Historical Studies By/With Verbs: Origins of Powers

LIXIL Ushioda East Asian Humanities Initiative
07.2020-06.2022

The Purpose of the Research

This research started with a simple question: what does mankind gain by creating a new view of global history from a Japanese and Asian perspective? Using verbs as the key concept, we set individual events free from the fixations of time and space (such as “Pre-modern Japanese history”) that have been binding the historic studies up until now, and enable multi-angle debates and dynamic understanding of history.
This was done with the same interests as in previous research, set using material objects (e.g., sugar, copper) as key elements, but those tended to end up being dependent on specific historical materials.
This research sets “verbs” as key elements so that we can include various regions more equally in debates.
We focus especially on the actions that generate, deepen and enrich power. This research cannot be done through historical study alone. It is essential to cooperate across multiple fields in Humanities and related academic fields. Therefore, the research to be conducted requires recruiting fellow experienced researchers while learning from accumulated knowledge from previous HMC product research.
We aim for this research to be a long-term cross-group cooperation, and to cooperate with external projects while presenting a new point of view focusing on historical study and historical studies of mankind.