Ruriko Kumano received her PhD in education from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2007 and is currently an associate professor in the Faculty of Global Studies at Reitaku University, Japan. Through her graduate studies at Seton Hall University in the United States (MA in Asian Studies) and PhD research at the University of Hawaii (East-West Center full fellowship grantee), she has focused on studying the lost memory of Japan’s pre-war ideology and the drastic reforms under the US occupation to discover the reasons for the downfall of the pre-war regime and why postwar Japanese people are taught so little about the pre-war ideology.
Her publications include Nihon Kyōiku Senryō (Japanese Education Occupied) (2015) and "Anticommunism and Academic Freedom: Walter C. Eells and the ‘Red Purge’ in Occupied Japan" (in History of Education Quarterly, 50, no. 4, 2010).