Yasuhiro Okazawa (岡澤康浩) is a historian and translator. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. He studied social sciences, media theory, and the history of science at Kyoto University, University of Tokyo, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science before completing his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on how human sciences and their inscription devices have historically shaped our ways of seeing, understanding, and interacting with each other. His research interests include the history of science, media theory, and ethnomethodology.

His PhD thesis, 'The Scientific Rationality of Early Statistics, 1833–1877', closely examines the activities of the Statistical Society of London, which was formed as a voluntary scientific society of statisticians to achieve a common scientific good: the collection of social facts. His thesis reveals that statisticians gathered at the Statistical Society of London conceived statistics as a collective scientific observation of society and collectively molded concepts, practices, and institutions to orchestrate statistical observation at both the national and international levels. Victorian statisticians promoted coordinated observation conducted by unremarkable observers while depreciating the value of fine observation single-handedly conducted by a capable observer, as no matter how accurately the latter observation was individually made, statisticians believed it would be a partial, and thus potentially distorted, vision of society, which could mislead observers. As Victorian statisticians saw it, statistical facts had to be numerous rather than a handful. Yasuhiro’s thesis argues that such conception of statistical facts resulted in relegating the value of statisticians' first-hand observation and compelled statisticians to observe society through pages of statistical documents in a dusty library. His thesis illustrates how the Statistical Society of London's activities shaped our way of seeing so that we are compelled to trust accumulated social statistics, as opposed to our eyes, to understand our very own life.

Currently, Yasuhiro is working on a new research project, 'Historical Epistemology of Social Exploration c. 1850–1910'. His project will study the practices of social exploration, a form of social investigation that closely observes and describes the actual lives of people, in mid-Victorian and Edwardian London and trace the historical formation of the field as a source of knowledge in social sciences. He will specifically examine social explorers' observational practices, literary technologies, and scientific self. In addition to those proto-urban-ethnographers in London, he is also interested in the proliferation of social explorers in Tokyo in the same period and how their literary practices shaped the ways of seeing, writing, and reading in the ‘modernization’ of Japan.