David J Chandler - Blog , Uncategorized

Unfunded in Japan

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:16:22 +0000

I’ve decided to write more on this topic as, having come in the top 20% of failed applicants for last year’s research grants, I was persuaded to try again, with a revised version of the same project. As I noted before, much of the art of success comes down to making (literally) incredible claims, so with valuable input from the university’s research support office I “beefed up” the project with even bigger assertions about how it would change the field, and what sort of research results I’d obtain. Once again, I was failed. This time I’ll give the results in detail; if 100 people did this, we might gain a little more insight into the system.

Three judges (who, as I wrote before, may very well know the applicant, or the applicant’s rivals) assess the project from various points of view and grade these on a 1 to 4 scale, 4 being very good. An average of around 3 across all the grading criteria generally seems to be enough to obtain funding. One of the categories roughly translates as the “academic validity” of the project. Last year, the less ambitious version of my project scored 2.67 here, probably meaning that two judges scored it “3” and one “2.” This year, despite the bigger claims, and supposed improvements, this score slipped to 2.33. On the other hand, another category is “the ability of the candidate to conduct the research.” Last year I scored just 2.67 here, but this year was evaluated far higher, at 3.67 (i.e. one point short of a perfect score!). It would be a fool’s errand to try and find anything objective or scientific about this, but if even a modicum of objectivity is teased out, the conclusion is apparently that my abilities and my judgement are increasingly at odds: I’m a good researcher who just can’t find an appropriately “valid” project! Conversely, of course, less talented researchers are apparently having more brilliant ideas. Yet another category is to determine the international impact of the research. Here I scored 3 last year, but 2.67 this year.

What’s most revealing about this is that I actually added a book to the expected research results! I said I would write (among other things) a pioneering study of the fascinating writer-composer Mary Linwood (1783–1862), and that Cambridge University Press (CUP) had expressed interest in publishing such a study. Perhaps the judges thought that was just boasting—and who has heard of Mary Linwood anyway? But in March this year, CUP really did issue me with a contract for such a book. Would the result have been different if, at the application stage, I could have said I had a book under contract? Probably not, because though it’s hard to credit, the idea of academic “validity” is quite incredibly nebulous in Japan and (I would argue) deliberately kept that way. Many Japanese would swear till blue in the face that my ideas about Linwood, whether presented to the world in a CUP volume or not, are no more “valid” than someone else’s ideas presented in one of the thousands of in-house, unrefereed journals, published in Japanese universities. By extension, a past record of publishing in top-class journals and with internationally-recognized publishers won’t influence the way the money goes, and the ultimate result is that Japanese universities will continue to slide in international rankings despite all the money thrown at academic research.

15 Years of Italo Montemezzi

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 04:04:11 +0000

Today is a big day: the official publication date of my book, Succeeding Puccini: The Operatic Career of Italo Montemezzi, 1875–1952, coauthored with Raffaele Mellace. I first fell in love with Montemezzi’s music around 2006. I was then consciously working through the major works of all Puccini’s leading contemporaries and rivals, feeling sanguine that I would discover operas that I would admire above Puccini’s. This proved to be the case. The two composers in this group who most impressed me were Alfredo Catalani (1854–93) and of course Montemezzi (1875–1952). Montemezzi’s opera L’amore dei tre re of 1913 struck me as a most extraordinary masterpiece, and over the years I’ve come to love it more and more. It is, to put it simply, my favourite opera.

Back in 2006, there was very little information available about Catalani and Montemezzi in English. In Italian, Catalani had fared reasonably well, and been the subject of a number of books. Montemezzi, by contrast, had been very inadequately treated. Just after his death, a volume of tributes to him and his music had been published under the title Omaggio a Italo Montemezzi. After that, not a single book had been devoted to him or his music. What is more, even reputable encyclopedia articles were riddled with errors. To take one example, it was claimed that, having moved to the United States in 1939, Montemezzi moved back to Italy in 1948. This was not true at all. Though he happened to die on a trip to Italy, Montemezzi’s final home was in Beverly Hills.

