Welcome!
My name is Tate Kihara (pronounced Tah-tay Key-ha-rah), and I am an Assistant Professor (sennin-kōshi in Japanese) in the Graduate School of Media and Governance (with a joint appointment in the undergraduate Faculty of Policy Management) at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus.
A sociologist and social demographer by training, I examine international migration to and from Japan in both historical and contemporary contexts, with a particular focus on its relationship to social inequality. My work has been published in Demography, Social Science Research, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, among others.
My research asks how the movement of people across national borders is entangled with social stratification and inequality: how many people moved, from where to where, and who they were; where they stood in the society they left; and where they and their children ended up in the one they joined.
I approach these questions with the tools of historical and social demography. Much of the work consists of assembling and harmonizing population data of different kinds, and sometimes of producing them. For my historical research, this means administrative and census records from the first half of the twentieth century, linked across years and sometimes across sources to follow the same people over time. For contemporary research, it means social surveys: as a member of the research group for the 2025 SSM Survey I work on its survey of foreign residents, and in another collaborative survey in the Tokyo metropolitan area I have carried out qualitative follow-up interviews with respondents to its quantitative survey.
My current project (JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists, FY2026–2029) extends this work, which began with the Japanese who settled in the continental United States, to people from Japan who settled in other countries, and pursues the same questions among immigrants in Japan today.
Born in Kyoto, Japan, I was educated in Japan, Canada, and the United States. Prior to starting my current position, I was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo. I received my Ph.D. from Brown University in Providence, RI, and my M.A. and B.A. from The University of Tokyo.
You can reach me at tkihara@keio.jp
略歴
慶應義塾大学大学院政策・メディア研究科／総合政策学部 専任講師
1991年京都生まれ．東京大学文学部行動文化学科社会学専修課程卒業，同大学院教育学研究科総合教育科学専攻比較教育社会学コース修士課程修了後，ブラウン大学大学院社会学研究科博士課程修了（Ph.D. in Sociology，2023年）．ジョージタウン大学マックコート公共政策大学院客員研究員，日本学術振興会特別研究員PD（東京大学社会科学研究所所属）を経て，現職．
研究内容
専門は社会学・人口学．研究関心は社会階層と国際人口移動．研究の軸にあるのは，国境を越える人の移動が社会階層とどう結びついているのか，という問いである．
どれだけの人が，どこからどこへ動き，それはどのような人々なのか．出身社会の階層のどこから来て，移動先で本人と子どもはどのような地位に就くのか．特に近年は，明治・大正期に米国へ渡った日系移民から現代の日本で暮らす外国人移民まで，日本から出ていく移民と日本に来る移民の双方を主な研究対象としてきた．
方法としては，計量社会学と歴史・社会人口学のアプローチを採用し，作業の多くは，種類の異なる人口データを集めて比較できる形に整え，時には自ら調査してデータを作ることにある．例えば，歴史上の移民については，20世紀前半の行政記録や国勢調査の個票を年をまたいで連結し，同じ人物を追えるようにする．現在の移民については社会調査を用いるだけでなく，その実施にも加わってきた．2025年SSM調査では研究会メンバーとして外国籍住民調査に携わり，首都圏の別の共同調査では量的調査の回答者への事後的なインタビュー調査も担ってきた．
主要な論文は Demography，Social Science Research，International Migration Review，Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies などに掲載されている．また，現在は科研費若手研究（2026〜2029年度）により，米国を中心とした研究をより多様な国・地域に広げるとともに，現代の日本で暮らす移民にも関心を向けている．