We Are All Survivors (University of Indiana Press, September 2022), co-edited by Michael Dylan Foster, professor of Japanese, is a collection of essays exploring the role of folklore in the wake of disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Maria, two earthquakes in Japan, and the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011. 

Foster came to UC Davis in 2016 after eight years in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Before that he worked at UC Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature & Foreign Languages, where he taught Japanese language, literature, folklore and film.

His research focuses on folklore, literature and popular culture, primarily in Japan. He is interested in how cultural phenomena and beliefs—particularly those associated with the supernatural—are articulated through textual and visual media as well as performance, ritual and everyday contexts.

He has written a lot about supernatural creatures and strange phenomena. His first book, Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai (2009), is a cultural history that traces how notions of the mysterious have been understood within both academic discourses and popular practices from the seventeenth century through the present. He particularly explores how aspects of everyday life we often take for granted—games, rumors, popular beliefs—reflect broader cultural and historical changes.

View the book at Indiana University Press