Harvard's Theodore Bestor, a WWU alumnus, will keynote WWU's Japan Week activities May 12

Theodore Bestor, the chair of Harvard University’s Anthropology Department and a 1973 graduate of Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, will present “Global Tuna,” the keynote address of WWU’s Japan Week, at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, May 12, in Parks Hall 146.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Bestor graduated from Fairhaven College with a self-designed interdisciplinary concentration in Anthropology, Japanese Studies, and Linguistics in 1973. He moved on to graduate school at Stanford University, where he earned Masters Degrees – in East Asian Studies and Anthropology, and continued on to a Ph.D. in Anthropology.

After several years as the Program Director for Japanese and Korean Studies at the Social Science Research Council he joined the faculty at Columbia University. In 1992 he moved to Cornell University, and in 2001 to Harvard University.

Bestor is a prominent author on contemporary Japanese society and culture, focusing on Tokyo, Japanese food culture, and popular culture. His most recent book, “Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World” (University of California Press, 2004), is based on his research since 1991 at Tokyo's Tsukiji market, the world's largest marketplace for seafood and the center of Japan's sushi trade.

For more information about Japan Week, go to http://international.wwu.edu.