher at both Seoul National University Asia Center and Institute of International Reconciliation Studies at Waseda University.

Her forthcoming monograph on sovereignty over Korea in the Japanese Peace Treaty (1941–1952)—supported by a Harvard-Yenching Institute grant—and a co-authored volume, Historical Recognition in Dialogue: Japan and Germany with Their Neighboring Countries, will be published by Korea University Press and Akashi Shoten, respectively, in spring 2026. In 2024, she co-authored Building Bridges through Negative Legacies: Between Japanese and Korean Societies with Korean Cultural Properties in Japan with Professor Masaru Tonomura of The University of Tokyo.

As a Resident Visiting Fellow at the DIJ, she conducts research on the role of the German Catholic St. Ottilien missionary order in occupied Korea and its contribution to the cultural policy formation of the Japanese Government-General of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Drawing on her fieldwork in 2019 on the cemetery of Japanese and foreign remains and on destroyed or looted Korean cultural heritage in North Korea, she also investigates the historical circumstances surrounding the missionary in Wonsan—from Japan’s defeat to the outbreak of the Korean War.