Asian Studies Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Queering Nuclear Legacies: Anti-Nuclear Space-Time in Hayashi Kyōko and Kobayashi Erika
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Lam, Sarah; DiNitto, Rachel
In 1945 the first detonation of a nuclear weapon was conducted at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. The decades leading up to and following this event involved the systematic displacement, exploitation, and poisoning of Indigenous, ethnic minority, and poor communities for the purposes of nuclear progression. This thesis suggests a framework called “anti-nuclear space-time” to address, challenge, and rewrite nuclear colonial histories. This framework is both a subversion of Western nuclear colonial domination over time and space as well as an imagining of alternative nuclear narratives outside of colonial systems. Using queer analytics, this framework will be applied to two Japanese literary texts: From Trinity to Trinity (1999) by Hayashi Kyōko, and Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019) by Kobayashi Erika. I suggest these two authors are “queering” the spatial and temporal dynamics of nuclear colonial histories and creating a global nuclear conversation that denationalizes and decolonizes nuclear timelines and nuclear spaces.
Open Access
Changing Rurality in Contemporary China: Double Commodification of the Countryside
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Wu, Shuxi; Buck, Daniel
This thesis examines contemporary rural transformations in China. I suggest that a different spatial relationship among production, reproduction, and consumption is in the making, grafted onto the urban-rural divide. A different urban-rural relationship is also in the making, shaped by changing divisions and integrations of labor that go into production, reproduction, and consumption. I argue that these two processes are occurring through a double commodification of the countryside, which produces what I call “rural commodity” and “rural-as-commodity”. “Rural commodity” refers to the ways in which products of rural labor are absorbed into urban-centered accumulation processes. “Rural-as-commodity” refers to how rurality itself has become an object of desire and exchange. These two forms of commodity collaborate to transform the urban-rural division of labor in China to facilitate accumulation. I focus specifically on rural tourism and media representations of new rurality to illustrate how these two forms of commodification converge.
Open Access
Tora-San, Wish You Were Here: Nostalgic Filmmaking In The World’s Longest Film Series
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Ghandour, Fawzi Rami; Freedman, Alisa
The longest film series to feature the same actor, the It’s Tough Being a Man film series, known to fans as the Tora-san series, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with the release of its fiftieth installment, Tora-san, Wish You Were Here (2019). Released twenty-two years after the previous entry and the death of its main actor, this film takes a nostalgic look back on the franchise in the absence the titular Tora-san by a particular technique of inserting scenes from previous films in the series as memories of the film’s main characters. I argue that the film uses its cinematic form to engage with nostalgia in three forms in order to bring Tora-san back. The first is by engaging with the cinematic image cultivated by the series during Japan’s high-growth and bubble economy eras, an image that is defined by Tora-san’s complex character and depictions of vanishing spaces in modern Japan. The second is the use of self-referentiality in the film, adopting the narrative formula of the previous films as well as rooting the cinematic world into the present. Thirdly, the techniques of filmmaking itself are used to evoke a feeling of nostalgia. Through these analyses, I engage with a notion of nostalgic filmmaking and suggest a larger discourse on the connection between cinema and memory within this product of Japanese popular culture.
Open Access
A Space of Renegotiation: Japanese Shachūhaku Narratives
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Bartholomew, David; Freedman, Alisa
In the past decade there has been a growing interest in representations of shachūhaku, or car camping, in Japanese media. In this thesis, I examine three different kinds of media representations of shachūhaku to understand how these narratives provide the distance from the rhythms of everyday life necessary to renegotiate one’s place within the hegemonies that structure them. Each kind of media that I examine has its own formal considerations, and each one utilizes both the spatial configurations of the vehicle and the narrative arc of shachūhaku to bring different aspects of the quotidian under scrutiny, but they all ultimately engage in this renegotiation, whether it be with the concept of death, gender, labor, or home.
