Hi there ! Tokinomichi means, in Japanese, “the way of time”. The blog here is presenting articles, reviews, essays about topics such as Japanese history, Western history, comparative history, history of technology and environmental history. If you have any questions or requests, do not hesitate to contact me by the contact form on this page.

My name is William Favre and I have been trained as a historian of Japan and museologist. My fields of interest are environmental history, disaster history, global history, history of technology, material studies and provenance research.

I earned a master’s degree in history and research at the EHESS, Paris (Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). My dissertation investigated the reaction of the Meiji State to the 1896 Sanriku Meiji Tsunami (year 29th of Meiji era). It focused on how the government responded in the case of lesser-known disasters and peripheral catastrophes. It was soon followed by a second master’s degree in Museum Studies at the University of Neuchâtel. The second dissertation focused on three Japanese collections stored in Swiss museums from three different travelers.

In 2023, I joined the research project “Faire le monde. Premiers tours du monde touristiques”, led by Jean-François Staszak at the University of Geneva, and still is ongoing.

I currently live in Switzerland and pursuing a career between museums and my career as a contributor for the site genevemonde.ch