Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies 2022
Three Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies have been selected in the programme’s eighth year.
Announcing the new Daiwa Scholars, Jason James, Director General of The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, said:
“We selected three new Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies on Friday 4th March, holding most of the interviews in person. As always, the applicants were looking to research a wide range of Japan-related topics, and faced a fearsome grilling in Japanese as well as English – a high level of Japanese language being one of the selection criteria. The successful candidates will be focusing on: (i) variant texts of the martial epic The Tales of Heike, (ii) kawaii (‘cute’) culture as an increasingly global rather than just Japanese phenomenon, and (iii) the way that ‘difficult’ heritage sites (e.g. those related to WWII) are presented differently in different languages. I very much look forward to following their research as it develops.”
You can see the Scholars’ profiles with photographs via this PDF.
About the scholars
Leo Collins
Leo began learning Japanese at undergraduate level, completing a BA in Japanese at the University of Oxford in 2017. As part of his degree, he studied at Kobe University. He translated and wrote a commentary on Ibuki Dōji, a tale about the childhood of the mythical demon Shuten Dōji for his dissertation project. The demon is the focus of a host of narratives, the oldest extant version dating to the fourteenth century. Following his BA, Leo returned to Japan where he worked for MUFG Bank as relationship manager and then compliance officer from September 2017 to September 2021. In April 2022 he will begin an MA at Waseda University in Global Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies. He intends to explore issues of textuality and authorship in premodern narratives, specifically in relation to The Tales of Heike.
Taniesha Kadiri
Taniesha completed a BA in Animation and Visual Effects at Falmouth University in 2019 and an MA in Japanese Studies at SOAS University of London in 2020. She travelled to Japan for the first time in 2017, for ten days. In September 2021 she began an MA at Waseda University in Global Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies. The first semester was conducted online from the UK, but Taniesha will be in Tokyo for the start of the second semester in April 2022. Taniesha took an interest in learning Japanese from the age of thirteen. She studied Japanese at school and also translated manga into English as a hobby, which helped improve her Japanese. During her MA at Waseda, Taniesha has been conducting research into kawaii culture as “globalised” cute culture, a synthesis of Japanese and non-Japanese cultural elements.
Oliver Moxham
Oliver completed a BA in Japanese Studies and History at the University of Sheffield in 2019 and an MA in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at the University of East Anglia in 2021. He spent a year at Doshisha University as part of his BA. It was his experience of working in Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, as a volunteer on the Willing Workers On Organic Farms (WWOOF) scheme that inspired him to study Japanese at university. Since November 2021, Oliver has been working as a Research Project Coordinator at the University of East Anglia. He has been hosting the Beyond Japan research podcast and organising webinars and conferences, amongst other duties. In September 2022 he began a PhD in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He intends to study the way that war history is presented and interpreted in Japan and the issues this raises for translation and intercultural communication.