Katsuaki Nakazawa (born 1966) is a historian of medieval Japan specializing in castles and hunting culture. Born in Nagano City, he left the doctoral programme at Aoyama Gakuin University and subsequently earned a doctorate in history. As a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science research fellow, he studied the functions of castle space in medieval society. He later investigated relations between humans and animals at Nagano National College of Technology and joined Sophia University’s Department of History in 2014. His research combines written documents, pictorial sources, and archaeological findings to examine the social roles of castles and residences and the connections between belief, politics, hunting, and meat consumption. In “Nikushoku no Shakaishi” (2018), he examined prohibitions on killing and ideas of pollution alongside evidence of falconry and meat eating, questioning the assumption that Japanese people uniformly avoided meat. “Shuryo to Kenryoku: Nihon Chusei ni Okeru Yasei no Kachi” (2022) developed this study of human–animal relations through the hunting practices of emperors, courtiers, and warriors. Ranging from antiquity to the early modern period, it explored how capturing wild animals became bound up with authority, ritual, and prohibitions on killing. In “Nihon Jokakushi” (2026), Nakazawa returned to castles through documentary history, tracing their development from ancient fortified enclosures to early modern castles. Rather than treating them solely as military installations, he followed changes in how people understood castles and their place in the social order.
