Education:

• MEXT Postgraduate Scholar, Research Student in World Heritage Studies, University of Tsukuba (2026 – present)
• MPhil Heritage Studies, University of Cambridge (2024-2025)
• BA Archaeology, Anthropology and Art History with Study Abroad, University of East Anglia, Norwich, and International Christian University, Tokyo (2020-2024)

Current Research Theme:                           

The role of industrial heritage in regional revitalisation schemes in Japan. I hope to push current interpretations of industrial heritage, which may include protected, preserved or repurposed buildings and infrastructure, to examine less tangible but equally persistent legacies of industrial processes such as pollution, environmental degradation, and socioeconomic decline, and their subsequent remediation and revitalisation as objects of heritage. I am interested in how the management of these legacies as ‘heritage’ may counter existing local, national or international heritage frameworks, in both written policy and real-world cases, where complex and transformed post-industrial landscapes exist alongside listed or designated natural or cultural heritage properties or sites.

BA Thesis:

One Mat, Many Places: The Multilocality of Landscape, Materials and Meaning as Cultural Heritage at the Taizanso Tea Estate, ICU, Tokyo.

I compared the relocation, rebuilding, and interpretation of the preserved Matsuura Takeshirō’s Ichijōjiki (One-mat Room) to the now-destroyed Omoya folk house, both situated at Taizanso, a tea estate assembled of historic buildings in 1939 on the Kokubunji bluff line in Tokyo, and now located within the International Christian University Campus. Juxtaposing vernacular and aristocratic architecture in their original landscapes with the artificially designed landscape of Taizanso, I explored how buildings carry changing and fluctuating symbolic meanings in their material, design and placement.

MPhil Thesis:

Legacies of the Western Gaze: Reframing the Ainu Collection from the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

I examined the acquisition of Ainu objects from the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition in London, and their subsequent display in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in light of decolonising efforts in Western museums today. I illustrated how the Western gaze interpreted and categorised the Ainu according to diverse concepts of cultural and scientific classification from the early twentieth century to the present day. I argued that the Western gaze shifts according to the anthropologist’s and museum curator’s discursive understanding of non-Western cultural groups, across literary, scientific, archaeological, political, and aesthetic spheres. With these new insights, I proposed a reframing to better contextualise and display Ainu and Japanese materials in the Western anthropological museum.

Scholarships

• 2026 MEXT Postgraduate Scholar
• 2024-2025 Duncan Robinson Curatorial Scholar, Magdalene College

Publications and Conferences:

• Taniguchi Yasuhiro and Simon Kaner. (Forthcoming, 2026). Introduction to Jomon Archaeology. Assistant Editor.
• 26th Annual Cambridge Heritage Research Centre Symposium, ‘The Role of Heritage in Shaping Ontological Security in the Contemporary World’. Poster: Pseudoacacia: Using Post-industrial Ecological Remediation as Natural and/or Cultural Heritage for Regional Revitalisation?
• University of Cambridge X Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Archaeological Conference, presenting One Mat, Many Places: The Multilocality of Landscape, Materials and Meaning as Cultural Heritage at the Taizanso Tea Estate, ICU, Tokyo.
• 25th Annual Cambridge Heritage Research Centre Symposium, ‘Pathways of Afterlives: Researching Legacies’. Conference correspondent.

About:

Alongside study, I am a freelance professional model railway and diorama maker, working for my family business who run the Ashford International Model Railway Education Centre, in Ashford, Kent.