Nelson Graburn was educated at Cambridge, McGill and Chicago, and has taught Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1964. He has carried out research among the Inuit since 1959 and in Japan since 1974. He has published widely on the anthropology of art, tourism and changing representations of ethnic identity.

John Ertl is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked on the JET program in Tochigi Prefecture for two years. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo and spent a year conducting his dissertation research in Noto Peninsula. His research interests include social reproduction and change, traditionalism, place making, urban planning, and local government in Japan.

R. Kenji Tierney earned his B.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley (2002). After a Reischauer Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and ExEAS Fellowship at the Weatherhead Institute, Columbia University, he has taught at Union College, Schenectady, New York, since 2004. He has taught courses on Japan and East Asia, Africa, food, space and place; he specializes in historical and symbolic anthropology.