Taft Undergraduate Grant: One Thousand Years of Games

I have seen more of my department head in one semester than I want to in a lifetime.

I am pleased, if not a little distressed, to announce that my submission to the university was selected for the Taft undergraduate research award last week. I didn't think I'd actually get it, but with this grant available my research is officially being funded over the summer and fall going into next spring. Completing the research for the grant will coincide with receiving my undergraduate degree, so the research has also become my senior project.

I was actually hoping I wouldn't get it because I came up with a much better idea for my senior project whilst my submission was being considered, but now that I've been chosen I'll just have to see this research through to the end. The project I'm working on for the grant on deals with reactions to and the end of modernity within Japan, interpreted through indigenous games played by different socioeconomic classes. As the title implies, it follows a thousand years of history regarding Japan's different tabletop games, from Go to Sugoroku, and the ways they were used both to react against and to harness modernity.

From c. 1880 onwards tabletop games were ripe with nationalist propaganda, featuring the Japanese empire's latest "steps forward" and (eventually) martial conquests as their subject matter, but hoi polloi games that tended towards the superstitious and supernatural were often rebellious against the spirit of empire. Hence there's ample room to see how different groups expressed their viewpoints through game creation and gameplay. It's essentially a popular history rather than an elite one, told through the objects of the collective society rather than the treaties and constitutions of the fractional.

Since this project is a distant cousin to what I do on the bookstore, from time to time I may throw up my brainstorming and drafts related to the project on here for consideration. In keeping with my free knowledge policy, once the final research is published around the time of the next Taft symposium I'll make it freely available through Juraku.

I'm just a little bitter that I'll be stuck chronicling events in the Nara to mid-Showa for a year. I'm much more interested in '99~'04 at this point.