Chikako Ozawa-de Silva | Omoiyari without Empathy: The Anthropology of Loneliness in Japan

Chikako Ozawa-de Silva

Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, D.Phil., is a Professor of Japanese Studies and Anthropology at Emory University. She is a NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) grant recipient and a Mind and Life Contemplative Studies Fellowship (The John Templeton Foundation) recipient. Her academic vision is to contribute to cross-cultural understandings of health, illness and well-being by bringing Western and Asian perspectives on the mind-body, religion, medicine, and therapy into fruitful dialogue. Her publications include two monographs: the multi-award winning The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan (University of California Press, 2021) and Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan: The Japanese Introspection Practice of Naikan (Routledge, 2006); as well as a co-edited special issue “Toward an Anthropology of Loneliness” in Transcultural Psychiatry (2020), review article “The Anthropology of Loneliness: A Multi-Scalar and Ethnographic Examination” in The Annual Review of Anthropology (2026) and over twenty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. For the past ten years her research has focused on loneliness, empathy, meaning-making, subjectivity, contemplative practice, and resilience in Japan and the US. Most recent book project is on the globalization of Japanese anime and manga.