Open Access
Re-Centering the Northern Periphery: International Trade and Regional Autonomy in the "Hiraizumi Century"
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Coyle, MacKenzie; Goble, Andrew
This thesis examines the role of international trade in building the Ōshū Fujiwara’s autonomous Hiraizumi polity, and ultimately critiques the idea of “center-periphery” binaries in Japanese history. Following the introduction, which prefaces the under-representation of the Ōshū Fujiwara and Tōhoku in scholarship, Chapters Two and Three detail the construction of the northern periphery in the Heian imagination, as well as the rise of the Ōshū Fujiwara and their autonomous power during the “Hiraizumi Century” (1087-1189). Chapters Four and Five build upon these foundations, and investigate the family’s involvement with Chinese and North Asian trade respectively. These chapters argue that, by acquiring symbolic foreign goods and by dominating key trade commodities, networks, and ports, the Ōshū Fujiwara not only established themselves as a politically and culturally autonomous entity, but also relocated themselves from the “periphery” of Heian society, to the “center” of Japanese and global historical developments.
Open Access
The Lost Year of Anime Conventions: Observations from FanimeCon 2020
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Scrivani, Kourtney; Freedman, Alisa
As a result of the pandemic in 2020, many large fan events canceled to adhere to health guidelines. From this context, conventions had to change their models to virtual entities. This thesis investigates the fan production of the virtual FanimeCon, based in San Jose, CA, during the COVID-19 pandemic. After setting up the history of anime conventions, including concepts of other fan producers and Fanime history, the study used participant-observation and digital interviews with eight respondents to show how fans moved into the role of producers. This information was analyzed to identify the motivations behind fans acting as producers of this convention. From the results, those motivations align with ideas of interactivity, community, and desire to recreate the convention in the absence of an official event. This fan-produced Fanime was a one-time event that resulted directly from the pandemic disruption, which caused a lost year of anime conventions.
Open Access
The Evolving Fashion of Taiwan from 1949-1987: Expression, Consumption, and Futurity
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) DiFonzo, Nakota; Buck, Daniel
The martial law era was an important period for the development of the fashion market in Taiwan. Due to economic and/or cultural influence from China, Japan, Western Europe, and, importantly, the United States, Taiwan was transformed into a consumer-capitalist society where the GMD increasingly predicated its legitimacy as a governing body on its ability to provide an economically comfortable, and consumer-oriented lifestyle for its citizens. In turn, the Taiwanese population, whose standard of living and disposable income increased over the course of the martial law period, had a progressively greater capacity to don a variety of new fashions. The beneficiaries of the fashion market also increasingly exposed Taiwanese to more fashion advertisements and articles in order to entice them into purchasing certain fashion products. This thesis draws on fashion advertisements and fashion articles from newspapers, literary sources from acclaimed writers such as Zhu Tianwen, and interviews from anonymous participants who share stories about the factors that informed the fashion that they donned.
Open Access
Sun Yat-sens: Contested Images of a Political Icon
(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08) Fischer, Thomas; Goodman, Bryna
This thesis explores the afterlives of the Chinese revolutionary icon Sun Yat-sen and their relevant contexts, arguing that these contexts have given rise to different images of the same figure. It serves as a gallery in which these different images are put into conversation with one another, revealing new insights into each. Key to the discussion, Sun is first introduced in a short biography. Then, the thesis moves to his different afterlives: Sun and the fight for his posthumous approval in the Republic of China before 1949; Sun and his usage in Chinese Communist political rhetoric from 1956 through 2016; Sun and his changing image in the ROC-Taiwan, a change that reflects the contentious political environment of an increasingly bentu Taiwan; Sun and two of his images among the overseas Chinese of Hawaii and Penang. Through this exploration, the thesis shows that there is no one Sun Yat-sen.
Open Access
'T'(ea) is for Terroir: An Analysis of the Branding and Valuation of Darjeeling Tea
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Dewan, Anudeep; Valiani, Arafaat
Darjeeling Tea is one of the most expensive types of tea sold today. It has a Geographical Indication (GI) Status that brings it under the intellectual property regime. The tea is valued for the cultural category it signifies, beyond its utility. This research investigates how recognition as a GI product has helped in fetching these premiums, and what meanings are being produced by analyzing how the tea is represented in images and words by different actors. This research reveals that the value of Darjeeling Tea is inextricably tied to meanings of authenticity and rarity that have existed long before the GI status was introduced, and the contradictions produced in the different ways these meanings are produced and values are created, revealing the complex web of capital, human behavior and power structures that span across space and scale.
