Intellectual Network

This interactive graph visualizes the people, texts, and research themes contained in my personal quotation database, which I have been developing since 2018.

Last updated: July 19, 2026.

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Current Research

Book Projects

Modernism and Japaneseness in Architecture: Hideto Kishida as Mediator

This book project developed from my doctoral dissertation, “Hideto Kishida: Mediator between Modernism and ‘Japanese-ness’ in Architecture,” submitted to the University of Texas at Austin in 2024. This book examines the history of modern Japanese architecture from the end of the Edo period (1603–1868) to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, taking the form of a biography of the architect Hideto Kishida (1899–1966). It explains how modernist architecture in post–World War II Japan emerged and how Kishida’s ideas and teachings profoundly influenced the work of Kenzo Tange (1913–2005), the internationally renowned Japanese architect. It is also a history of how modern Japanese architects attempted to express Japanese identity through architecture and how they learned from, imitated, caught up with, inspired, and influenced European and American architecture. I chose Kishida as the protagonist because he was the key figure in linking modernist aesthetics from Europe with traditional Japanese aesthetics, a process that began in the late 1920s and culminated in a unique mode of Japanese modernism epitomized by Tange’s work.

Japonisme and Modernity: Japan as Commons in Modern Architectural Thought

This book project examines the history of Japonisme in a broad sense in architecture from the late nineteenth century to the present and its role in shaping Western modernity. My first book, Modernism and Japaneseness in Architecture, and this project complement each other, as the former explores how the aesthetics of modernist architecture from Europe were linked to those of traditional Japanese architecture primarily from the perspective of Japanese architects, whereas the latter examines the same topic mainly from the perspective of European and American architects. Japonisme and Modernity illustrates how Western architects, critics, and historians have always maintained both an interest in and a distance from Japan as an essentially different country, while constantly changing their demands for Japanese architecture. It argues that Japan has repeatedly served as a conceptual “commons” for Western architects, critics, and historians, a shared intellectual resource from which they have drawn ideas to imagine and legitimize radical architectural changes. This perspective provides a framework for understanding how ideas about Japanese architecture have played a role in shaping global architectural discourse from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Koreanness for Japaneseness: Constructing Koreanness in Modern Japanese Architectural Discourse

This book project developed from my paper titled “Koreanness for Japaneseness: Constructing Koreanness in Modern Japanese Architectural Historiography,” presented at the Rediscovering Koreanness symposium held in New York in May 2026. The project examines shifts in Japanese architectural discourses on Koreanness from the 1890s to the present. It argues that many, though not all, Japanese historians, critics, and architects discussed Koreanness as a way of constructing notions of Japaneseness in architecture. The book proposes a framework identifying three major functions of Korea in modern Japanese architectural discourse: Korea as a means to understand Japan, Korea as a foil for Japan’s uniqueness, and Korea as an object in its own right. Within these functions, it identifies six recurring approaches employed by Japanese writers. As a general tendency, the three functions became dominant in roughly this order, corresponding respectively to the emergence of architectural history as an academic discipline in the 1890s, architectural modernism in the late 1920s, and empiricist historical scholarship in the late 1940s. To investigate how Japanese intellectuals constructed notions of Koreanness in defining their own cultural identities over time, this book examines the writings of Japanese architects and architectural historians such as Chūta Itō (1867–1954), Tadashi Sekino (1868–1935), Hideto Kishida (1899–1966), Gaijirō Fujishima (1899–2002), Nobuzō Sugiyama (1906–1997), and Hirotarō Ōta (1912–2007), as well as art critics such as Kakuzo Okakura (1863–1913) and Soetsu Yanagi (1889–1961).