ISHII Yumi
石井弓

Yumi Ishii specializes in Chinese area studies using oral history. She is interested in how people felt and thought throughout history, and how they have remembered the past. Her research has focused on the collective memory of war and the trans-generational transmission of memory, for which she has conducted interviews with nearly 400 villagers in Shanxi Province. She has recently started collaborative research that compares war memories across various Asian countries to examine the interconnectedness of memories and the formation of memory spaces across wider regions. Furthermore, motivated by the revival of rainmaking rituals in her research sites since the 1980s, she has expanded her research scope to include the relations between modernization and tradition, the resilience of traditional networks, and the activities of missionaries who transmitted rainmaking narratives to Europe.