Eiko Ikegami was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. After receiving a university education in Japanese classical literature in Japan, she became a business journalist in Tokyo at the Nikkei, the Japan Economic Journal. In 1983, on a Fulbright program, she came to the United States for her graduate studies in sociology, at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in 1989. She held a number of fellowships and grants including Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2002, she was elected as Chair of the Section of Comparative and Historical Sociology at the American Sociological Associa...