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Top > Vol.16 - Tze May Loo
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 Name: Tze May Loo |
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Nationality: Singaporean |
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| Affiliated research center/ school in Waseda |
Faculty of Political Science and Economics, The Graduate School of Political Science |
| Affiliated research institution |
University of Richmond, Assistant Professor of History
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| Period of stay at Waseda |
From July 2009 to July 2010
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Subject of research
Modern Japanese history / Japanese colonialism, Okinawan history, cultural properties
About myself
 Conference
Okinawa |
I was born and raised in Singapore, lived there until I finished high school. When I was seven years old, my family moved to Hong Kong because of my father’s work, and we lived there for two years. I remember many things about that time and thinking about it now, I think they influenced me in important ways. In Hong Kong, I attended International School and all my classmates were from different parts of the world. It was a really wonderful multi-cultural environment. Without realizing it, I think I was learning about how big and exciting the world was; importantly, I was also learning about how to engage with people whose cultural backgrounds were very different from mine. I was very young, but those lessons stayed with me after my family moved back to Singapore and they continue to do so now.
After high school, I left Singapore to attend the University of Sydney. Like most young people that age, I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do in the future. I liked studying history in high school, so I enrolled in some history classes to see what they were liked. One of the classes I took was a class in modern Japanese history by Dr Rikki Kersten. Dr Kersten was a really amazing teacher and I enjoyed the class very much. So the following semester, I took another class with Dr Kersten, and then another. I eventually wrote an honors thesis on Uchimura Kanzo under Dr Kersten’s supervision. By the time I graduated from Sydney, I had come to like Japanese history very much and contemplated doing graduate work in it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a Phd, so I enrolled at the National University of Singapore to pursue a Masters degree in Japanese studies to see if I really liked doing research. I soon realized that I wanted to pursue a PhD in Japanese history, and applied to graduate schools in the United States. I was accepted to and entered Cornell University in the fall of 2000.
At Cornell, I worked under the supervision of Dr J. Victor Koschmann for a degree in modern Japanese history. I had originally intended to study the anarchist movement in Japan, focusing on Ōsugi Sakae and Itō Noe. But in my first two years Cornell, I was exposed to many new things and ideas and learned about many other aspects about Japanese history. I ended up changing my dissertation topic entirely! After spending two and a half years in Japan learning Japanese language and doing dissertation research, I completed a dissertation on Japan’s prewar national treasure system (bunkazai seido) that focused on Okinawa’s Shuri Castle. After defending my dissertation in 2007, I joined the University of Richmond as an assistant professor, where I teach East Asian history.
Waseda University as research base
I am spending this year as a visiting scholar in the Faculty of Political Science and Economics under a Japan Society for the Promotion of the Sciences fellowship, under Dr Umemori Naoyuki’s mentorship. I have known Dr Umemori since 2001, when Dr Koschmann introduced us when I was still aiming to work on prewar Japanese anarchism. In addition to specializing in Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Dr Umemori is also a specialist in prewar Japanese anarchism and anarchist thought. Even after I changed my research topic to focus on Okinawa, Dr Umemori continued to give me excellent advice about my project and I have learned a lot from him. I chose to spend my fellowship year at Waseda University because I wanted to continue to work with Dr Umemori. In addition, Waseda’s library is without equal in Japan, and contains many important sources for my research. I am also looking forward to meeting scholars affiliated with the Institute for Ryukyuan and Okinawan Studies (Waseda daigaku ryūkyū Okinawa kenkyūjyo). Waseda is an intellectually rich environment place in which to do research. There is always some kind of event going on – a talk, a seminar or a symposium.
My research at Waseda centers on writing the manuscript for a book based on my dissertation research. This project uses the theme of heritage preservation and national treasures to investigate Okinawa’s relationship with Japan in the prewar. In particular, I examine how cultural heritage preservation functioned as a form of Japanese colonial power in Okinawa during the prewar period (1868-1945). I focus on Shuri Castle, designated a Japanese national treasure (kokuhō) in 1925, and suggest that rather than the recognition of an already-existing cultural value, “cultural heritage” was something produced by the Japanese state as it fashioned its national identity. I examine how cultural heritage was another way to naturalize Japan’s colonization of Okinawa by producing “Shuri Castle” as a stable marker of Ryūkyūan cultural heritage and writing it into a narrative of Japanese cultural history.
For my next project, I am planning to explore postwar Japanese political thought and I am interested in studying the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. I hope that I will be able to return to Waseda to do the research for that project too!
This picture is of host Professor Umemori and me ,
PUBLICATIONS
- Tze M. Loo, “Shuri Castle's Other History: Architecture and Empire in Okinawa,” The Asia- Pacific Journal, Vol. 41-1-09, 2009.
- Tze M. Loo, “Escaping its Past: Recasting the Grand Shrine of Ise” (forthcoming in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
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