Timothy S. George is Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island, where he teaches courses on modern Japan, modern China, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. He has also taught courses on modern Japan, East Asian environmental history, and democracy in East Asia at Harvard University as a lecturer in 1997-98 and a visiting professor in 2004-05. His publications include Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (2001), and he is co-translator of Harada Masazumi’s Minamata Disease and of Saitō Hisashi’s Niigata Minamata Disease. He has spent 16 years in Japan since 1962.