UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Between Body and Spirit: Indian Influences on Modern Japanese Art(2024) Chiu, Chao Chi; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation contributes to ongoing examinations on modern transcultural exchanges between Japan and other Asian countries in the field of Japanese art by investigating the influence of India on itinerant Japanese artists throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, it challenges prevailing assumptions that Japanese artistic engagement with foreign culturesoperated entirely within an imperialistic context. Among the many Asian countries that served as sources of artistic inspiration for Japan, India stood out from the rest because of its esteemed spirituality in the eyes of Japanese intellectuals. Contemporary Japanese writings emphasized India’s importance as the birth place of Buddhism and framed the South Asian country as a bastion on Asian spiritual fortitude against the influx of Western materialism. Consequently, India also attracted Buddhist artists across Japan to visit its ancient temples and museums to its art. While these Japanese abroad expressed their admiration towards India’s religiosity and adherence to keeping its traditions alive, they also fantasized about the exoticism and corporeality embodied in Indian art and contemporary locals. Such fantasies were visualized intheir works in visual icons such as half-nude females with elaborate poses, Buddhist figures, including the Buddha himself, with exaggerated Indian ethnic features, and tropical plants and animals representing a long-lost past. I argue that Japanese adaption of Indian styles and themes into their art was characterized by a precarious harmony between spiritual and corporeal elements in the artist works. Furthermore, each artist defined “spirituality” and “corporeality” in distinct way, which led to diverse approaches. My dissertation revolved around four artists as case studies: Arai Kanpō, Nōsu Kōsetsu, Ishizaki Kōyō, and Sugimoto Tetsurō. By examining the careers, writings, and artworks of each artist, I will highlight how Japanese artists interpreted Indian materials and utilized them to create unconventional works. Furthermore, I would contextualize these artists’ work in the development of Japanese perspectives toward India throughout the twentieth century, expressed through contemporary writings that praised India for its spiritual fortitude but also denigrated them as an inferior Asian country. Examining the artists’ life and works in connection to changing perspectives towards India, Buddhism, and religious art in modern society, this dissertation explores the nuances of Japan’s artistic interaction with foreign materials beyond the context of colonialism and imperialism.Item Music Literature During the Allied Occupation of Japan and Debates on the Future of Japanese Music, 1945-1949(2023) DeBell, Joshua Blake; Robin, William; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research on how countries under military occupation developed their music range from studies of the American occupation of Germany to studies of the Allied Occupation of Japan. Even though studies on Japanese music under occupation mainly focused on how composers dictated this culture, Japanese scholars should also be considered because scholarly writings have historically influenced what styles and aesthetics the Japanese endorsed. This study examines music literature from the University of Maryland’s Gordon W. Prange Collection. From 1945 to 1949, this literature is characterized by scholars studying the hōgaku, European, and American art music traditions. They also advocated that readers appreciate composers, pieces, styles, and genres from European art music, American art music, or hōgaku to establish a new music culture for Japan. However, these authors were divided on whether this music should only employ Western and Japanese styles or be a fusion of both. By examining this literature, this study offers an analysis of an under-researched perspective on music during Japan’s occupation and provides a new musicological approach toward examining occupation cultures.Item Sounds of the Compact City: A Musical Urban Ethnography of Toyama City, Japan(2021) Scally, William Donawerth; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation explores the sonic and musical aspects of social life in Toyama City, a Japanese city of about 400,000 people that has recently been connected to Tokyo by a high-speed rail line. To support an aging and shrinking population while moving toward greater environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, the Toyama City government has enacted a series of programs termed the “Compact City Plan” to improve ease of access to public transportation and vital facilities while encouraging older residents to live in designated “residence encouragement zones” close to major transportation hubs. Drawing on extended in-person engagement, correspondence, and examination of online materials, I discuss the interplay of music, sound, and the natural and constructed environment. What emerges is a picture of social life in the city, animated and given meaning by individuals, communities, and patterns of movement in both its everyday life and in moments of celebration or catastrophe. This dissertation includes a detailed exploration of the sensory experience of the Toyama City center, an overview of several musical webs that rely on the movement of people into, out of, and within Toyama City, an overview of other webs that have coalesced around key individuals, and an account of several important festivals that occurred or were cancelled in 2019–2020. Tying these threads together is a discussion of the co-constituency of the human-made and natural environments and the ways that social worlds rise and fall from them. This is a study of both the connections and interruptions that characterize life in Toyama City. Part-way through my fieldwork period, I had to return to the U.S. as the spreading COVID-19 pandemic threatened safety, travel, and the operations of everyday life. This shift to remote fieldwork, however, also allows attention to Toyama’s connections and self-presentation to the rest of the world. Toyama is both similar to other small cities and unique, and