My name is Ian Rapley. I am a historian of modern Japan, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

This site is home to some bits and pieces that are either outside of my conventional research, or are offshoots of my research and teaching. Here are some suggestions that might be of interest:

• Towards a Ranking of Rankings, an article about Banzuke, Japanese ranking systems.
• I wrote a Twitter Bot
• A scroll of the tokaido (road between Kyoto and Edo) which I annotated for use in the classroom
• A writeup of the Tokugawa Top Trumps exercise I use in the classroom
• What bakumatsu era historical figure are you? A buzzfeed-style quiz my students and I put together. 

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My latest research project focuses on the game of Go in the twentieth century, but I’m also interested in a wide range of topics such as internationalism, travel, language in history, and the history of science. My university profile is here: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/73064-rapley-ian

I am the author of Green Star Japan: Esperanto and the International Language Question, published in 2024 by the University of Hawaii Press. I was interviewed about this work for the New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/green-star-japan and the Beyond Japan podcast: https://japaninnorwich.org/2020/11/26/beyond-japan-ep-15-esperanto-transnational-language-with-dr-ian-rapley/

I am an occasional public speaker, including talks for the Japan Society, National Galleries Scotland, & the BBC World Service, and a regular reviewer for the Asian Review of Books.

Finally, I have an interest in innovative and alternative teaching approaches. As an example, here is a syllabus for my third year undergraduate module on travellers in Japan: Glimpses of the Unfamiliar