This paper examines the major thematic elements, or motifs, that allow the folktale Momotarô (The Peach Boy) 桃太郎to undergo changes in plot and usage as it moves from the oral tradition to nationalist literature. My research traces written motifs from a variety of classical and medieval documents to the emergence of Momotarô during the Muromachi period (1392-1573) 室町時代. I identify and compare these motifs within different versions of the tale to determine its change and continuity up through World War II. The paper groups the various versions of Momotarô chronologically into four time periods, researching the social, political, economic, and artistic histories of each to determine what overarching influences change or maintain plot and other details in the story. At the same time, I identify changes in political and social climate. By connecting this popular folktale with its origins, we gain a greater understanding of Momotarôs importance in Japanese history and culture. While the story has received recent modest attention in Japanese studies due to its usage in World War II propaganda, an exploration of the tales development is lacking. This paper seeks to shine some light on the growth of Momotarô and how it became the most recognized folktale in Japan.

Since the founding of the United Nations and the establishment of the Security Council there have been no changes to the makeup of the permanent membership. Indeed, with the exception of one amendment to increase the size of the rotating membership from six to ten the Security Council has continued unchanged. In the fifty-plus years since the founding of the world body and the victory over the Axis Powers that served as the impetus for its creation, the world has changed dramatically. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has ceased to exist; the Republic of China has been exiled to Taiwan and undergone remarkable economic and democratic changes; the British Empire has morphed into the Commonwealth and the French Empire has collapsed. New states have come to the forefront to challenge the post-war status quo. Some, like Egypt and India, were colonial possessions of the imperial powers. Others, like Germany and Japan, were the defeated powers of the Second World War. Japan in particular has a unique economic, financial, political and military history that deserves special consideration as it relates to its ambition for a permanent United Nations Security Council position. Furthermore, the motives and justifications for why it pursues such a seat and the opposition it has received deserve just as much attention. This thesis traces the views of the leading figures in Japanese politics from the founding of the United Nations to the present and demonstrates that from the beginning Japan realized that the UN was a legitimizing force for their new place in the new post-war world. It also demonstrates clearly that lacking a clear definition of what a permanent UN Security Council contender looks like aspirant states are forced to create their own portfolios. Therefore Japan relies heavily on its strengths as an undisputed economic and financial power. Furthermore, it shows that despite strict Constitutional constraints on the use of the military Japans force is modern, well-funded and well-maintained. Finally, it catalogues opposition to expanding the Security Council into three distinct categories and explains them in their modern geopolitical context.

The famous cross-dressing heroine Mulan is a symbol of filial piety, a role model of female heroism in Chinese culture. However, most people do not know the story as well as they think they do. Besides the ballad of Mulan, there are at least four versions of the Mulan story. My discussion will be a comparison of various versions of the Mulan story and an investigation of the development of the Mulan story. Through the study of the zaju drama Ci Mulan tifu congjun (A Female Mulan Replaces Her Father and Goes to War) by Xu Wei(1521-1593), I question the commonly-held idea that Ming zaju were not written with an eye to performance. I argue that Xu Wei created scenes that were very entertaining for Ming audiences. This zaju play was not only widely read and may have been staged by household troupes for male audiences in the Ming literati world, but may also have appealed to common people. Though the story of Mulan was familiar to every household, authors in the Qing dynasty continued to add new twists to this old story and create more complex and intriguing images of Mulan. In the novels Sui Tang yanyi (Romance of the Sui and the Tang) and Mulan qinüzhuan (Biography of Extraordinary Mulan), Mulan commits suicide either to avoid unwanted marriage or display her loyalty to the ruler. The novel Beiwei qishi guixiao liezhuan (An Amazing Tale of a Filial Woman in the Beiwei Period Who Has Been Through Extraordinary Ordeals) challenges the audience by an explicit depiction of Mulan having sex with her husband. I examine the significance of the authors in the Qing dynasty depicting Mulan as a chaste or a licentious warrior. I argue that Mulan could be a symbol of filiality, chastity, loyalty and sexuality, or even a symbol of a mixture of all above. Her complex image may fulfill male authors' fantasies of a woman who has it all.

