The Center for Disability Studies welcomes Yoshiko “Yoyo” Okuyama, PhD.

This presentation draws from Yoshiko Okuyama’s book, Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health (2022). Okuyama will begin with a brief statement on how she became involved in disability studies, personally and professionally. Then, to provide some background, she will touch upon the history of Japan’s tōjisha undō (minority rights movements). The rest of the presentation will focus on how depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are narrated in graphic memoirs in Japan. To provide a fresh perspective for this audience, Okuyama will introduce some of the most recently published comics, together with the ones analyzed in the book.

Yoshiko Okuyama (PhD, University of Arizona) is a professor of Japanese studies in the Department of Languages at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, where she has been teaching at UH-Hilo for more than twenty years. Her areas of specialization include Japanese popular culture, disability studies, deaf studies, second language acquisition, and technology-mediated communication. Her recent publications include Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Reframing Disability in Manga (University of Hawaii Press, 2020), and Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime (Lexington Books, 2015). She received a research grant from the Association of Asian Studies in 2020, a scholarship for an NEH Summer Institute, Global Histories of Disability, in 2018, a research fellowship from the Japan Foundation in 2017, and a Nihonjijō Kyōiku Shōreikin (Japanese Affairs Educational Subsidy) at Nanzan University in 2014. She has also given presentations at universities such as Cornell University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as interviews with media outlets, including National Public Radio, National Geographic, and CNN. She lives on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, signs American Sign Language, and is a mid-life marathon enthusiast.