Julia Walton is the inaugural Blakemore-ICWA Fellow, examining how youth civic participation in Japan is evolving amid demographic change and shifting political structures. A doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, she recently completed a year of advanced language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, Japan as a Blakemore Fellow. Her academic research examines how literature, media and games shape cultural relations between Japan and the United States, and her dissertation traces the emergence of everyday life as an aesthetic form in popular culture since the 1980s. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where she majored in English and served as editor-in-chief of The Nassau Literary Review.