CJS Colleagues

CJS Colleagues

CJS スタッフ近況

Publications and Updates

Over the last year, the diverse specialists that make up CJS have continued to produce impressive outputs across conferences, journals and lectures alongside their teaching – a testament to the expertise and breadth of research that our staff continually bring to the field of Japanese studies.

Dr Sherzod Muminov, Associate Professor in Japanese History, published his latest title Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of the New Japan, 1945-1956 in January 2022, which aims to explore the real people taken as prisoners of war by the Soviet Union from the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, numbering over 600,000 Japanese soldiers. Creating a portrait of life in Siberia and later in Japan, the study also sheds new light on our understanding of the Cold War front. Sherzod was also in Japan on a research fellowship at Tohoku University Center for Northeast Asian Studies (CNEAS) earlier this year and gave a lecture at Ritsumeikan University on the topic of the Siberian internment of the Japanese Army. Sherzod has since taken over as Acting Director of CJS for this academic year and continues to teach the Japan special subject, a yearlong, third-year undergraduate module titled “Japan’s First Modern Century, 1868-1968”

Professor Simon Kaner, who is on study leave for this year, has been busy with arrangements for the exhibition Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan, currently on show at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre until August

2023. Featuring some objects which have never before been shown outside of Japan, the opening was held on Thursday 29th September, and attended by his Excellency Mr Hajime Hayashi, Ambassador of Japan to the UK. The exhibition has received significant coverage in the media and Simon has also taken part in podcasts for both English Heritage and The PastCast, alongside articles in Current World Archaeology and the English Heritage Magazine.

Dr Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage and course director for the MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies, published Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde, an exploration of The Bokujinkai or ‘People of the Ink’ a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers. Through their work, this group rerouted the course of global abstract art, bringing calligraphic visualities and narratives to international audiences. You can hear more about Eugenia’s work on Avant-garde calligraphy in this Beyond Japan podcast episode. Eugenia has also become Acting Director of the Sainsbury Institute for this academic year and has been busy with tasks related to the running of the institute as well as being course director for the MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies programme.

Dr Ra Mason, Sasakawa Associate Professor of International Relations and Japanese Foreign Policy, has been working primarily on Okinawa and Japan's security. This has included chairing a session on Okinawan activism at the Daiwa Foundation in London, giving an invited talk on security in the East China Sea at the Nissan Institute, University of Oxford, as well as leading a student-staff delegation to an international panel discussion at the European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS) and multiple presentations at EJARN, NAJS, VUB (Kobe/Kent) and other Japan-related international conferences. Ra also completed a chapter for the forthcoming book, Japan's Security Policy (Routledge), as well as on Shuri Castle for the Handbook of Disaster Studies in Japan (MHM Press), in addition to a chapter for the edited volume Old Friends, New Partners: New Perspectives on Peacetime Anglo-Japanese Military Relations: 18642022, to be published next year with Brill Publishers as part of a collaborative project with colleagues at Ritsumeikan University and elsewhere. Finally, Ra has just signed a book contract to write Okinawa: Keystone of the Pacific with Agenda Publishing. Along with other colleagues, Ra has also been instrumental in overseeing the completion of an exciting new MoU with the International Relations department of Ritsumeikan University, and will make good on an MoU with Meio University, Okinawa, when he takes up a seat as a visiting scholar from January 2023. He also continues to work with Tohoku University to strengthen CJS’s multi-faculty ties there.

Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, Lecturer in Japanese Language and Culture, has been working on an upcoming online publication, Okinawan Art in its Regional Context: Historical Overview and Contemporary Practice, to be published as part of the Sainsbury Institute Occasional Paper Series. Editing alongside Hiroko Ikegami, Megumi Machida, and Toshio Watanabe, the publication is a culmination of papers from a conference of the same name that took place in October 2019. The conference itself addressed the socio-cultural complexities of Okinawan identity over the course of history, and explore the intersection between art, politics, and identity from an interdisciplinary perspective. We will release full details of the publication via our social media channels once it is published. Eriko also took part in this year’s AAS conference in a panel on the theme of ‘Decentering "Japanese Art History": Rethinking Periodization, Geography, and Historiography’, as well as the British Association for Japanese Studies conference in Manchester in September with a paper titled ‘Neo-Ryukyuan Painting: Contemporary Okinawan Female Nihonga Painters and the Recreation of the Ryukyuan Painting Tradition’.

Dr Nadine Willems, Associate Professor in Japanese History, released her latest book in 2020 which investigates a strand of non-violent anarchism through the eyes and travels of Ishikawa Sanshirō, an activist and intellectual in Modern Japan. Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imagination: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan identifies a transnational ‘geographical imagination’ that valued ethics of cooperation in the social sphere and a renewed awareness of the man-nature interaction. You can find out more about the publication from a recording of the book launch event at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation here. Nadine also gave a talk entitled ‘Going to War During the Taisho Period: Japan’s Siberian Intervention of 1918-1922 as Illustrated by the Pictorial Diaries of Infantryman Takeuchi Tadao’ at the 101st International ARC seminar this year, a report of which was written by MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies alumna Emma Kiey, available here.

Dr Hannah Osborne, Japan Foundation Lecturer in Japanese Literature, has this year been busy in her post as Chief Editor for Japan Forum. Papers are currently being revised for a forthcoming special issue, guest edited by Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland, focussing on contemporary women’s fiction, and she is anticipating a number of draft papers coming through for the Decolonising Japanese Studies special issue which she will be guest editing early next year. Hannah has also been involved in arranging a roundtable event for the CJS Research Seminar series with

William Marotti, Emi Foulk Bushelle and Kelly Midory McCormick on their special issue for Japan Forum 'Imagination and the Real' which came out in August this year. She was also closely involved in organising an in-person event with Tomiyasu Hayahisa with the National Centre for Writing. She will be on study leave in the Spring Semester during which time she will be working on a monograph on Kanai Mieko's early writings and engagement with the 1960s Japanese avant-garde scene.

Dr Ryoko Matsuba, Lecturer in Japanese Digital Arts and Humanities, has delivered modules on the MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies programme over the past year, with a particular focus on coordinating innovative joint lectures with Ritsumeikan University involving livestreamed workshops between UK and Japan on digitisation practices. The theme of digitisation has continued in Ryoko’s own research, where she has been leading on digitisation initiatives with collections of Japanese artefacts in the UK, as well as capturing traditional woodblock printing technologies with printmakers in Japan. Ryoko also has three upcoming book publications on Hokusai’s work which will be announced via our social media channels once published including a book chapter ‘Facsimile Reproductions (fukusei) of Hokusai’s Prints in the Meiji Era (1868-1912 )‘ for the British Museum Research Volume Late Hokusai: Thought, Technique, Society, which will be published early next year.