[1] She is best known for her most recent book Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award[2] and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography,[3] and was a finalist for both the Baillie Gifford Prize[4] and Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
She has received harassment from Japanese internet right-wing communities (commonly known as netto uyoku ネット右翼, or neto uyo ネトウヨ for short)[7] and Japanese and Korean right-wing scholars due to her criticism on how the controversial issue of Korean comfort women of WWII has been written about by academics.
"[8] As a result Stanley has also stated that she was the subject of “oblique threats.”[9] Stanley’s interest in Japan was first sparked when she interacted with Japanese post-doctoral students who worked alongside her father at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
[10] Stanley did not start learning Japanese until she began her post-secondary education at Harvard University.
[11] Under the guidance of her advisor Harold Bolitho she was encouraged to pursue her research in early modern Japan.