College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate 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 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.Item The Green Coolness and Shelter of Leaves: Poems(2007-05-06) Heck, April Naoko; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of plain-spoken, free verse poems is primarily a means of knowing and remembering two late family members. The first section is a series of poems tracing the steps of my Japanese great-grandmother, Obaasan, as a Hiroshima survivor. Through research, conversations with family, and imagination, the poems in part interweave a narrative with the process of discovering this narrative. The short, bridging second section consists of poems that deepen concerns about the body's vulnerabilities, and suggest physical experience as one way of relating. In the third section--traveling from east to west, from distant to recent past--a series of poems uncovers a childhood of both nurturance and instability, complicated by economic hardship, issues of identity, and my father's addictions and sudden passing.