This project examines the Cold War from a distinctly global perspective, drawing upon insights gained since its conclusion. By engaging historians from regions previously marginalized in traditional U.S.-centric narratives—such as Japan, Vietnam, and Angola—the project prompts a critical reexamination of Cold War historiography. Utilizing digital humanities tools including LLMs and digital archives, it aims to establish a shared global research foundation and construct a new paradigm for understanding late 20th-century history.

Focusing on cross-media creative networks in early 20th-century Japan across stage, film, radio, and print, this project explores collaborations such as the Zenshin-za theatre troupe with Kubo Sakae, and the Narutaki-gumi scriptwriting collective. Combining archival research and close reading with data-driven network analysis using the Japan Biographical Database (JBDB), it digitizes primary sources for ToUDA and aims for an international symposium and an open-access volume.

This study systematically digitizes and integrates Tohoku University’s extensive dialect collection accumulated since the 1960s, establishing a sustainable research infrastructure. By linking fragile audio tapes with field notes, adopting international metadata standards, and incorporating AI-assisted linguistic analysis, the project will publish an open-access volume featuring grammatical sketches of six representative Tohoku dialects.

Examining regions traditionally regarded as the "margins" of society, this project investigates how local experiences and cultural connections are depicted in literature and film, focusing on Terayama Shuji in Aomori and minority communities in Osaka. It illuminates "marginal" spaces as generative sites of cultural innovation and uses text mining on historical newspapers to visualize labor migration from Tohoku to Osaka.

Transcending biological taxonomy, this project constructs a "Multi-Life Humanities" framework to analyze nonhuman autonomy in Japanese history and society. Key inquiries include the historical evolution of medicinal plant knowledge during crises from the Edo to Pacific War periods (Huang), and an anthropological study of scientific rationality coexisting with religious memorial practices (kuyo) for laboratory animals and donated bodies (Ochi).

Investigating how minoritized language varieties and dialects are utilized across television, literature, and regional merchandise, this project explores their impact on public perception and language conservation. Grounded in Tohoku while engaging international comparisons, it employs interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative approaches to interrogate the boundaries between linguistic commodification, consumption, and preservation.

This interdisciplinary project examines how major sociohistorical changes from the 1960s to the 2000s were lived and mediated through "embodied realities." Bringing close readings of literature and media into dialogue with cultural anthropology and history, it utilizes digital archives (ToUDA, NDL, Nichibunken) to situate Japan within transnational currents of ideas, images, and cultural commodities across Asia and the world.

Exploring the historical development of finance from the early modern to modern periods in Japan, this project reexamines Western-centric economic historiography. Through the digitization and AI-assisted transcription of rich archival collections at Tohoku University, it develops new datasets to advance comparative economic history combining digital humanities and quantitative approaches.

Building a comprehensive AI research infrastructure for Japanese historical documents, this international project integrates Japanese translations into the Dharmamitra machine-translation platform, develops OCR/HTR models for handwritten texts including kuzushiji, and implements semantic search and RAG tools. It regularly hosts public workshops to train early-career researchers in AI-driven text analysis.

Advancing comparative historical research on high economic growth and societal memory during "The Long 1960s," this initiative collaborates with Sapienza University of Rome to translate and digitize historical records of the 1968 student movement housed at Tohoku University Archives. Making these primary sources accessible in English expands global research networks on modern societal transformations.

Conducting cross-national comparative surveys across Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Taiwan, this project investigates body consciousness regarding facial hair (masculinity), facial exposure (hijab and impression formation), and tattoos (social norms vs. deviance). It aims to illuminate how cultural norms influence body perception and social-psychological behaviors.

Comparing Japanese culinary traditions with other Asian food cultures through historical, environmental, and sensory-psychological lenses, this study moves beyond traditional nutritional science. It clarifies similarities and differences across Asian foodways, enhancing cross-cultural understanding while articulating the distinct identity of Japanese food culture.

Analyzing how war memories in European peripheries (Ochi) and Asia (Ishii) interact within a "global memory formation," this research examines the political manipulation of history and victimhood nationalism. Transcending regional frameworks, it examines how memories clash, resonate, or align across borders, exploring possibilities for new "mnemonic solidarity."

