Ian Neary taught at the universities of Huddersfield, Newcastle and Essex before arriving at Oxford University in 2004. He retired in 2019 and is now an emeritus fellow at the Nissan Institute and St Antony’s College. He has written about Buraku issues, human rights and industrial policy in Japan and published a textbook on Japanese politics (Polity, 2002, 2nd edition 2018). He lives for part of each year in the small town of Soeda, Fukuoka prefecture.