This study examines the advertising appeals delivered, and the cultural values reflected in Chinese advertisements in newspaper and on TV. It proved that the most frequently used advertising appeals are 'technological', 'status', 'enjoyment', 'vain', 'natural', and 'healthy' for print ads, 'effective', 'youth', 'enjoyment', 'technological', 'vain', 'healthy', 'traditional', 'family', and 'status' for TV ads. Most of them are product category related, but others, such as 'enjoyment', 'healthy', 'status', are universal for any products. The origin of brands makes a difference only on some appeals. Local Chinese brands tend to use more 'traditional', 'community', 'cheap' and 'morality' which are inherent in traditional Chinese culture. However, global and local brands are becoming similar on the choice of most advertising appeals. Among cultural values, group/consensus appeals are significantly more than individual/independence appeals; soft-sell appeals are significantly more than hard-sell appeals; modernity/youth appeals are significantly more than traditional/veneration of elderly appeals; product merit are significantly more than status appeals; symbolic values are significantly more than utilitarian values. Cultural values differ by product category but not by country of origin. Between global brands and local Chinese brands, there is no significant difference on cultural values except that local brands' TV ads keep more group and traditional values. The elements of 'Chinese culture' are broadly used by both local and global brands. Symbolic visuals are preferred to only literal visuals. Website addresses are shown in most print ads. Corporate image, new product ideas and life style are also given attention to. TV ads convey more group/consensus, soft-sell, traditional/veneration of the elderly, oneness of nature and symbolic values, but less hard-sell and status values than print ads. The implications of this research are: 1. Advertisers in China need to consider all the related variables-product category, origin of brands, media type, target market and culture-when choosing advertising appeals and cultural values. 2. Cultural adaptation is necessary and helpful. The issue is not what advertising appeals to pick, but how much Chinese culture to be added in delivering them.

This thesis examines the relationship between Japanese pan-Asianists and pan-Islamists from the end of the nineteenth century till World War II. The materialization of pan-Asianism in Japan and pan-Islamism in the Ottoman Empire was a response to the perceived acts of aggression against a fictive and universal West. Both pan-Asianism and pan-Islamism emerged as a reaction to the strong currents of anti-Western discourse. The trajectories of both pan-Asianism and pan-Islamism intertwined with major turning points in international history, such as the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), WWI, and later in the 1930s after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Intellectuals involved in both these movements engaged in intense debates about race, civilization, and empire. It was such transnational imaginations that laid the foundations of Japanese-Ottoman interactions. Pan-Islamists, keen on uniting the social, religious, and political recesses evident in the Islamic world, sided with Japanese pan-Asianists in the Early Meiji Era. It was the desire of pan-Islamic intellectuals to join forces with Japan for the purpose of constructing a twentieth century utopia under the banner of Islam, which was suitably modern, spiritual, and able to withstand Western hegemony. According to them, the strength of Japanese pan-Asianism combined with the universality of pan-Islamisms message was an integral force in the awakening of Muslims around the globe. Also, Japanese pan-Asianists were keen to engage in diplomatic discourse with Ottoman intellectuals so as to overturn the Orientalist framework that had condemned the Eastern nations to a status of inferiority by the Occident. This thesis, therefore, connects Japanese history to the world of Islam and investigates how the accepted notions of Orient and Occident, East and West, Self and Other, engineered a relationship between two very different nations. The embracing of Japan by pan-Islamist intellectuals and the affinity of pan-Asianisms message as the Easts answer to the West (as an equal in matters of race, civilization, and culture) is indicative of an association incumbent upon restructuring the global power politics of the time.

This thesis examines the motives behind the Japanese imperial household's decision to invite an American Christian woman, Elizabeth Gray Vining, to the court as tutor to Crown Prince Akihito about one year after the Allied Occupation of Japan began. In the past, the common narrative of scholars and the media has been that the new tutor, Vining, came to the imperial household at the invitation of Emperor Hirohito, who personally asked George Stoddard, head of the United States Education Mission to Japan, to find a tutor for the crown prince. While it may have been true that the emperor directly spoke to Stoddard regarding the need of a new tutor for the prince, the claim that the emperor came up with such a proposal entirely on his own is debatable given his lack of decision-making power, as well as the circumstances surrounding him and the imperial institution at the time of the Occupation. From September 1945 to the end of his term in April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur led the operation of the Occupation. As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, MacArthur had a considerable effect on the affairs and decision-making processes of the imperial household, whose major concern was the emperor's life and sovereignty that had been at stake since Japan's surrender. To protect the emperor in MacArthur's Japan, the imperial advisers made a series of stratagems to project a new image of the emperor favorable to MacArthur who had a personal aim to Christianize Japan. Given these circumstances, this thesis argues that it is not coincidental that the emperor, or whoever was in charge of finding a tutor for the crown prince, requested that the new tutor be American Christian; the purpose of the new tutor was to provide the crown prince English-language lessons, which, from an objective point of view, could have been conducted by a non-American or non-Christian native English speaker. Ultimately, this thesis shows that the imperial household's effort to invite a new tutor for the crown prince was more politically-oriented than has been interpreted in the past.

