My scholarship has been shaped by a fundamental concern for how humans struggle to build and maintain connections to the past in the midst of radical change. In Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan (U. of Hawaii Press, 2006), I examine the ways in which different interest groups in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Japan sought to preserve, abandon, or reinvent death rituals that had developed over generations to build continuity in the face of loss. The question “What to do with the past?” haunts Modern Passings from start to finish, informing such topics as the reworking of cremation from a minority religious practice into a mandated public health measure, the expulsion of temple graveyards from city centers, and the evolution of funeral professionals from suppliers of ritual paraphernalia into purveyors of ritual knowledge.
My second book, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (Princeton U. Press), was released in September 2025. Fuji achieved global fame as a beautiful wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan. But behind this picture-postcard image is a history full of conflicts, contradictions, and upheaval. Fuji has erupted violently over the centuries, wreaking havoc and instilling fear. It has long been an object of worship, but the deities inhabiting the mountain have changed radically over time. A totem of national unity, it has been embroiled in disputes over the direction the nation should take. And while its splendid form has inspired countless works of literature and art, its lower slopes host military training grounds and its water sustains a polluting paper industry. Through examining these and other aspects of Fuji, I reveal a mountain always in the making, and invite readers to reflect more broadly on our relationships—material and imagined, creative and destructive—with the natural world and each other. Professor Bernstein discusses his Fuji project on the September 24th, 2025 episode of the Historically Thinking Podcast.
