Joel Littler

Dr Joel Littler is a Japan Foundation - Global Japan Studies Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Tōbunken), University of Tokyo. He is a transnational cultural and intellectual historian of Modern Japan. His ongoing monograph project is titled A World Revolution: Imagining the Future in Meiji Japan, in which he examines the cultural and intellectual activities that emerged from the losing sides of Japan’s civil conflicts. He finds that although the ‘civil war losers’ were excluded from mainstream politics, they were active in pursuing their own conceptions of modern progress and frequently attempted to realize their ideas in China, the Philippines, and Siam (Thailand). Using the life of Miyazaki Tōten (1871-1922), a popular intellectual, author, revolutionary activist, and naniwabushi balladeer, to explicate the role of the Seinan ‘civil war losers’ in modern Japan, the book aims to shed light on the multiple imaginations of the future in Meiji Japan, which were central to the early twentieth-century Asian revolutions and part of popular culture and protest in the late Meiji period.

Dr Littler received his DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in June 2024. He has previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (2024-25), a Visiting Researcher at Kyushu University (2022-23) and as a Lecturer in Philosophy at Thammasat University and Mahidol University in Thailand (2018-20).

At the University of Tokyo, alongside preparing his book manuscript, Dr. Littler  continues to research how the ‘civil war losers’ engaged in transnational activity in Korea and Southeast Asia. He hosts the Japan Foundation - Global Japan Studies seminar series at Tōbunken, so far holding events on Meiji civil war “losers”, Tokugawa views on the Ming-Qing transition, Burmese communist movements, and Literary Sinitic in colonial Taiwan.

He was the convenor of the Oxford Japanese History Workshop, 2023-24.

Publications

Littler, Joel (2024) A Song of Fallen Flowers: Miyazaki Tōten and the Making of Naniwabushi as a Mode of Popular Dissent in Transwar Japan, 1902-1909, Modern Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000392

Littler, Joel (2023) Meiji Civil War Losers in Siam: Miyazaki Tōten’s Utopian Farming Community (1877-1896), In Lewis Bremner, Manimporok Dotulong, and Sho Konishi (eds.) Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Japan and the Wider World (Leiden: Brill). https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004685208_012

Matanle, Peter; Littler, Joel; and Slay, Oliver (2019) Imagining Disasters in the Era of Climate Change: Is Japan’s Seawall a New Maginot Line?, The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 17(13), 1. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1557466019015377  Open access here: https://apjjf.org/2019/13/matanle