Michifumi Isoda (born 1970) is a Japanese historian and professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Specializing in early modern and modern Japanese history, he uses household accounts, diaries, letters, and disaster records to reconstruct the everyday lives of samurai and ordinary people. His representative work, “Bushi no Kakeibo: Kaga-han Gosanyosha no Bakumatsu Ishin,” analyzes the financial records of the Inoyama family, hereditary accountants of the Kaga domain, to show how samurai household finances and ways of life changed during Japan’s transition from the Tokugawa period to the Meiji era. The book received the Shincho Documentary Prize and was adapted into a film.
