I grew up in a rural part of The Netherlands, imagining that the forest behind the house was one of Astrid Lindgren’s woods. After highschool, I went to art academy and graduated in 2007 with a claymation based on Annie Proulx’ short story The Blood Bay (1999). In the same year, I got my black belt in karate and enrolled in the BA Japanese Language and Culture at Leiden University.
My final undergraduate year was spent at Osaka University on a MEXT Japanese Studies scholarship. Upon my return to Leiden I entered the research MA Area Studies: Asia and the Middle East. For a class on the Mongol Empire, I wrote on the bizarre Japanese legend that the twelfth-century general Minamoto no Yoshitsune would in fact have been Genghis Khan. I developed the theme in my MA thesis and I graduated cum laude in 2013.
Again I set off for Osaka University, this time on a two-year MEXT research scholarship. My research project morphed from a study of Yoshitsune legends into a study of warrior legends in children’s literature and their role in Japan’s nation-building project. I then went back to Leiden and continued my research on an Isaac Alfred Ailion Foundation PhD scholarship.
I have an unusual combination of expertise in early modern and modern literature and cultural history. I attended summer schools on Early Modern Japanese Palaeography (Cambridge) as well as Children’s Literature (Antwerp).
At Leiden University, I designed and taught several undergraduate seminars, including ‘Worldviews in Early Modern Japan’ and ‘Heroes and Historical Imagination’. I also taught the survey course Arts and Material Culture of Japan.
I collect (well-thumbed) historical maps, ephemera, textbooks and children’s books, and enjoy introducing my students (and other interested audiences) to authentic material from my own and far more prestigious collections. Have a look at my video on maps of the Tokaido in the Leiden University Library Special Collections, recorded during the pandemic.
During my PhD, I encountered a lenghty piece of unidentified premodern Japanese writing in the Leiden collections and deciphered the words:
Ine understands everything and asks for you all the time, which makes my heart ache even more.
It turned out to be an unknown letter by Kusumoto Taki addressed to the banished Philipp Franz von Siebold. The letter mentions Ine, their three-year-old daughter, who would become Japan’s first female doctor in Western medicine. The discovery made the national news.
I graduated cum laude in September 2022, with the thesis Memory, Modernity, and Children’s Literature in Japan: Premodern Warriors as National Icons in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Literature and Curriculum. I then took part in the innovative Leiden-Yale digital humanities project ‘Blood, Tears and Samurai Love‘ as a postdoctoral researcher.
Currently, I am based at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellow. I am reworking my doctoral thesis into a most fascinating book, while also developing a new project on the representation of women from Japanese history in girl’s literature. You can read more about my projects and publications on the research page. In my free time, I enjoy visiting the theatre, browsing the stores of ‘booktown’ Jinbōchō, singing with my choir and exploring the mountains near Tokyo and further afield.
Top image: detail from the first page of Yakken 訳鍵, Dutch-Japanese dictionary by Fujibayashi Fuzan, 1810. UBL.
AAFKE VAN EWIJK 