Japan’s Civil War Losers and the Transnational Making of Gender and Environmental Thought

Asian Studies Special Lecture by Chinami Oka, Assistant Professor,
Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University

22 September 2026, Tuesday, 17:00 – 18:30
Veritas Hall B #320, Yonsei International Campus Songdo

What happens when we set aside the nation-state as the primary framework for writing history? Modern history is often told through national boundaries. While this makes a complex past easier to organise, it can also obscure people, ideas, and connections that crossed borders or challenged the logic of the nation-state. This lecture discusses how transnational history can bring these perspectives into view. We will focus on the defeated samurai of Japan’s civil war (1868–69), who were marginalised by the victorious Meiji state. Some of these samurai sought new possibilities outside the national framework after their defeat, including studying Russian Orthodox Christianity and joining a multi-ethnic commune in rural America. Tracing their transnational journeys brings to light a largely forgotten cultural and intellectual movement that emerged in early twentieth-century Japan and contributed to the development of Japan’s first modern environmental movement and progressive education for girls and blind and deaf children. Their stories invite us to reconsider how history is written, and what we might discover when we look beyond national boundaries and the perspectives of the victors.

Chinami Oka is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities at Nagoya University. She specialises in transnational history, with a particular focus on the cultural, intellectual, and religious lives of people in modern Japan and the wider world. Before joining Nagoya, she taught at the University of Oxford as the Tanaka Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies, where she also completed her DPhil in History and MSc in Modern Japanese Studies. Her research has been published by The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press), Amsterdam University Press, and Brill, among others, and she has been featured in the Historical Association’s podcast series.