Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet the Japanese Army was arguably ...

This dissertation argues that the Japanese debate over prostitution regulation between the 1870s and the 1910s saw a fundamental shift in the construction of male sexuality as a political tool. Before the turn of the century ...

The purpose of this thesis is to use the history of music theory to study cultural change in Japan. It has been said that “music is number” (Sima Qian), that it is the “organon of philosophy” (Schelling), that the discovery ...

This dissertation seeks to answer two overarching questions: what was “Western knowledge” in the nineteenth century, and how did it become a global knowledge form? I do so by sketching a transnational history of the networks ...

This dissertation examines the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious attempt to create a new order in East Asia. Most studies on Japan’s new order focus on either the imperial center (Japan) or the ...