Asian studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Last October a pallet of furikake arrived at the wholesale grocer where I work with English stickers describing it as "fish seasoning". Underneath, the Japanese packaging advertised the product as a taste of the Seto Inland Sea, with a cartoon fisherman and a reference to a regional festival. Correcting the stickers took ten minutes. Explaining to my manager why the original label was selling something quite different from the English one took longer, and it is the kind of question I would like to spend the next two years thinking about properly: how goods, images and ideas about place move between Asian societies and the rest of the world, and what changes on the way.

I studied History and Japanese at undergraduate level, graduating with a 2:1. My language study included a year of intensive reading in modern Japanese, which gave me enough confidence to work with prewar newspapers, slowly and with a dictionary close by. For my dissertation I examined advertising for Osaka department stores in the 1920s, using digitised newspaper archives. I was interested in how these stores presented themselves as both modern and rooted in local merchant culture, sometimes in the same advertisement. Reading Jordan Sand's House and Home in Modern Japan helped me see that domestic consumption in this period was tied to arguments about national life, not simply shopping. My own contribution was modest: a close reading of around forty advertisements and an argument that Osaka stores leaned on regional identity more than the Tokyo examples Sand and others discuss. My supervisor's main criticism was that I had treated Osaka in isolation, and I agree. I would now like to place this kind of material in a wider East Asian frame, including colonial Korea and Taiwan, where the same companies traded.

Since graduating I have worked full-time in the buying office of a food wholesaler that supplies restaurants and small supermarkets. Much of my day involves checking import documentation, correcting product descriptions and answering questions from customers who want to know what something is and how to use it. I have become the person colleagues ask about Japanese labels, and I have started learning hangul so that I can do the same for our growing Korean range. This work is not academic, but it has made me more attentive to how translation flattens meaning and how commercial categories such as "Asian food" lump together very different histories.

Two evenings a week I tutor a retired engineer and a sixth-form student in Japanese. Preparing lessons for such different learners has made me clearer about grammar I once took for granted, and it keeps my own reading regular. I also play shogi online, badly but persistently, and have been working through annotated game records in Japanese, which is an unexpectedly good way to practise reading dense, technical prose.

At postgraduate level I hope to develop a project on consumer culture and regional identity across the Japanese empire, drawing on advertising and trade publications. I know I need stronger training in historiography beyond Japan, a more systematic grounding in research methods, and better reading skills in classical forms that still appear in early twentieth-century texts. I also want to improve my Korean to the point where I can use sources directly rather than relying on translation.

I am a steady, organised worker. My job has taught me to handle detail under deadlines and to explain complicated things plainly, and my dissertation showed me that I enjoy the slow work of archive reading. I would bring both habits to graduate study, along with a practical sense of how ideas about Asia are packaged and sold today.