On 2 February, Jonathan Nilas Puntervold from our Japan Studies program successfully defended his dissertation – “If the Shoe Fits: Yamada Yoshio and the birth of neotraditionalist linguistics in Japan” – thereby obtaining his Ph.D.

Jonathan took on a journey back to pre-war Japan, where the encounter with Western linguistics spurred a local school teacher to try to restore Japan’s ‘Kokugaku Grammar’, in an attempt to develop a Japanese linguistics.