Welcome to the homepage of Dylan J. Plung.

Dylan J. Plung is a PhD student in History at the University of Washington, specializing in modern Japan and international relations.

Dylan holds a Master’s in International Studies with highest honors from the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Japan Studies Program. He is an alumnus of Stanford University’s prestigious Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) in Yokohama, Japan, and Whitman College, where he earned a Bachelor’s in Asian Studies with distinction, emphasizing modern Japanese history. He previously served at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), worked with the University of Washington’s East Asia Center, and taught as a Teaching Assistant for modern Japanese history courses at UW. He has lived in both Osaka and Yokohama, Japan.

He has published several peer-reviewed articles in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus about Japan’s wartime society and US-Japan relations, including “The Japanese Village at Dugway Proving Ground: An Unexamined Context to the Firebombing of Japan” (2018), “The ‘Unrelated’ Spirits of Aoyama Cemetery: A 21^st Century Reckoning with the Foreign Employees of the Meiji Period” (2021), and “The Impact of Urban Evacuation in Japan during World War II” (2021).

Beyond academic publishing, Dylan contributes policy commentaries on East Asian geopolitics, historical memory, and disinformation. Recent pieces include “Japan’s WWII Anniversary Strategy and China’s Memory Politics” in The Diplomat (2025) and “Japan’s Technology Paradox: The Challenge of Chinese Disinformation” for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab (2025).

Dylan has presented his research at the Western Conference for the Association of Asian Studies (WCAAS), the Japan Studies Association (JSA), Harvard University, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, the University of Washington, and the Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ). His work has been cited by leading Japan scholars including Kenneth B. Pyle (University of Washington) and Sheldon Garon (Princeton University) and in literary works such as Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors.

In addition to a Top Scholar Award at the University of Washington, he has received two national Blakemore-Freeman Fellowships (one for Advanced Japanese Language Study and another for a Professional Language Tutorial in the language of Japan’s wartime mass media), a U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for Japan Studies, and numerous scholarships, prizes, and grants supporting his archival research on World War II Japan.