Open Access
American Mindfulness: A Case Study of the Transnational Reception of “Mindfulness – Maindofurunesu” in Japan
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Duong, Anh Tu; Unno, Mark
Over the past few decades, “mindfulness” has become popular and spread throughout the world, from North American to Australia. It has been applied in numerous context: mental health, education, and business, among others. Although mindfulness has its roots in Buddhist meditation practices, it has been removed from its religious contexts and secularized. Significantly, this standardized form of mindfulness, which can be called American Mindfulness, has been reimported back into Asia. In the case of Japan, American Mindfulness has become popular at the public level, and there are prominent Zen Buddhist priests claiming that American Mindfulness is in fact a part of Japanese Zen. Through analysis of the broader Japanese cultural environment and the Japanese Buddhist context, this thesis will explain how Japanese Zen Buddhists come to make their claim on American Mindfulness.
Open Access
Establishing National Identity in the Twentieth-Century China: Traces of Russian and Ukrainian Literature in the New Chinese Literature
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Korovianska, Veronika; Chan, Roy
Russian literature is traditionally regarded as one that served a model and guide for Chinese intellectuals in developing their national literature. It is also recognized that Eastern European literatures drew much attention of Chinese intellectuals in their quest for national identity and modernization. This thesis is aimed at providing a more detailed look at the Chinese- Slavic literary discourse of the 1920’s, focusing on Russian literature as a recognized literary “authority” of the time, and Ukrainian literature as an example of a literature of an oppressed nation, which went under both Russian and Eastern European “labels” at the time. I argue that challenged by a deep social and political crisis, Chinese intellectuals were compelled to develop a unique form of national identity, basing it on two usually mutually exclusive forms of nationalism, which manifested itself in the literary works of the period.
Open Access
Migrants in Shanghai: An Analysis of Verbal Pejoration in Weibo
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Song, Depei; Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo
This thesis examines 硬盘Yingpan ‘hard drive,’ a newly created online derogatory code word referring to the migrants in Shanghai against the historical background of discrimination of migrants in Shanghai. Based on corpus data from Chinese social media, I examine the usage patterns of this derogatory word. The results show four salient speech acts in which this word is used. These are 1) complaints about migrants, 2) abusive commands, 3) self-victimization of the locals, and 4) lamentation over the loss of Shanghai identity. These usage patterns reflect the impacts of societal changes as a result of mass migration in contemporary China. This study has implications for research of migration and the consequential societal tensions in societies across the globe.
Open Access
Aspirational Migration: The Case of Chinese Birth Tourism in the U.S.
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Folse, Brandon; Otis, Eileen
The ways in which individuals navigate the globe today complicates previous conceptualizations of migration and mobility. Once such mode of contemporary movement which challenges scholars is known as "birth tourism." This research considers birth tourism to be a form of "lifestyle migration," which I label aspirational migration. By analyzing the motivations which drive many parents to give birth abroad, I shed light on the complex and risky process, which involves a host of players, including family, friends, and a global birth tourism infrastructure. Through this drawn-out process, which begins well before the decision to give birth abroad and continues into the distant future, I argue that birth tourists and their foreign-born children become aspirational migrants and acquire cosmopolitan capital.
Open Access
The Problematic Formation of the Modern Self in Lu Xun’s “In Memoriam” and Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophia’s Diary”
(University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Xiong, Shuangting; Chan, Roy
The crisis of the Chinese nation in the early twentieth century compelled May Fourth intellectuals to search for a modern self in order to modernize and strengthen the nation. They did so by self-consciously experimenting with literary forms and genres, from which the first-person narratives arose. This thesis explores how particular formal or generic characteristics produce, problematize, or even impede the formation of a modern self modeled on the Western Enlightenment notions of the self as autonomous, coherent, and bounded. I argue that despite the two authors’ attempt to create an aspirational modern self, the selves constructed in the two texts are always fragile, split and fragmented. It not only reveals the limits of the Western Enlightenment epistemology of the self but also a more complicated processes of how the concepts of the self and subjectivity, as discursive constructs, are contested and negotiated in particular historical circumstance and social reality.
Open Access
Constructing a New Asian Masculinity: Reading Lilting Against Other Films by Asian Filmmakers
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Cheng, Feng; Chan, Roy
In western media, Asian men have traditionally represented as either effeminized or emasculated. First providing a historical and ideological account for such representations, this thesis proceeds to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the three strategies that Asian filmmakers have adopted to counter this stereotype: the assimilationistic strategy, the segregationistic strategy and the integrationistic strategy. Eventually, this thesis proposes a new way to cope with dilemma by providing a close reading of a British independent film, Lilting. It argues that a fourth strategy, which is named the dynamic strategy, can be detected. Because in this film masculinity is presented as a fluid quality that flows through different characters and does not attach to race or any other fixed identity, there is no need to struggle against the demands imposed by the white hegemony.
