This dissertation examines the discourses surrounding women and writing in the rapidly commercialized publishing industry and media in early 20th-century Japan. While Japan has a rich history of women's writing from the 10th century onwards, it was in the 1910s that the journalistic category of "women's literature" (joryû bungaku) emerged within the dominant literary mode of Naturalism, as the field of literature itself achieved a respectable cultural status after the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Through a close textual analysis of fictional works, literary journals, and newspapers from the turn of the century to the 1930s, I explore how various women embraced, subverted, and negotiated the gendered identity of the "woman writer" (joryû sakka) while creating their own spheres of literary production through women's literary journals. Central to this investigation are issues of media, translation, canonization, and the creation of literary histories as Japanese literature became institutionalized within the new cosmopolitan notion of world literature. The first chapter explores how the image of the woman writer formed around the key figure of Tamura Toshiko (1884-1945) within the interrelated discourses of Naturalism, the New Woman, and decadence in the 1910s. As the New Woman became a social phenomenon alongside ongoing debates about women's issues, feminist women inaugurated the journal Seitô (Bluestocking, 1911-16) as a venue for women's literature. While this category renders their writings marginal to mainstream literature, it was a progressive, political position that marked their place within the literary world. I examine Toshiko's ambivalent position within this feminist project, and the instability of the media image of the New Woman that was always on the verge of slipping into the decadent figure of femme fatale. The second chapter examines the canonization of the late 19th-century prominent writer Higuchi Ichiyô (1872-96) at the turn of the century as a model woman writer and an embodiment of Japan's past tradition, which cast a threatening shadow on the women of Seitô. Tamura Toshiko's rejection of the New Woman identity and increasing association with aesthetic decadence also came to be at odds with their feminist mission. Seitô women's rejection of both Ichiyô and Toshiko was thus a necessary act in self-proclaiming the birth of the New Woman. As the number of women writers gradually increased in the late 1910s, various types of literary expression emerged beyond gendered expectations, paving the way for the mass expansion of women's writing in the 1920s. As the notion of world literature formed alongside various national literatures during the vast expansion of the publishing industry and translation culture in the 1920s, women began to envision their own alternative genealogy alongside dominant literary histories. The third chapter explores the envisioning of women's literary history by the Seitô writer Ikuta Hanayo (1888-1970) and the British modernist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), whose feminist imaginations came together through the canonization of the English translation of The Tale of Genji, originally an 11th-century work written by a woman. As the growth of translations created a sense of global simultaneity, I further examine how the rhetoric of gender was central to Japanese literary modernism through the reception of two major British modernists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, in Japan.

Recent advances in near-field acoustical holography (NAH) have expanded the theory to interior spaces where multiple sources and/or reflections are present. In 1990, Tamura presented the spatial Fourier transform separation method to measure the reflection coefficient at oblique angles using two measurement planes in the wave number domain. This paper adapts the spatial Fourier transform separation method for application in interior NAH. A practical exploration of important experimental parameters is performed, which include the relative amplitudes of primary and disturbing sources, the measurement plane separation distance, and an acceptable noise floor. This technique is successfully applied in a reverberant environment to reconstruct the velocity of a clamped vibrating plate. NAH methods based on the measurement of pressure and particle velocity have led to the ability to reduce the required measurement locations. Other recent advances in NAH have expanded the theory to interior spaces where multiple sources and/or reflections are present. This paper investigates the use of interpolation techniques to reduce the required measurement locations for interior NAH. Specifically, the benefits of a bi-cubic Hermite surface patch interpolation are discussed and compared to other interpolation routines. Although the required inputs for the Hermite interpolation can be measured using a variety of devices, a scanning six-microphone probe in a tetrahedral configuration is suggested. The six microphones are utilized to simultaneously sample pressure on two parallel planes and estimate the pressure gradients on both of these planes. The two interpolated measurement holograms are used to separate the incoming and outgoing waves using the spatial Fourier-transform method. Analytical simulations of simply supported plates are shown as well as experimental results in a reverberation room to characterize the reduction in measurement locations. Depending on the spatial frequency of the hologram, a measurement location reduction of 20–80% was observed.