Toma-Jin Morikawa-Fouquet

Research Topic

The Cosmopolitics of Symbiosis: Science and Democracy in Transwar Japan (1910s–1970s)

Supervisor: Sho Konishi 

Associated with the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and the Centre for Intellectual History, Oxford.

I am pursuing a DPhil in History as a Clarendon scholar, generously funded by the Oxford-Kobe Scholarship tenable at St. Catherine’s College. My research spans across intellectual history, cultural history, and the history of science of modern Japan viewed from transnational and non-state perspectives. Generally, I am interested in the history of alternatives that have eluded the conceptual contours of historiography and social theory. My doctorate dissertation looks at popular science and politics in transwar and transnational Japan, including entomology, psychic/occult sciences, sexology, ufology, and monstrology (yōkai gaku).

My second master’s degree in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge was fully funded by Trinity College, where I was awarded the English Essay Prize (2023) and Bowen Prize in Modern History (2023). I wrote my thesis on 'cosmic thought' (uchū shisō 宇宙思想) in late Meiji Japan, which was selected to be deposited in the Seeley Library. Prior to Cambridge, I completed a master’s degree in Japanese Studies at Oxford, where I was also a Clarendon and Oxford-Kobe scholar. My MSc dissertation on Hirano Imao's (平野威馬雄) translation of science and relief campaign for "mixed-race" children was awarded the Arthur Stockwin Best Dissertation Prize by the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies in 2022 and the Ivan Morris Memorial Prize (second prize) by the British Association for Japanese Studies in 2023.

I transferred to Amherst College in the U.S.A. for my bachelor’s with a fully funded Niijima Scholarship, and my undergraduate honours thesis on international relations theory was supported by the Gregory S. Call Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Before transferring to Amherst, I spent 3.5 years enrolled at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, where I was awarded an Undergraduate Award for Distinction in 2018. For one of those years, I studied at the University of California at Berkeley under an exchange study abroad program, which was partially funded by the Gyomu Super Japan Dream Foundation Scholarship.

My graduate studies have also been supported by a Rufus B. Kellogg University Fellowship from Amherst College (2021–2024), where I delivered the 2024 Kellogg Lecture.

I can be reached through my website at https://tjmf.me/.

I would be happy to supervise undergraduate history theses pertaining to modern and contemporary Japan, especially through transnational and non-state perspectives.

Research keywords:

transnational/global intellectual history, cultural history, history of science, non-state and non-imperial history, democracy, Japan, (political) cosmology and ecology, environmentalism, symbiosis, race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, anarchism, mysticism, and the supernatural.

Previous programmes:

MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History, 2022–23 (University of Cambridge, Trinity College), distinction.

MSc in Japanese Studies, 2021–22 (University of Oxford, St. Catherine’s College), distinction.

BA in Anthropology and Political Science, 2019–2021 (Amherst College), summa cum laude with distinction, Phi Beta Kappa.

Undergraduate student, Political Science with a concentration in International Relations (no degree), Doshisha University 2016–2019.

Exchange student, University of California at Berkeley, 2017–2018.