In 2010, I began planning a book on Montemezzi: a simple, straightforward biographical account and examination of his critical fortunes. But the project gradually grew and grew. It became clear that there was a lot of information about Montemezzi in old newspapers and various manuscript collections, but tracking it down, and synthesizing it into a coherent narrative, was a huge challenge. What is more, and this was most exciting, some very important Montemezzi letters were regularly coming on the market, each one opening new doors. I began building my own Montemezzi archive. In 2014 and 2016 I was able to visit the Villa Montemezzi in Vigasio, the house where Montemezzi was born and raised, and where he composed much of his greatest music. It contained a positive treasure trove of Montemezzi related materials.

By 2018, I felt I had a reasonably full biography completed, and I began approaching publishers. They all said basically the same thing: Montemezzi was not a big enough figure to justify a purely biographical study; there would need to be analysis of his music too. I was not equipped to do this, so in 2020 I established a collaboration with Raffaele, a brilliant Italian musicologist who had already written at length on Montemezzi’s opera La nave (1918). At every stage of working on Montemezzi, there were remarkable—providential—coincidences, and here was another: Raffaele shared a birthday with Montemezzi! It has been a very happy collaboration, with Raffaele writing lots of brilliant analysis, and me then weaving it into the biographical narrative I’d already largely constructed. There were constant new discoveries along the way.

We approached Oxford University Press in 2022 and were over the moon when they accepted our proposal. And now, after goodness knows how many thousands of hours of work, Succeeding Puccini is finally published.

The Imaginary "Lottery" of Research Funding in Japan

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 01:31:40 +0000

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The Japanese economic “bubble” is usually thought to have come to an end in 1991, and by some metrics, Japan is no longer the “rich” country it long claimed to be (as Japanese people often lament). Yet in some respects, there is still an awful lot of wealth on display, and this includes funding for academic research. Each year, billions of yen are distributed to thousands of researchers up and down the country. Writing applications for this funding is a big part of life for many Japanese academics. Although Japan is often seen as a country of modest understatement, nothing could be less true when it comes to these applications. The general goal is to make your project sound like the most earth-shattering piece of research ever attempted in your field and the level of “spin” has to be seen to be believed. These applications are considered by 3 “judges,” who will themselves be academics, though not necessarily in your field. They may be your colleagues, your friends, or even your partner, but statistically it is always far more likely that they are colleagues, friends or partners of the many people competing against you for the money. They know exactly who you are.

The results are announced around the beginning of March, bringing joy to some and despair to others. In the abstract, of course, one would assume that the money would go to (i) the best projects devised by (ii) the best researchers with (iii) the best track record of producing high level, internationally recognized research. In reality, it is so hard to see that this is the case that many Japanese academics refer to the whole system as a “lottery.” You may “get lucky,” they will say, or you may not. If it really is this arbitrary, of course, it’s very concerning and hardly conducive to improving the international ratings of Japan’s many universities.

In fact, I believe, the “lottery” idea is just a comforting myth. There is not a random pattern of success and failure. Some academics will get grant after grant, leveraging one into another, and burning through millions of yen of taxpayers’ money in the course of their careers. Some will never touch this money at all.

One result of this, that I’m often led to contemplate (coming from a somewhat poor, somewhat puritanical background), is the relative cost of research and the matter of value for money. Imagine 2 Japanese professors of English working on T. S. Eliot. The first gets no special funding and relies on the resources of their university library, with the mass of online materials, etc. The cost of the research is hardly more than the electricity used to power their computer. The second wins a grant of $20,000 claiming that to do the research at all, they need a new computer, to present their ideas at a conference in Hawaii before committing to publication, to make a research trip to the Huntington Library in California, and goodness knows what else. Each, in the end, produces one article. (The idea that $20,000 might produce just one article about poetry might seem like satirical exaggeration. It is not. With patience, one can work out just how much grant produced so much publication on any particular topic at https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/index/). So the second article cost about 10,000 times more to create. It is almost certainly not 10,000 times more important, but is it even 10 times more important? There is an exceptional reluctance to seriously address such questions in Japan, which is why Japanese academics will cling to the belief that somehow the second of my hypothetical professors just won the “lottery,” while the other didn’t.

(Full disclosure: I have worked in Japan for 24 years and applied for grants on 4 occasions. Just one application was successful.)

Writing about the Fast and Furious in Japan, in Japan

Sun, 21 May 2023 05:35:52 +0000

I made a remarkable discovery this past week. An article I'd written on the Fast and Furious film franchise, and its engagements with Japan, recently published in one of my department's own journals, had been downloaded over 4,000 times. Here's a link to the article.