Today manga (Japanese comics) pervades Japanese society and reaches a readership that spans from children to adults. Among manga, the works of Tezuka Osamu occupies a special place in the heart of the Japanese masses because Tezuka is considered as the God of Comics. Although Tezuka passed away in 1989, his manga are still widely read inside and outside of Japan. Thus Tezukas manga could potentially influence peoples perception of Japan. In this thesis, I conduct a discourse analysis of Tezukas manga on World War II. Based on Homi Bhabhas definition of nation as a set of narratives, I explore the means used by Tezuka to challenge the official narrative of World War II. My goal is to demonstrate that the States narration of a nation is volatile. I argue that Tezukas World War II manga both challenges and strengthens the official narrative of the wartime Japanese nation. Tezuka challenges the official narrative by giving voice to those who were absent of this narrative, mainly children and war orphans, and depicting the brutality of Japanese officers against civilians. Tezuka also challenges the mainstream narrative by presenting the U.S. occupation of Japan as a neo-colonization period during which American soldiers abused their power. This denunciation of Japanese suffering stands at the core of Tezukas constant call for international peace. Yet this focus on the Japanese suffering also leads to an almost disappearance of the Imperial armys non-Japanese victims. In other words, Tezuka strengthens the official victimhood narrative because he merely addresses the issue of Japanese war crimes. This ambiguity of Tezukas narrative exemplifies Bhabhas idea of individuals agency in the definition of a nation. By examining the representation of World War II in popular culture medium such as manga, this thesis also provides an in-depth understanding of Tezukas works as well as an insight about the ongoing debate surrounding Japans wartime responsibility.

Robots are an increasingly common staple of realistic science fiction. Summer blockbuster movies warn us of the dangers of giving in to hubris by creating machines that are as intelligent and capable as we are, and humorous books provide the wary with helpful tips on how to prepare for the inevitable robot revolution. In Japan, however, this trope is reversed. Instead of being coldly rational enslavers of humanity, unsympathetic to their creators, fictional Japanese robots are just as emotional as their human counterparts and often strive to defend humans and humanity. The roles for robots that are common in American movies almost never appear in Japanese works, and the reverse is true as well. Fictional Japanese robots tend to fall into three categories: being equivalent to humans, being god-like, or serving as a spiritual vessel for gods. For the first category, some robots are so much like humans that their mechanical nature is not even a particularly salient feature. Instead, it is about as important and emphasized as the blood type of a human character. Almost never are questions raised about whether the robot has a soul. This can be seen to be consistent with Buddhist and Shinto beliefs that treat animals as being spiritually similar to humans, while the Abrahamic traditions espouse that only human beings have souls. Since Japanese religions already accept animals as spiritual beings, the extension to robots is a small one. In the second category, giant robots in anime are frequently portrayed as being god-like. They are sometimes built by humans in need of protection, but they also frequently appear as ancient, unfathomable beings. They greatly resemble Shinto gods, being worthy of respect due to their impressive size and power, and existing independently of humanity while being willing to grant the requests of those they have chosen as worthy representatives. Finally, fictional robots that are not gods themselves may serve as spiritual vessels for them, as puppets can serve as vessels for gods in Shinto ceremonies. This allows even those robots that are not spiritual creatures themselves to touch the realm of the holy.

Contrary to popular assumption, the transitional period from the late Edo into the early Meiji period was anything but bloodless. A civil war, known as the Boshin War, ran for over a year from 1868 to 1869, and it pitted the troops of the new Meiji government against a number of adversaries, not all of whom were fighting for the same objectives. This thesis examines in detail the history of the Alliance, the circumstances of its formation, its aims, and its composition. It further analyzes the terminology used by the victors in their writings about the war. Finally, this thesis proposes a radical reinterpretation of our understanding of the Boshin War, and of the Meiji Restoration as a whole.

In 1877, an American educator named William Smith Clark began his one year contract with the Meiji government to head a new agricultural college in Sapporo, Hokkaido. While there, he taught the basics of Christianity to his Japanese students under the guise of moral education. This paper seeks to understand the religious and moral philosophy that was absorbed by the students at Sapporo Agricultural College and how this laid the foundation for two prominent Japanese Christian intellectuals who came out of the Sapporo Band: Uchimura Kanzô and Nitobe Inazô. In order to accomplish this, this thesis first examines William Clarks educational and religious views as influenced by his background, followed by a discussion of what Christian-related activities took place at Sapporo Agricultural College before and immediately after Clarks departure. In the last chapter, the religious elements that were taken away by students like Nitobe and Uchimura from their Sapporo experience will be examined. Such an exercise will show that they and other graduates shared the basic elements of a Christianity run by laymen, with an emphasis on Bible study and a disregard for ecclesiasticism and denominationalism, as well as the addition of a spiritual lineage that they traced to William Smith Clark. Sapporo graduates also adopted a philosophical system that encouraged the development of self-cultivation and independence of thought not unlike that of certain Neo-Confucian schools.