Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies 2023

Two Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies have been selected in the programme’s ninth year.

Announcing the new Daiwa Scholars, Jason James, Director General of The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, said:

“One of our two new Scholars will be looking at the continuing important debate over Japan’s constitution – both how to interpret it and whether to revise it. The other is focussing on one of Japan’s leading 20th century literary figures, Kōbō Abe. Both of the Scholars impressed the interview panel with well thought-through explanations in both English and Japanese of their research interests.”

You can see the Scholars’ profiles with photographs via this PDF.

About the scholars

Alana Stone

Alana completed a BA in East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and an MA in Japanese Literature at Columbia University in 2012. During her studies at Johns Hopkins she won awards for her research and writings on Brazilian-Japanese reverse immigration. She subsequently spent two years in Tokyo, studying and teaching English. Following this, she became a freelance Japanese to English translator. Alana began a PhD in Japanese Literature at the University of East Anglia in February 2022, and has been analysing the shifts in the perception of identity in post-war Japan through the study of Japanese narrative fiction, with particular focus on Kōbō Abe’s fiction and theatre of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. She is interested in the way mask-like devices are used in Abe’s work as a way of constructing new, non-specific identities. She is currently Managing Editor of Japan Forum and has recently published a Japanese-English translation of an academic paper by Inuhiko Yomota as part of the re-release of Tomu Uchida’s film A Fugitive from the Past. Alana will also publish a translation of a piece by renowned architect Kengo Kuma in the Review of Japanese Culture and Society.

Alfie Fellowes

Alfie completed a BA in Japanese at the University of Oxford in 2021, with a year abroad at Kobe University. As well as learning Japanese from scratch at the start of his degree in 2017, he studied Chinese as a subsidiary language.  He became particularly interested in Japan’s past and present diplomatic relationships and wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Japan’s international policy in the late 19th and early 20th century and the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1902. Since graduating, Alfie has been teaching at an English conversation school in Odawara city, Kanagawa. In September 2023 he will begin an MA in International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London. Alfie is interested in the sustainability and extent of Japan’s constitutional pacificism, and intends to research Japan’s diplomatic policy-making and the evolution of constitutional interpretation and implementation of Article 9.

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