Open Access
YASUKUNI SHRINE: A CASE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE AXIOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE IN SINO-JAPANESE RELATIONS
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Lewinski, Roland; Vu, Tuong
This thesis concentrates on the partial reconstruction of the axiological basis at the core of the ideological – nationalistic disputes between China and Japan. The recent history of Sino-Japanese international relations is analyzed in order to show how nationalistic incentives became the rational political choice in the domestic policy of both countries. The research, concerned primarily with history, memory, and historical memory, is based on the argumentation used by the People’s Daily, an extension of the People’s Republic of China’s political line, in regard to Yasukuni shrine and Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s visit to the shrine in 2013. The final purpose of this thesis is to analyze the dialectical argumentation, and by comparing both country’s sentiments, to explain the role of nationalism in their current bilateral relations.
Embargo
Capital's Chinese Pigpen: Political Ecologies of Pig Production in the People's Republic of China
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Conant, Abram; Buck, Daniel
This thesis analyzes contemporary political ecologies of pig farming in the People's Republic of China, as well as emergent discourses of “meatification” and the industrialization of Chinese agriculture more broadly. Situated within these extensive, heterogenous, and dynamic assemblages, which I contextualize in historical-geographical terms throughout Chapter I, I narrow my argument to three relatively neglected problematics that occupy subsequent chapters: the role of pigs in the affective construction of modernity, the microbiological zones of insecurity intertwined with industrial pig production, and the re-valorization of urban food waste through peri-urban pig farming, including so-called “garbage pigs.” Animated by broad political, ethical, ontological, and epistemological concerns about society and ecology, culture and technology, and food and the mass-production of commodified organisms, this research helps demonstrate how fraught relationships between pigs, people, and place participate in the politics of "modernity" in the People's Republic of China.
Embargo
From Modern Girl to Post-Modern Girl: State, Society, and Self
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Rose, Kimberly; Walley, Glynne
The Japanese state has long attempted to control the choices and behaviors of women through campaigns of moral suasion and social management. These campaigns have varied in terms of their efficacy but have all endeavored to encourage women to embrace the “good wife, wise mother” ideals espoused in ryosai kenbo ideology, often for the purported good of the nation. Leading up to WWII, these campaigns were effective in undermining the Modern Girl and eventually squeezing her out of existence. The bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s, however, created the Post-Modern Girl, who, like the Modern Girl, has particular attitudes about marriage, children, work, and sexuality. Unlike the Modern Girl, however, the Post-Modern Girl has survived nearly three decades since her emergence. This thesis examines these two figures and their converging and diverging trajectories and explores the limits of state control in the lives of modern Japanese women.
Open Access
The East China Sea Dispute in Japanese Politics
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) McAuliffe, Kathleen; Vu, Tuong
The East China Sea (ECS) dispute between Japan, the People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of China began in the early 1970s and has continued to escalate. Although the Japanese government claims to handle conflicts in the disputed area as domestic matters, scholarship has focused on the dispute as an international relations or legal issue between states. This project explores the dispute as an issue in domestic Japanese politics by examining the narratives and power dynamics of the major political parties, nationalist and ultraconservative groups, and Okinawan activists vis-à-vis the national government and international actors.
Open Access
Science, Space, and the Nation: The Formation of Modern Chinese Geography in Twentieth-Century China
(University of Oregon, 2014-10-17) Wallner, Rachel; Goodman, Bryna
At the turn of the twentieth century, the modern epistemological framework of science superseded indigenous Chinese knowledge categories as the organizing unit for empirical knowledge about space. By the 1920s, pioneering Chinese intellectuals housed spatial knowledge under the new category of modern geography. While this framework for modern knowledge was rooted in the West, Chinese scholars innovated the discipline in ways that enabled them to consistently attend to fluctuating nation-building imperatives. Using autobiography, memoir, and periodicals produced by early Chinese geographers, this study explores how the intellectual shift toward spatial epistemological modernity facilitated modern China's entrance into the global nation-state system. Modern geographic knowledge ushered in new geopolitical claims and notions of citizenship that would define the new Chinese nation and its position in the world until today.