Daiwa Scholars 2020

Dr Elliot Byford

Elliot was awarded a Bachelor of Medicine degree by Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia in 2018, and completed an intercalated BSc in Medical Research at the University of Leicester in 2017. He is currently completing his second year of training as a Junior Doctor at North Manchester General Hospital. His interest in Japan developed through involvement with his university’s Japan Society, and he decided to undertake a medical elective at Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine in summer 2016. Having thoroughly enjoyed his time in Nagoya, he returned in summer 2017 to intern at Kamiyama-Gakuin Japanese Language School. Following a PhD, which he would like to undertake in Japan, he aspires to pursue a career in academic haematology. He is particularly interested in subtypes of lymphoma that are uniquely prevalent in Japan and in the future aims to establish an international network of co-investigators.

Katie Croft

Katie was awarded a BA in English and Philosophy by the University of York in 2008. She then became a gardener, training with the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and the National Trust for Scotland. She worked for the National Trust for seven years at gardens including Bodnant and Hidcote Manor. She is currently working freelance, specialising in complex pruning and Japanese gardens. During her first visit to Japan in 2016, she spent four months working at Kiseki no Hoshi, a modern conservatory garden in Awajishima (Seto Inland Sea). It was during this period that she realised she wanted to further her knowledge of Japanese gardens. She has since returned to Japan on three more occasions, most recently in 2019. She aims to become a leading expert in Japanese garden design, construction and maintenance in the UK and to create new gardens in the public and private sphere, consult on and maintain existing gardens and teach these skills to other professionals. You can see Katie’s The Adventuring Gardener  website here https://www.theadventuringgardener.com.

Here you can read Katie’s review of  “Tokachi Millennium Forest: Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature” written by Dan Pearson with Midori Shintani: The Japan Society – Tokachi Millennium Forest: Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature.

Grace Lawrence

Grace was awarded a Bachelor degree in Arts and Sciences by University College London in 2019. As part of her degree she took a module in Japanese, and spent a year at the University of Tokyo from 2017 to 2018. While in Japan she wrote a dissertation on the Japanese postwar student protests, and her final dissertation explored Butoh, which she discovered in Japan and continues to practise. She first visited Japan during her gap year in 2015, during which time she travelled around by herself for a month. Having enjoyed the experience, she returned to Japan to undertake a month-long internship with Ashinaga in 2016. Deeply interested in the issue of sustainability, she has turned her attention to the investigation of seaweed and regenerative ocean farming. She aspires to a career that raises awareness of seaweed as a sustainable food, animal feed and carbon sink and which would provide livelihoods for fishermen in areas suffering from declining fish stocks.

Jack Young

Jack was awarded a BSc in Evolutionary Anthropology by the University of Liverpool in 2019, and in 2020 completed a Master’s in Palaeoanthropology, also at Liverpool. During a period of study abroad at Seoul National University in South Korea, Jack was invited to present at Kyushu University on the subject of women in employment in Japan and South Korea, following which he extended his visit to travel around the country.  Intent on continuing his research on the distribution and morphology of large carnivores, including canids, he aspires to complete a PhD after which he proposes to engage in post-doctoral research in the areas of archaeozoology and integrative biology. Japan presents a unique opportunity for him to study the two extinct wolf subspecies unique to Japan, the Honshu wolf and the Hokkaido wolf.

Hannah Wu