Chinami Oka

Research Topic:

Civil War Losers’ Making of New Morals in Modern Japan: Arai Ōsui and a Modern Religious History of Japan, Russia, and the United States

I started a DPhil in history at Oxford in 2017, following an MSc in Modern Japanese Studies at Oxford in 2015-16 as an Oxford Kobe scholar. My research is on the transnational, intellectual, and religious history of modern Japan, which emerged and developed around forgotten northern people. I am particularly looking into their hidden transnational non-state networks and collaboration with Russians, Americans, and more in developing new moral visions of the world beyond mainstream imperial, Western modern civilisation discourses. Through the study of the small, peripheralized microcosm, I hope to challenge some of the large historical narratives that have consciously or unconsciously underpinned our historical understanding of modern Japan and beyond. I am a convenor of the Oxford International History of East Asia Seminar.

My doctoral research is generously funded by a Swire Scholarship via St Antony’s College, Oxford. My archival research in northern Japan was also enabled by research travel grants from the following funding bodies: Arnold Bryce and Read Funds, Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, Sasakawa Fund, and STAR (Student Travel and Research) Grants at St Antony’s College, Oxford (in alphabetical order).

Publication:

Goodman, Roger, and Chinami Oka. "The Invention, Gaming, and Persistence of the Hensachi (‘Standardised Rank Score’) in Japanese Education." Oxford Review of Education 44, no. 5 (2018): 581-98.

Teaching:

Modern History of Japan in the Wider World, 1868-1972 (FS Modern Japan | tutorials). Faculty of History, Oxford. Hilary 2019.

Modern Japanese History (part of the East Asian Survey Course | tutorials). Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford. Trinity 2019.

Japanese Caligraphy (class). Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford. Trinity 2019.

Supervisor: Professor Sho Konishi