Taking the 1946 founding of the Tohoku Psychical Science Research Association by Tohoku University scholars as its starting point, this project explores the intersection of spiritualism, science, culture, and academia in postwar Japan. Through archival research and interdisciplinary analysis across literature and history, it elucidates the position of psychical research in postwar local society.

Addressing metadata resource shortages and cross-disciplinary access policy discrepancies in digital archives, this international study develops methods for structuring archival materials into formats usable by generative AI. It constructs an international knowledge infrastructure model for digital scholarly environments in the DX-AI era.

This research project will trace the development of Japanese horror manga and American horror comics in the late 20th century and conduct a comparative analysis. It will compare the expressive and formal characteristics of horror comics produced during the formative periods of the genre in both national settings, focusing on Japanese horror manga and American horror comics published before the 1990s.

This collaborative research focuses on the representation of locality in Japanese literary and film works. We will collectively examine the interaction between regional culture and creative expression.

This collaborative research project explores how Japanese literature and media from the 1960s to the 2000s have grappled with fragmented realities—realities shaped by social upheavals, political mobilizations, urban and economic transformations, and ecological crises. By tracing how cultural texts mediate experiences of uncertainty, anxiety, and social change, the project highlights the creative strategies through which “reality” itself is imagined, contested, and reconstructed. Bringing together interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches, it seeks to deepen our understanding of how form, genre, and affective experience intersect in times of rupture and transformation.

This research project aims to digitize three valuable collections of archival material related to the economic history of Japan held at Tohoku University: the Kemuyama village and Imai village document collections located on microfilm at the Economics Department, and the Kotani documents at Tohoku University Library. The project will enable new digital research rooted in collaboration with researchers around the world.

The aim of this research is to compare and examine the various aspects, memories, and subsequent changes that occurred during the period of high-speed economic growth on a global scale, with the goal of identifying the issues and structures of modern society as it exists today. Additionally, we translate historical materials housed in the archives of Tohoku University Digital Archives into English. By making these materials accessible to researchers worldwide, the project seeks to expand the scope of this research.

While it is not uncommon for people to have tattoos in Europe, in East Asia, including Japan, there is still a strong aversion to them. The ultimate aim of this project is to clarify the causes and effects of cultural differences in attitudes towards the body, or ‘body consciousness’ but the goal of this proposal is to clarify how these attitudes differ from culture to culture by creating a new list of terms for body expression by utilizing the Tohoku University Digital Archives (ToUDA).

This project organizes English translations and explanations of the Documents of Hōzawa, a collection of historical documents held at the Department of Japanese History in the Faculty of Arts of Letters. Subsequently, we will disseminate these materials through both digital and physical channels: publication in the university's digital archive (ToUDA) and academic journals, and an exhibition at the library.

This research investigates alternative approaches to memory studies by examining the transmission of war memories from perspectives that extend beyond the framework of nationalism. It particularly focuses on war trauma, traditionally regarded as personal, and discusses the significance of its sharing with others through the acts of narrative and representation. 

Metadata is as important as materials in building a digital archive of valuable materials and books. It includes information such as the author, year of publication, and history of the material or book, and provides the basis for its academic value. To enable smoother and more appropriate management, this study will explore the possibility of metadata assignment using generative AI under the framework of an international joint research project.

This project explores the possibilities and challenges of adopting a multispecies perspective in humanities research by analyzing the autonomy and role of nonhuman organisms in shaping the varying human experiences in Japanese history, society, and culture.
In addition to utilizing the digital archives, we combine the insights of history and anthropology with the knowledge of medical and pharmaceutical sciences for more integrated understanding.

We create high-quality digital data in which page images are precisely aligned with carefully corrected Japanese text, and use this as a foundation for building a vision–language model (VLM) infrastructure tailored to Japanese Buddhist texts. The aim is to explore how far such models can support automatic reading and layout understanding, to develop a reusable workflow that can be applied to similar materials.