Looking Beyond Novelties: Professor Tomoko Hamada Connolly and Students Win Research Grant to Japan

Five William and Mary students led by Professor Tomoko Hamada Connolly have been granted the exciting opportunity to travel to Japan with the twin goals of traveling and researching food and ritual practices in contemporary Japan for a month. The research trip is fully funded by Professor Hamada Connolly’s successful grant from the ASIANetwork Freeman Foundation Student–Faculty Award. 

Nathan Revere ‘10, Loretta Scott ‘10, Jeff DeMars ‘11, Chris Pugliese ‘09 , and Sam Davis ’10, will all go through rigorous training in familiarizing themselves with the aspects of conducting intensive ethnographic field work as well as becoming knowledgeable of the long history of Japanese ritual practice.  

According to Loretta Scott ‘10, “I was tired of reading things from behind a desk, and wanted to do something.”  Her research is on digital socialization on foodways as a daily ritual practice, a cohesion of her interest in Japanese language, food, the internet, and cinema.  “I came in with four years of Japanese language from high school, took an Asian Cinema Freshman Seminar with Professor Francis Tanglao-Aguas where we made a short film, and next thing you know I’m making teaching Japanese videos for YouTube.  Now I am video content producer for yesjapan.com.  This research combines all my interests.”

Nathan Revere ‘10, a linguistics and East Asian Studies Major, chose to participate in the research trip to not only “broaden his horizons”, but also to fuse his Japanese interests with his linguistics major by researching ritualized discourse conventions and proper etiquette.  “I’ve been a T.A. in the Japanese language courses, helped translate the FUTURE SHOCK exhibit, and now I have the opportunity to do on site field work in Japan.” 

In true William and Mary fashion, the students themselves took charge of planning the trip. As Loretta says, this experience gave the students “an idea of the incredible depth” that goes into planning these study abroad trips. Upon reaching Japan, each of the five students will have a specific topic of concentration or aspect of ritual practice, from the ritualized discourse conventions and the language of proper etiquette to the Japanese ritual of tea, coffee, and alcohol consumption.  

According to Nathan, they “will stay with Japanese host families in Kamakura”, a city founded 1192 by the Shogunate of Minamaoto-no-Yoritomo, and the former center of Samurai culture and current center for Zen Buddhism. Under the guidance of Professor Hamada Connolly, the students will be given the chance to investigate the Japanese common-sense world of food-related custom, taboos, myths, rituals, and categories. They will also investigate symbolic meanings of collective consumption of food and drinks for social relationship both within and outside the household. As a part of the ethnographic research, the students will employ interviews, participant observation, focus-group discussion and other ethnographic methodology with the end goal of publishing in addition to presenting the findings at a series of conferences.    

Such initiatives are a vital part of the education experience here at William and Mary, and rightly so. The Asian Studies Initiative hopes to support more of these opportunities in which students can take the initiative to pursue their interests in Asia.  As Loretta ’10 puts it, “At first it was only the exoticism and novelties of these cultures that drew me in, but with the knowledge that I continue to gain, I hope that my appreciation of the culture has evolved into a deeper more meaningful understanding of its complexities.”