Asian Studies

Monday opens with a 9 a.m. Japanese language class—a fast-paced ninety minutes of grammar drills, kanji dictation, and paired conversation exercises where you practise requesting directions in Kyoto dialect before switching to a short oral presentation on a newspaper article about Japan's ageing population. Language classes meet four mornings a week, and by second year the pace is relentless: you're expected to read untranslated primary sources by the end of the term. After a break, you attend a lecture on China's Economic Rise Since 1978, tracing the arc from Deng Xiaoping's Open Door Policy through the creation of Special Economic Zones to the Belt and Road Initiative. The lecturer uses trade flow data, provincial GDP maps, and case studies of Shenzhen's transformation from a fishing village to a tech megacity. You take notes for next week's essay comparing state-led development models in China and South Korea. The afternoon is free, and you spend it in the library reading Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' for your Southeast Asian politics seminar, annotating his argument about how print capitalism fostered national consciousness in the colonial Dutch East Indies.

Tuesday begins with a two-hour seminar on Postcolonial Southeast Asia. This week's focus is the legacy of Japanese occupation during World War II and its paradoxical role in accelerating independence movements across the region. The group debates whether the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere represented a genuine challenge to Western imperialism or merely replaced one colonial master with another, drawing on memoirs from Indonesian nationalists and Malayan resistance fighters. You've prepared by reading Akira Iriye alongside local historians, and you argue that the occupation shattered the myth of European invincibility even as it imposed brutal exploitation. After lunch, you have a reading-intensive session on Classical Chinese Philosophy—this week it's Zhuangzi, and your tutor guides the group through the 'Butterfly Dream' parable in both classical Chinese and English translation, exploring what Daoist epistemology means for contemporary debates about consciousness and selfhood. The rest of the afternoon is spent in the East Asian Studies reading room, surrounded by students working on everything from Korean Wave cultural exports to Tibetan Buddhist manuscript traditions.

Wednesday morning features a lecture on India and the Indian Ocean World, examining how maritime trade networks connected Gujarat, the Swahili Coast, and the Malay Archipelago centuries before European arrival. The lecturer projects maps of monsoon wind patterns and archaeological evidence of Tamil merchant guilds in Sumatra, challenging the Eurocentric narrative that Asian trade was peripheral before colonialism. After lunch, you meet your dissertation supervisor to discuss your proposed research on how Japanese soft power strategy—anime, cuisine diplomacy, Cool Japan campaigns—shapes perceptions of Japan among Southeast Asian youth. She suggests adding a comparative dimension with Korean Wave influence and recommends fieldwork interviews during your upcoming study-abroad semester in Tokyo. Thursday brings a workshop on research methods for area studies—you practise using digital newspaper archives in Mandarin, learn to navigate the National Diet Library's online catalogue, and discuss the ethical challenges of conducting interviews across language barriers. Friday is lighter: a film screening of Edward Yang's 'Yi Yi' followed by a discussion of Taiwanese New Cinema's relationship to democratisation and identity formation. Most weekends involve steady reading—four or five journal articles plus language homework—but you also attend the East Asian Film Society's screenings and occasionally help run the department's public lecture series on contemporary Asia.