Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies 2021
Four Daiwa Scholars in Japanese Studies have been selected in the programme’s seventh year.
Announcing the new Daiwa Scholars, Jason James, Director General of The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, said:
“We held Zoom interviews on 5th March and selected four new recipients of Daiwa Scholarships in Japanese Studies (DSJS), which support postgraduate students in this field. One of the key criteria for DSJS is that they are expected to have reached a high standard in Japanese language, so part of the interview takes place in Japanese, which must be a daunting experience!
One of the successful candidates will be doing an MA in Arts Studies, but otherwise the focus this year was on history, including poor-relief activities by mediaeval Japanese religious institutions, Japan’s relations with other Asian countries during the Meiji period, and interwar influence on the Japanese Upper House from the British House of Lords. We look forward to supporting the four scholars and to hearing about the eventual conclusions of their research.”
You can see their profiles (at the time the Scholarship was awarded) with photos via this link.
Three Scholars are pursuing courses in Japan. Lucy Fleming-Brown began an MA at Tokyo University of the Arts in April 2021, Dominic Veveris is pursuing a PhD at Tokyo Metropolitan University, and George Wollaston started an MA at Tokyo University in April 2021. Joel Littler embarked on a DPhil at Oxford University in September 2020.
About the scholars
Lucinda Fleming-Brown
Lucy completed a BA in Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford in 2018. As part of her degree, she spent a year at Kobe University, majoring in Art History. During her degree at Oxford, she took the Japanese Art Special Subject course, and her dissertation explored Japanese post-war photography. Since 2018, and up until travelling to Tokyo for her MA, Lucy worked at Michael Hoppen Gallery in London as a Gallery Assistant/Japanese Art Specialist, supporting the gallery’s specialism in Japanese photography by assisting with artist/foundation liaison, acquisitions, and research.
Lucy began her MA in Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices at Tokyo University of the Arts April 2021, studying under the the supervision of Professor Yuko Hasegawa and Professor Meruro Washida. Her graduation thesis focused on representations of Okinawa in the history of Japanese visual culture from the 1970s, with a focus on the role of photography. Lucy completed her MA in March 2024, and worked as a Director at Michael Hoppen Gallery whilst continuing her research as part of the Getty’s Foundation’s ‘Connecting Art Histories’ initiative, Shared Coasts, Divided Historiographies: Mobilising artefacts, people and ideas in the East Asian Mediteranean.
She is now working for DoBeDo Represents.
You can read a testimonial written by Lucy in 2024 on our website here: https://dajf.org.uk/scholarships/japanese-studies/scholars-experiences-daiwa-scholars-in-japanese-studies
Dr Joel Littler
Joel completed a BA in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield in 2016. As part of his degree, he spent a year at the University of Tokyo. Following his BA, he completed an MSc in Modern Japanese Studies at Oxford in 2017. He went on to work as a lecturer at Thammasat University in Thailand for three years. It was while in Thailand that he started to develop his DPhil project, which he began at the University of Oxford in October 2020 under the supervision of Professor Sho Konishi. While the opening of Japan to the wider world in 1868 is seen primarily as an opening to the West, Joel’s research project, ‘Mapping an Asian Revolutionary Space: Miyazaki Tōten’s Vision of Asia (1877 – 1922)’, looked at the understudied non-state, transnational relations between Japanese and Asian people. He paid particular attention to Japan’s intellectual links with Thailand in the late nineteenth century, since they were the only two uncolonised Asian countries.
Joel completed his DPhil in July 2024, and went on to receive a prestigious Reischauer Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship in Japanese Studies. These Fellowships provide recent graduates with the opportunity to continue their doctoral research at Harvard and produce publishable work from their dissertations. More information about Joel’s cohort of Fellows can be found via the following link: https://rijs.fas.harvard.edu/people/postdoctoral-fellows
In November 2025, Joel took up a two-year research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Tōbunken), University of Tokyo funded by the Japan Foundation.
Dominic Veveris
Dominic first visited Japan in autumn 2012. He decided to move to Tokyo in 2013 to begin his BA in History and Japan Studies at International Christian University. He finished his BA in 2017, and went on to complete an MA in Japanese Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo in 2020. His MA thesis was on ‘British House of Lords Reform and Interwar Japanese Discourses on House of Peers Reform’. From September 2020 until 2023, he progressed with his research on Japanese House of Peers reform in the interwar period as a PhD student in Political Science at Tokyo Metropolitan University under the supervision of Professor Shin Satō. Although his research, focusing on the connection between the House of Peers and the British House of Lords, is primarily historical, he highlights its relevance as discussions on constitutional revision continue in Japan, while in the UK a definitive solution to the future of the House of Lords continues to be debated.
George Wollaston
George became interested in Japanese history as a teenager, inspired by a strategy computer game set in the Warring States period. Towards the end of 2014, he began learning Japanese online in the hopes that he would eventually be able to research Japanese history. He visited Japan for the first time in spring 2016 and went on to complete a BA in Japanese Studies at the University of Oxford in 2020. As part of his degree, he spent a year at Kobe University. In April 2021, he commenced an MA in Japanese History at Tokyo University under the supervision of Dr Akiko Mieda. He researched the relationships that existed between religious institutions and marginalised peoples (the sick, the destitute, and those with physical disabilities), as well as other fringe groups in Japan between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. George completed his MA in March 2024 and began a PhD, also at Tokyo University.