RESEARCH PROJECT

An Imagined Future, Disappearing Futures: ‘Nihon-gaku’ and Colonial, Internal, and Imperial Differences within the Japanese Nation-Empire

This postdoctoral research project addresses the attempts to reconstitute a discursive network of colonial, internal, and imperial differences that discursively sustained and legitimated the future of the Japanese empire envisioned by the Japanese political and intellectual elites. More concretely, the project identifies three loci crucial for such attempts, which together constituted a liminal space, or a transformative threshold, to reiterate those differences. The first is the semantic and conceptual shift from ‘shukan’ (the observing subject) to ‘shutai’ ( the acting subject) we see in the early 20th century, which, as the primary cognitive apparatus, re-enacted the boundaries of ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese’ as the modern subject, as collective self-consciousness, vis-à-vis the internal and external other of the Japanese empire. The second is what I term here as ‘the grammar of teikoku (empire)’, which offered a discursive disguise for the hierarchised scale of differences established by ‘shutai’.

My engagement with ‘shutai’ and ‘the grammar of teikoku’ will constitute a conceptual and analytical backdrop for the third and main locus of research, that is the field of knowledge called ‘nihon-gaku’ (studies of Japan) developed at imperial universities as a site of self-knowledge production and dissemination for the ‘Japanese’ students and scholars to reiterate the scale of differences, and as a mode of cultural assimilation of colonial subjects into imperial subjects. By critically engaging with these loci, this postdoctoral project seeks to understand contestations and negotiations built into a discursive network of colonial, internal, and imperial differences, and to account for the ways in which a specific future of Japan and East Asia was articulated in a liminal space between epistemology (cognitive practices mediated by the idea of ‘shutai’), politics (the Japanese empire instituted and legitimated through the grammar of teikoku), and cultural production (knowledge production and dissemination through nihon-gaku).

ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES

Publications

• The Subject Position: Modern Knowledge Formation in Japan as Translational Practices. Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophi-schen Fakultät der Universität Heidelberg. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg 2025. DOI: 10.11588/heidok.00036472.
• “Epistemic (Dis)Obedience: ‘Japanese’ Theory, Structural Inequality, and Kokusai Nihongaku.” In: Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques 79(2), 2025, pp. 329–366. DOI: 10.1515/asia-2025-0001

Presentations / Panel chairs

• Presentation on research topic. Proposal Workshop, Research Training Group GRK 2833 “East Asian Futures”, Duisburg, Germany, Jun 13–15, 2024. [Poster]
• “‘Metascience’ of Self-Knowledge and Anthropological Knowledge? A Note on Kokusai Nihongaku 国際日本学 (International/Global Japanese Studies) from a Historical Perspective”. Mittagsforum, Faculty of East Asian Studies, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, Jul 3, 2024.
• “On the Limits of Analytical Categories: Japanese Imperial and Colonial Discourses and the Conception of Time and Temporality”. 18th Annual Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS) “Asian Temporalities: Chronologies, Seasons, Tenses”, Department of Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia, Nov 22–23, 2024.
• “‘How to narrate Japan as Japanese to those outside?’ Kokusai Nihongaku and categories of knowledge”. Satsuma Chair Guest Lecture, East Asian and Arabic Studies Research Unit, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, Apr 30, 2025.
• “Transgression: A theoretical reflection on the temporality of future imagery of the Japanese Empire”. International Conference of the Young Scholars‘ Group of the German Association for Asian Studies (DGA) “Thinking Futures in Asia”, Leipzig University, Germany, May 9–11, 2025.
• Panel Chair for “Cybercrime in a Digitalized Japan: Risks, Responses, and Implications for the Future”. British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS) 2025 – 50th Anniversary Conference, Cardiff University, United Kingdom, Sep 3–9, 2025.
• “A future that remoulds the past: An introduction to the studies of past futures in East Asia”. Guest Lecture, Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’Foscari University, Venice, Italy, Oct 6–8, 2025.