Akiko Nosaka
Associate Professor of Anthropology
- Professional
- Biography
Education
- Ph.D., Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, 1997
- M.A., The Pennsylvania State University, 1993
- B.A., Pacific Lutheran University, 1990
- B.A., Chuo University, Tokyo, 1986
Selected Publications
- The Influence of Migration, Education, and Parents on the Fertility of First-Generation Japanese Women in the U.S.
- Fertility of First-Generation Japanese Immigrant Women in Seattle: The Influence of Ken Affiliation, Residential Location, and Employment Status
- The M-Shaped Dilemma: Life Strategies and Fertility Trends Among Working Women in Contemporary Japan.
- Coresidence and Geographic Dispersion of Adult Children and Their Mothers in German Variation in Ethnicity, Gender, and Marital Status
- Traditional Roles, Modern Behavior: Intergenerational Intervention and Contraception in Rural Bangladesh
Selected Articles
- Nosaka, Akiko. "Aspirations and Desires: Women's Education and Fertility Strategies in Contemporary Japan." Human Organization Vol. 71(2), 2012: 188-199.
- Nosaka, Akiko and Athanasios Chasiotis. "Parental Influence on Fertility Behavior of First Generation Turkish Immigrants in Germany." Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health Vol. 12(1), 2010: 60-67.
Biography
Dr. Nosaka’s core interests are family and inter-generational relationships, which she approaches by looking at issues including fertility, life-strategy, aging, gender, migration, and ethnicity.
She conducted fieldwork on female fertility behavior in relation to socio-cultural values and norms in rural Bangladesh. Her study results have been published in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies (2000), the Journal of International Women’s Studies
(2004), and Human Organization (2008).
She also conducted research on the inter-generational family relationships of Germans and Turkish immigrants living in Germany. Some of the conclusions from this research have been published in the book Grandmotherhood: The Evolutionary Significance of
the Second Half of Female Life (2005, Rutgers University Press). She also published this research in the Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (2009) and Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health (2010).
More recently, she has examined contemporary Japanese women’s fertility with regard to their family structure and relationships. Her recent work has been published in such journals as Ethnology (2009) and Human Organization (2012).
Over the past several years, she has been researching the family demography of Japanese Americans in collaboration with Dr. Donna Leonetti at the University Washington. This research has yielded publications in the Journal of Northwest Anthropology (2018) and International Journal of Social Sciences (2020), and another forthcoming publication in the Journal of Northwest Anthropology (2025).