this study of the city’s diverse sonic and musical life across multiple genres and in both local and virtual domains provides a model for making sense of the material life of a small city.Item Childhood Notes(2017) Pratiwi, Theresia; Mitchell, Emily; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in “Childhood Notes” represent a portion of work I have done as a graduate student in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland. They were chosen for their thematic links, for their stylistic experimentation, and for their roles in guiding me to pay a closer attention to language. Collectively, they read as life episodes undergone by characters who find no comfort in being where they are: disillusioned couples, two friends in a segregated city, a medical doctor in a conflict area, and people lost in Japan.Item Ideals, Aesthetics, and Practices of Professionalization in the Tokyo Jazz Scene(2016) Scally, William Donawerth; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the early twenty-first century, jazz has a history in Japan of approximately 100 years. In contemporary Tokyo, Japanese musicians demonstrate their right to access jazz performance through a variety of musical and extra-musical techniques. Those accepted as fully professional and authentic artists, or puro, gain a special status among their peers, setting them apart from their amateur and part-time counterparts. Drawing on three months of participant-observation in the Tokyo jazz scene, I examine this status of puro, its variable definition, the techniques used by musicians to establish themselves as credible jazz performers, and some obstacles to achieving this status. I claim two things: first, aspiring puro musicians establish themselves within a jazz tradition through musical references to African American identity and a rhetoric of jazz as universal music. Second, I claim that universalism as a core aesthetic creates additional obstacles to puro status for certain musicians in the Tokyo scene.Item Empiricism and Exchange: Dutch-Japanese Relations Through Material Culture, 1600-1750(2015) Jamrisko, Kristi; Wheelock, Arthur K; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis will focus on unique modes of material culture exchange to shed light on the early relationship between the Dutch Republic and Japan in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I will demonstrate that while exoticism and “otherness” animated this cross-cultural interaction, important commonalities between the two countries also merit examination. The rich and diverse material culture bequeathed by the Dutch-Japanese relationship, particularly when viewed in the context of “micro-exchanges” such as gift-giving and (anti-) religious ritual, offers an excellent means for exploring these similarities. Three case studies – the Japonsche rok (Japanese robe), Rembert Dodoens’s Cruydt-Boeck (Herbal), and bas-relief plaques of Christ and the Virgin Mary, which in Japan were transformed into fumi-e (踏み絵, “trampling images”) – will illuminate one of these commonalities: the simultaneous rise of empiricism in both the Dutch Republic and Japan.Item Isamu Dreams of Flying(2015) Kauffman, Ashlie; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fictionalized events in the life of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) are woven with the story of a boy fascinated with airplanes, who grows up to be an artist. This section shows Isamu and his mother, Leonie Gilmour, traveling to Japan to live with his father, poet Yone Noguchi. In Japan, Isamu is raised solely by Leonie. He is surprised when she gives birth to his sister, the dancer Ailes Gilmour. Facing racial discrimination and feeling envy toward Ailes, he departs in 1918 for boarding school in Indiana. Interspersed with this is the story of a boy, David, who builds a model airplane that he wishes to show his mother when he visits her for a week. Raised by his father, he is envious of attention his mother gives her boyfriend. As an adult, David begins dating a woman named Elizabeth, before he moves to Japan to teach art.Item Do Students Have Cultural Scripts? Results from the First Implementation of Open Source Tutorials in Japan(2013) Hull, Michael Malvern; Elby, Andrew; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1980's and 1990's, results from flurries of standardized exams (particularly in 4th and 8th grade mathematics and science) reached the attention of ever-growing numbers of Americans with an alarming message: our children are not even close to keeping up with those in China, Japan, and Korea. As a step towards improving American classrooms, cross-cultural education researchers began to investigate differences in classroom structure, curricular content and focus, and attitudes and beliefs of students towards learning. Inspired American teachers tried to capitalize on these observed differences by making their classrooms look (for example) "more Japanese" and frequently met with failure. Researchers have used the differences in student beliefs as a justification for this failure: "Japanese students believe different things about what classroom learning should look like than American students do. If you teach American students in a way that clashes with their beliefs about learning, it's no surprise that the students don't buy in to it and the lesson doesn't succeed!" This response has discouraged teachers from haphazardly trying to change their classrooms so as to resemble more successful ones. At the same time, this message, in addition to the methods, analyses, and discussions surrounding the observations of student beliefs in general, have treated beliefs as being something determined by the culture in which the student grows up in, and as being stable and robust. Based upon research findings in cognitive science about the fluidity of student beliefs, we hypothesized that the treatment of student beliefs as being stable is overly simplistic and ineffective at describing certain classroom phenomena that would be of interest to the cross-cultural education research field. We felt such phenomena could be instructional to American educators, and that a failure to understand such phenomena would imply a failure to learn from these classrooms. We hypothesized that, were we to introduce reformed physics