Nahoko Uehashi

Nahoko Uehashi is a Japanese writer of children’s books and a cultural anthropologist who has studied the culture of the Yamatji, an indigenous Australian people. She teaches ethnology at Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University in Abiko, Chiba.

 Biography 
Uehashi was born in Tokyo in 1962. She loved reading books and manga as a child. When she was a high school student, she wanted to be a cartoonist. However, she gave up trying because she thought she was not very good at it. 

After graduating from her high school, she enrolled at Rikkyo University and studied cultural anthropology. She went to Okinawa for field work and was advised to try to do it in a place where the spoken language is different. She chose Australia as the place and researched about the Yamatji (one of the tribes of Aboriginal people). She has studied about them until now and taught about cultural anthropology in Kawamura Gakuen Women’s University.

Her career as a writer started in 1989, when she published her first work “Seirei-no-Ki (Spirit Tree)”. Uehashi has continued to write and publish many more stories.

 Fictional Works 

 Shika-no-Oh series (King of the Deers) 
Van, a man who was the top of the “Dokkaku (a kind of army)” , Yuna, a young girl who was saved by Van and Hossal, a doctor, had fought with the mysterious sickness named “Mizzal (black-wolf fever)”.

 Kemono-no-Soja series (The Beast Player) 
Erin, an orphan girl met with a sacred young animal and grew with it experiencing various things, meeting with a lot of people and learning about what the creatures are.

 Koteki-no-Kanata (Beyond the Fox Whistle) 
A twelve-year-old girl, Sayo, saved a young fox. He was actually a fox spirit living in the gap which is between the real and gods’ world. The two got involved in the fight for territory but they grew their love by trying to solve the problems.

 Moribito-Series 
A woman bodyguard, Balsa, was asked by a second queen to save the second prince from assassins. From the journey to escape from the assassins, they visited various places and learned lots of things about spirits and the world which they live in.

 Tsuki-no-Mori ni Kami yo Nemure (Sleep in the Moon Forest, God) 
Tayata was a god of snakes living in the Moon Forest. However his fiancée allowed villagers to seal gods in the forest. This is the story of the balance of the relationship between gods, humans and nature.

 Seirei-no-Ki (Spirit Tree) 
The earth had gone under because of the environmental destruction and the human beings had lived on other planets. A boy and his cousin knew that one tribe was coming to their planet, but they were embroiled in the troubles.

 Study 
When she enrolled at university, she wanted to learn about western history. However she gave up learning it because the ancient language was too difficult for her. Then at that time she found a seminar of the African spiritual world. African spiritual things were completely new for her and she got interested in them.

In graduate school she learned about menstrual taboos and avoidance of women in different cultures. She went to Okinawa to collect detailed data and compare them. She enjoyed doing field work and decided to do more in a completely different and remote place.

She found an internship in Australia as an elementary school teacher. She went there in 1990 and learned about the Yamatji people. She continued to visit Australia after her internship and wrote a book,” Tonari-no-Aborijini (The next aborigine)” in 2010.

Also she got 15th Japanese Cultural Anthropology Association Award in 2020 with her studies.

 Awards 
She has gotten 18 awards in total until 2020. Since her second fictional book she got awards for each work. Also her books were translated into some languages and some of her books in English got 4 awards from the American Library Association.

The biggest award she has got was the Hans Christian Andersen Award as an author in 2014. The award was an international publication award of children’s literature and it is called “small Nobel prize”.

 Other websites 
https://uehashi.com/en/about/
https://uehashi.com/en/about/#awards
http://www.webdoku.jp/rensai/sakka/michi095_uehashi/20090930_4.html
https://kadobun.jp/special/shikanoou/ 
https://book-sp.kodansha.co.jp/topics/kemono/#01
https://uehashi.com/book/monogatari/#obi36
https://www.kaiseisha.co.jp/special/moribito/
https://www.kaiseisha.co.jp/books/9784036524303
https://www.shinchosha.co.jp/book/132085/
https://www.chikumashobo.co.jp/product/9784480427274/

Category:1962 births
Category:Living people
Category:Children's writers
Category:Ethnologists
Category:Japanese academics
Category:Writers from Tokyo