John W. Traphagan

John W. Traphagan was born in Boston, Massachusetts and currently resides in the Metropolitan Boston area. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Program in Organizational Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Emeritus of anthropology in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also held positions at Arizona State University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Waseda University in Tokyo. He received his BA in political science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, his MA in social ethics from Yale University, and his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh. Traphagan first visited Japan in the late 1980s, and in the 1990s he conducted research for almost two years there as a Fulbright scholar. He has returned annually and spent a total of almost five years in rural areas and Tokyo.