Fall 2024

Tokikake Ii’s Dissertation Defense

Join us on Friday, December 6th, from 11:00am-2:00pm HST for doctoral candidate Tokikake Ii’s dissertation defense! His project, titled “Imagining Tōhoku,” is under the direction of Professor Nancy Stalker.

The defense will take place in Sakamaki A-201 and is open to the public. The defense will also be streamed on Zoom; the information can be found below:

Below is an abstract of Tokikake’s project:

This dissertation examines how metropolitan institutions (such as mass media) and the national government viewed and treated Tōhoku (northeastern Japan)—as a source of labor, economic, and energy extractions for national development—from the postwar period to the current post-2011 Great East Japan Disaster (commonly known as the 3.11 Disaster) period. These various institutions established and deployed images of “pure and underdeveloped” Tōhoku countryside, while simultaneously treating the region as the authentic, ideal homeland (furusato). This dissertation demonstrates the existence of historical continuity in the metropolitan and government’s treatment and use of Tōhoku. Most scholarship focuses on one time period only, and does not contextualize Tōhoku within metropolitan cultural and media stereotypes or within national economic development. This dissertation examines various newspapers, photograph collections, popular magazines, novels, films, and government policies on land, infrastructural developments in the Tōhoku countryside, and national labor migration to and from Tōhoku. The analysis demonstrates that the mechanism of resource extraction—and the persistent existence of cultural stereotypes of rural Tōhoku—are key defining socioeconomic features of postwar and post-3.11 Disaster Japan.