Akiko Hashimoto grew up in Tokyo, London, and Hamburg. She received her B.Sc. from the London School of Economics and M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. After working at the United Nations University in Tokyo, she taught Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh for 25 years, and is now Visiting Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Portland State University.
She is author and editor of volumes on cultural sociology and comparative sociology, focused on social constructions of reality in varied cultural settings. Her special interests are cultural trauma, war memory, national identity, culture and power, popular culture and media, family and aging. Her book The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory and Identity in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2015) won the 2016 Scholarly Achievement Award of the North Central Sociological Association. The book is now available in Japanese (Nihon no Nagai Sengo, Misuzu Shobo Publishers, 2017) and Chinese (Beijing Imaginist, 2019). She is also author of The Gift of Generations: Japanese and American Perspectives on Aging and the Social Contract (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and co-editor of Imagined Families, Lived Families (SUNY Press, 2008) and Family Support for the Elderly: The international Experience (Oxford University Press, 1992).