Akiyama Tamako

• Member of Advisory Board Assistant Professor of Foreign Language Department at Kanagawa University

AKIYAMA Tamako (秋山珠子) teaches at Kanagawa University and is widely known for her scholarship on, and subtitling and interpretation of, Chinese language cinema. She has been a close observer of Chinese thought, cinema and art since the 1990s. Supporting these artists' efforts through writing, translation and interpretation, she has experienced their many turning points together—helping to introduce the forefront of Chinese art and film to Japan. Her many translations include Zhang Yuan's Beijing Bastards (1993) and Crazy English (1999), Wang Bing's Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003) and Fengming: a Chinese Memoir (2007), Cong Feng's Dr. Ma's Country Clinic (2008) and Du Haibing's A Young Patriot (2015). She has been invited as a speaker or festival juror by many universities and film festivals. Akiyama also has been awarded the Grant-in-Aid for Exploratory Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for the research into contemporary Chinese documentary. She is currently writing a critical history of the independent Chinese documentary scene as “cultural asylum.”.