Eiji Oguma (born 1962) is a Japanese sociologist specializing in historical sociology and a professor in the Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University. After graduating from the University of Tokyo, he worked as an editor at Iwanami Shoten before completing his doctorate at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His research uses extensive archival and contemporary sources to examine national identity, colonial rule, postwar thought, and social movements. In his representative work “A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-Images,” Oguma challenges the belief that Japan has always been an ethnically homogeneous nation, demonstrating that this image became dominant only after the collapse of the Japanese empire. The book received the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities.
