Digital Commons Network^™

Baseball: A Vehicle For Exchange Between Two Complicated Global Powers, Cole W. Tully

Honors Theses

Baseball, America’s “national pastime,” has a similarly prominent role in Japanese culture and the nation’s history. Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball at professional, collegiate, high school, and youth levels has become increasingly prominent within each nation. As baseball became increasingly central to each nation's social and cultural identities, it also began to play a critical role in furthering the nations’ bilateral relationship.

The paper explores various periods where baseball has influenced diplomatic relations, especially “soft diplomacy” and cultural exchange between each nation’s citizens. This includes baseball’s institutionalization into Japan’s education systems during the Meiji Restoration, as …

How Properly Contextualized Christianity Could Benefit Japan, Benjamin Highsmith

Honors Theses

This thesis aims to ask the question “how could Christianity, if properly contextualized, benefit Japan?” It does so through the use of academic sources, interviews, and personal observations. Topics covered include Japanese culture, its perception of Christianity, and the lifestyles of Japanese Christians. This thesis uses cultural concepts to explain how Christianity and Japanese culture might find themselves at odds, but also explains how Christianity could work in unison with Japanese culture in order to benefit Japanese society as a whole, defending its argument using Biblical concepts intertwined with Japanese values.

Overlooked Diplomacy: A Look Into Missed Diplomatic Efforts In The Pacific Theater Of World War Ii, Maxwell Melanson

Honors Theses

This thesis examines possible diplomatic solutions that may have ceased United States-Japanese conflict throughout the late 1930s and 40s. The first chapter analyzes the declaration of the policy of unconditional surrender, and what this policy entailed. Despite Roosevelt claiming that the idea just came to him, it was a carefully developed policy, and was chosen to be enacted for a multitude of reasons. After the Casablanca conference in January 1943, unconditional surrender became a unifying policy and a politically smart policy in Roosevelt's favor. The second chapter then analyzes the tensions rising between Japan and the United States through the …

Of Spies And Assassins, Haddon Smead

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the possibility of a connection between the Shinobi of Japan and the Order of Assassins from the Middle East. There is evidence that these two secret societies of antiquity are related and that there might have been some level of interaction and/or connection between them. The aligning methodologies, the geopolitical circumstances, the transmission of culture, and the other organizations resembling these two groups establish a frightening level of similarity between them and support the existence of a historical connection. It is hoped that additional study will be undertaken with regards to this subject, and the author of …

Suspicious Minds: A Study Of The Attitudes That African Americans Held Regarding The Japanese During World War Ii, Timothy E. Buchanan

Honors Theses

This thesis explores African American viewpoints about the Japanese, from just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor up to Allied occupation of Japan after the Second World War. The primary sources for this thesis include Black newspapers, the papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as oral histories from African American veterans. The goal of this research is to provide a historical view of the African American perspective, both in the United States and abroad. This thesis also aims to fill the gap in the scholarship on this topic by bringing different groups …

Nationalism And Education: A Case Study Of Germany And Japan, Sarah Vrtiska

Honors Theses

In this piece I ask the question: How has education contributed to the formation or prevention of nationalism in Germany and Japan? In examining this, after defining the standard conceptions of nationalism, I apply these definitions to pre-war and post-war Germany and Japan. Ultimately, I conclude that the goals of education, concepts of national identity that are taught, history curricula, and control of education all historically have the potential to contribute to the rise of nationalism within a country. Based on these fields, I find that although there are similar nationalist trends in both countries during the pre-war period, in …

Computing The (Un)Computable: A Computationally-Augmented Perspective On The Yasukuni Shrine Controversy, Ryan Muther

Honors Theses

Computational methods have been used with increasing frequency in the social sciences and humanities, due to the availability of digital sources and computing power to study everything from changes in the meanings of words in Latin texts to how knowledge was categorized in eighteen century encyclopedias. Recent trends in the fields of digital humanities and computational social science include statistical methods like machine learning, requiring large pre-tagged and annotated sets of documents which in turn necessitates a great deal of prior work to create data to use with such methods. This reliance on large corpora of annotated data limits the …

Otaku – A Case Of Assigned Identities, Steven O'Branovich

Honors Theses

With the international rise in popularity of anime and manga in the 1990s, Japan shattered its image as a nation of soulless salary men and robots and became an entertainment giant. Since then, anime has become an even larger force in the global cultural landscape, growing from a niche tape-trading market at science fiction conventions to inspiring large-scale conventions of its own. The driving force behind this expansion is a group of people known as otaku. Internationally, otaku are often defined simply as enthusiastic fans of Japanese popular culture and of anime and manga in particular. In Japan, however, the …

Fox-Kuzunoha: The Actor Print And The Expression Of Female As 'Other' In The Late Edo Period, Kara Jefts

Honors Theses

Stories of the supernatural are a rich part of Japan’s cultural history, and one way to explore the popularity of these tales is through the widely produced visual medium of Ukiyo-e prints. By the eighteenth century, kabuki theatre became a dominant theme in Ukiyo-e, and kabuki plays provide a way to access diverse folk traditions involving the supernatural, often based on Shinto beliefs or Buddhist principles. Confucian values, at the core of Edo Period society, commonly frame these subjects in contrast to traditional familial relationships. Using the visual language of the stage, moments of dramatic climax in kabuki are emphasized …

The Evolution Of The Status Of Women In Korea: Colonial Times To The Present, Rebekah Thomas

Honors Theses

Korean women are treated as second rate citizens that have to depend on a man for their social status. With the passage of time, things are getting better for Korean women and the way society feels about women having significant authority in society is changing. The Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-1945) is at the foundation of postwar tensions between Japan and Korea. The Japanese mistreatment of Korean women is an important element in many of these disputes. Specifically, the Japanese government took advantage of the Korean women's low status within Korean society to erect a sexual military system. Since the …

Kichi Mondai (The Military Base Problem) : A Study Of How American Bases In Okinawa Are Presented To The American People, Mark Carney

Honors Theses

Media representations play a role in how one perceives a particular space. The American media presented the American military bases in Okinawa during the period of American civil administration (1945-1972) as necessary and beneficial for the Okinawan people . Because the media linked the bases and the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR) as dependent upon one another, the media considered the benefits brought to Okinawa by the existence ofUSCAR a result of the bases as well. Despite Okinawan resistance to both USCAR and the military bases, the press presented the Okinawan people as actually wanting the …

The International Military Tribunals: An Overview And Assessment, Joshua Daniel Franklin

Honors Theses

As World War II drew to a close in Europe, the victorious Allies faced the question of what to do with the political and military leaders of defeated Germany. The war had been like none other; they needed a drastically new approach to the final treatment of those in charge of the Axis powers. While war crimes could be punished under the Geneva and Hague Conventions, no international agreements assigned personal responsibility to those who ordered the crimes.

While Axis leaders could have been simply executed, the Allies chose to plan a cooperative international trial. The resulting International Military Tribunal …

Danmono: A Type Of Japanese Koto Music, Jonathan Richard Besancon

Honors Theses

Sokyoku (koto music) in Japan before the end of the seventeenth century is represented by only two genres: sets of solo songs with koto accompaniment which are called kurniuta, and koto solos called danrnono. Danrnono and kurniuta were the beginning of the sokyoku tradition which developed through the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868). It is the solo genre of sokyoku, the danrnono, which is the subject of this study. This genre is the most important of the few examples of Japanese music which are independent of literary influence. The danmono repertoire is also rather curious because it is limited today to only …