curriculum from America to students in Japan, we would observe context-dependency in how students approached the material. Furthermore, we hypothesized that this curriculum, which was motivated by the assumption that students have multiple ways of approaching knowing and learning, would be productive in the Japanese classroom. Either of these results would go against the tacit assumption of the cross-cultural education research field that students have a stable belief about how learning should take place, and would cast doubt on such a framework. Curriculum developed and tested at the University of Maryland was translated into Japanese and implemented in the spring semester of 2011 at Tokyo Gakugei University. Based upon available literature on the education system in Japan, we hypothesized that students would be entering the college classroom having had three years of cramming for entrance exams in high school and would likely think of physics as something to be learned from authority, by listening to lectures and taking notes. We also hypothesized that many of these students would maintain intellectual resources developed from primary school experiences of working in groups to draw upon their own ideas and experiences to construct knowledge on their own. We chose curriculum intended to get students to act more like they had in primary school than they had in high school, and we hypothesized that although such curriculum would be surprising to the students, they would nevertheless not find it difficult to shift in their beliefs about learning physics to an attitude that "physics can be personally understood and one's own experiences are important in constructing relevant knowledge." For six months, I observed student reactions via various means including semi-structured student interviews, video recordings of the classes, and asking the course instructors about their perceptions of how students were responding. This study has found that, indeed, although most students did enter the class with beliefs about physics and expectations about how to learn it, that they had no difficulty adapting to this style of learning that violated those beliefs. One reason for the ease of this adaptation given by students is that they had experienced something similar to this learning style in primary school. To summarize, we found: - Students easily adopted the new curriculum in the first few classes - Some students made it clear that the class had changed their attitude about physics and what it means to learn physics - Evidence that primary school was a resource on which many students may have drawn Whereas the current perspective on student beliefs used by the cross-cultural education research community would have predicted that a curriculum incompatible with student beliefs about learning would have been a struggle, this was not what happened. This dissertation thus stands as a call to the community to reconsider the concept of a cultural script, and more generally of the fluidity of student beliefs. This is relevant not only for cross-cultural education researchers, but also for teachers reluctant to introduce a curriculum that goes against student beliefs of how learning should take place.Item Borderlands and Border Crossing: Japanese Professors of English and the Negotiation of Translinguistic and Transcultural Identity(2012) Rudolph, Nathanael John; Martin-Beltran, Melinda; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship in the field of ELT posits that critical constructions of the Native Speaker/Non-Native Speaker and Native English Speaker Teacher/Non-Native English Speaker Teacher binaries in the ELT literature have oversimplified and essentialized categories of teacher identity (e.g., Menard-Warwick, 2008; Park, 2012) and as a result cannot account for contextualized negotiations of borders of linguistic and cultural identity around the world. In the interest of addressing this issue, the following study explores the lived experiences of four Japanese professors negotiating their translinguistic and transcultural identities in the field of English language teaching (ELT) in Japan, and how through these experiences they have arrived at challenging who they might be or become as English language learners, teachers and users. Employing narrative inquiry and the use of semi-structured interviews, the study attempts to provide a sociohistorically-situated account of participants' lived experiences conceptualizing and negotiating borders of being and becoming as English language learners, users and teaching professionals. In doing so, the study attempts to examine the interplay of local and global discourses of identity implicated in the construction and perpetuation of borders within ELT in the Japanese context. The study seeks to encourage dialogue in the ELT research and teaching community both within and beyond Japan, related to how these discourses might adversely affect learner, teacher and user identity and contextualized language teaching. In addition, the study attempts to contribute to debate within ELT scholarship regarding who "non-native" teachers might be or become and the roles "native" and "non-native" teachers might play in globalized ELT.Item Standing Tall: U.S. Efforts at Democratizing Rural Japanese Women During the Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952(2010) Price, Emily Rebecca; Mayo, Marlene J; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952, dismantling the political and cultural systems that were perceived to have led Japan to war was a primary goal. Democracy, a word that came to encompass much more than its standard definitions, was to be the replacement ideology and coupled with demilitarization. Through a survey of SCAP documents from Record Group 331 located in the National Archives, this paper examines the way in which varying concepts and meanings of democracy were promoted to rural Japanese women by U.S. Occupation forces. It also explores the ways in which Japanese farm women embraced, rejected, and/or modified the evolving ideas about democracy into their daily lives. While the impact of democracy - in all of its many guises - was not as powerful as Occupation members desired, it still had a definite effect on the way rural Japanese women thought about their society and on their daily lives.