Tom Stanley

Tom has guided tours since 1992 when he became one of the two founding partners of Walk Japan. However, he first came to Japan with his family in 1959 when his father, an American diplomat, was posted there. Prior to this his family’s contacts with Asia were mainly in China, where all his grandparents and two great-grandparents were missionaries. Japan was something of an enemy to his pro-China ancestors, especially his parents who were interned in China by the Japanese during World War II. Nevertheless, Japan made a favorable impression on the whole family after they began living there. Tom completed high school at the Canadian Academy in Kobe, Japan, the same school his Canadian mother and her siblings attended in the 1930s.

Subsequently, Tom studied modern Japanese history and received his doctorate from the University of Arizona after periods of research at Hiroshima and Keio Universities. His academic career subsequently took him to the University of Arizona, the University of Tokyo, the National University of Singapore and the Australian National University before he settled down at the University of Hong Kong in 1986. Here he  taught modern Japanese history and served as head of department and associate dean until retiring from the University in 2008.

Tom's research interests began with radicalism in the 19th and early 20th Centuries century Japan and include a book on Osugi Sakae, an anarcho-syndicalist, published by Harvard University Press. His work subsequently encompassed the use of technology in the study of history as well as the history of the Nakasendo highway, the focus of Walk Japan’s original tour. More recently, he has been editing a diary that his maternal grandmother kept from 1937 when the Japanese invaded the area she lived in northern China. She feared, unnecessarily so as it turned out, that she would never see her children again and wished to leave a record of what she was witnessing.

Since leaving the University of Hong Kong, Tom has been living in the US, returning to Japan to lead tours. His other primary responsibility with Walk Japan is as a manager of educational tours.