Takuya Tokuhara
Takuya Tokuhara（徳原 拓哉）
World History Teacher, IB Teacher at Yokohama Senior High School for International Studies
tokuharatakuya1030@gmail.com
Degree:
2025: Master of Interdisciplinary Information Studies(Research Degree), Graduate School of Tokyo University(Tokyo, Japan).
2015: B.A. in American History, Yamaguchi University(Yamaguchi Japan).
Teaching and Social service:
2025-present, Shophia University
2021-present, Yokohama Senior High School for International Studies(Kanagawa, Japan)
2016, Tsurumi senior highschool(Kanagawa, Japan)
Main Publications:
“Who is the Historian” -Historical practice in the classroom struggling with fighting
against denialism, Mizuki Hoshi and Tatsuya Watanabe eds., Gendaini Tsunagu Rekishi Jugyou Design( in Japanese), Meiji Tosho, 31-46, Aug 2025.
“Rethinking Well-Being -Why do we fail to grasp neoliberalism as a matter of historiography,” Syakaikakyouiku(in Japanese), 786(10) 18-21, Sep 2024.
“Public history as a recursive perspective -Classroom space, outside classroom space, historical culture, and life-story,” Syakaikakyouiku(in Japanese), 786(10) 116-119, Sep 2024.
“The world changed by the internet - the Black Lives Matter movement of those placed on the periphery,” Connecting Global History 3: Exploring the Historical Context of Modern Times/SDGs., 3 231-235, Sep 2023.
“Scaling of Questions and Curriculum in Historical Synthesis—-"Questions as Fractal Structures" Model,” Yamakawa History Press, (6) 6-10, Feb, 2022.
What was 'high school-university collaboration' - on Shar-ed/ing Authority and digital public history?, Bulletin of the Association of High School-University Cooperative History Education(10) 8-25, Mar, 2022
The hidden story of the women of Postwar Yokohama, Known as "Pan-Pan," World History from Kanagawa: Walking, Seeing, and Feeling History, 155-156, Dec, 2021
Yokohama Senior Highschool of International Studies
Session
In recent years, public history has fundamentally reopened the question of who produces history. While social and people's history expanded inquiry to include ordinary individuals, public history has gone further by broadening the range of those who write, interpret, and practice history. This development has accelerated since the mid-2010s, as university programs in public history have expanded globally and international networks have grown.
At the same time, the internationalization of public history has renewed attention to its conceptual foundations. The vocabulary of “public,” grounded in Western modernity, is not easily translatable across other countries. In Italy, as Serge Noiret notes, equivalent terms carry strong political connotations and the English word is often retained. This is more obvious in Asia. A Chinese scholar Na Li has noted the difficulties posed by 公共 (gonggong) and 公衆 (gongzhong). The Japanese term 公共(kōkyō) also bears layered and politically charged meanings, resisting simple equivalence.
This paper examines how such translational challenges have produced divergent forms of public history practice. By comparing the uses of public / kōkyō / gonggong / gongzhong and analyzing the development of public history curricula in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan, the study shows how translation itself generates multiple modes of historical practice.
Furthermore, the paper argues that the internationalization of public history has often, unintentionally, relied on Western liberal-democratic assumptions regarding “publics’’ and “participation,” which do not adequately reflect the political, cultural, and institutional specificities of Asian societies.
By foregrounding these translation gaps, the paper proposes a framework for conceptualizing global public history—one that treats it not as a universal model to be exported but as a constellation of locally mediated, historically situated practices. This study contributes to the decolonization of public history and to broader efforts to theorize multiple forms of “the public” in global historical practice.