Norio Akasaka (born 1953) is a Japanese folklorist from Tokyo. After graduating from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo, he taught at Tohoku University of Art and Design and Gakushuin University and served as director of the Fukushima Museum and the Tono Culture Research Center. He advocated "Tōhokugaku," or Tohoku studies, which approaches northeastern Japan as a region with its own layered history and cultures rather than merely as a periphery viewed from the national center, and founded the journal "Tōhokugaku" in 1999. His "Okamoto Tarō no Mita Nihon" received the Bunkamura Deux Magots Literary Prize and the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize. In his representative work, "Tōhokugaku: Wasurerareta Tōhoku," Akasaka examines mountain communities, fishing populations, hunting traditions, and northern cultural connections that were often excluded from accounts of Japan centered on rice-growing villages, drawing on interviews and fieldwork to reconstruct the region’s diverse past.
