2023 UPDATE: My name is John Kanbayashi (formerly John Hayashi) and I am Assistant Professor in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. For current information, please refer to my Penn faculty page.

I am a scholar of East Asian and environmental history, with particular interests in rivers and water, Japan and Taiwan, migration and diaspora, and the history of science.

My current project, Hydraulic Taiwan: Colonial Conservation under Japanese Imperial and Chinese Nationlist Rule, 1895-1964, argues for the centrality of rivers in linked environmental and colonial transformations that took place across the Japanese and early Chinese Republican periods in Taiwan. I show that the threat of flooding and the promise of creating greater resources through water led to the rise of a conservationist understanding of Taiwan's rivers. Such a view led not only to afforestation and damming but was also deeply implicated in the dispossession of peoples indigenous to Taiwan's highlands.

My work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Akiyama Life Science Foundation, the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia, and various Harvard centers.

Before starting my Ph.D. at Harvard, I worked as Coordinator for International Relations for the City of Matsusaka, in Mie Prefecture, Japan. I received my B.A. magna cum laude in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health from Yale College in 2014 and my A.M. in History from Harvard in 2018. During the 2019-20 academic year, I was a Guest Research Associate at Kyoto University's Institute for Research in Humanities.