It's an intriguing development in an interesting story. Most Japanese universities like to publish their own journals as publishing channels for their own staff. My English department publishes no less than three, all with content reviewed and edited within the department. We're thus asked to review each other's essays, and though this process is "blind" in theory, it virtually never is in practice. The journals cover a very wide range of things: articles on English literature, the historical background to literature, Japanese literature in its relations to English literature, theatre, English linguistics, Japanese linguistics, sociolinguistics and all sorts of EFL content. In fact, the scope of the journals is basically meant to be coextensive with the very diverse research interests of members of the department.

Until now, at least. No one had written about popular movies before, and even though the focus was very much on the representation of Japan in the Fast and Furious series, there was clear concern, mostly emanating from one reader, that this was somehow ineligible for inclusion in a journal that I myself had often served in the role of editor. I was told that what I had written couldn't be accepted as an "article," but could be accepted as a "research note." The problem here is that we don't publish any technical criteria to distinguish an article/essay from a "research note," though when I protested, some ad hoc criteria were tendentiously thrown together to supposedly eliminate my piece from the category of articles, while at the same time justifying all the other contributions (and hundreds more, in earlier issues) being treated as articles, and by extension more heavyweight contributions to scholarship. The distinction wouldn't stand up in court for five minutes: if this essay of mine is not an article, then dozens of other articles in our journals are not articles either.

The whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth, but I do think the purpose of writing anything is to have people read it, and if this article on the Fast and Furious is something people want to read, that's fantastic.

Two Ukraine stories that have shaped my life

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:08:07 +0000

The news at the moment is dominated by Russia's war in Ukraine. It's heartbreaking. I've never been to (or even particularly near) Ukraine, but I've had a special feeling for the country all my adult life. This is because of two powerful fictions. My high school library, which I have extremely fond memories of, had a number of novels by Frederick Forsyth which I read with great avidity in my mid-teens. My favourite by some way was The Devil's Alternative (1979), which involves Ukrainian freedom fighters and their struggle to free their country from the Soviet Union. I've never read it since, but it's so powerful that certain elements of the plot linger in my mind to this day. It put me firmly on the side of Ukraine.

A few years later, as an undergraduate student, I obtained a recording of Mussorgsky's brilliant comic opera, the name of which has appeared in various English forms, but Wikipedia has The Fair at Sorochyntsi, so let's go with that. It's based on one of the stories in Gogol's Ukrainian collection, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. The opera is full of wonderfully memorable Ukrainian folk melodies, and can be enjoyed as a sort of love letter to the country and its people. It's a powerful reminder of how intertwined the histories and cultures of Russia and Ukraine are.

May peace come soon.

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The fascination of early careers -- and mozzarella

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 08:35:24 +0000

Looking back on my interests since undergraduate days (if not earlier), one thing which has always fascinated me is the beginnings of an artistic career. When a young writer starts to write, or a young composer starts to compose, or a young painter starts to paint, then a fascinating link tends to be established between the individual talent and the tradition. Early works tend to be derivative, yet at the same time they often contain the "seeds" of a more individual approach that will gradually strengthen over time.

These thoughts are inspired by the appearance of the April edition of Opera today, which includes an article by me about Domenico Cimarosa's early career. He would go on to become the most successful opera composer of his day, but how did he start out? He was no infant prodigy like Mozart, and didn't compose his first opera until he was about 22. The article argues that the opera usually considered Cimarosa's third work in the genre, La finta parigina ("The Fake Parisian"), was actually very likely his first opera, and datable to 1772. It immediately becomes much more interesting if it was, of course. I feel an affection for this opera that I can't wholly explain, but that certainly has something to do with its homeliness and strong sense of locality. It combines several love stories, but the one I like most sees Cardillo, the local innkeeper, engaged to Preziosa, the local mozzarellara, or mozzarella-seller, who has a cheese shop just next door to the inn. I always think of this opera when eating mozzarella! I think the Cardillo-Preziosa subplot could be separated from the rest and treated as an intermezzo-style work, something like La serva padrona. It could be really delightful, and called something like The Cheese Seller or The Cheese Shop.

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The Journal of Popular Music Studies and Publishing Red Flags

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 01:21:06 +0000

A couple of people have written to ask about the Journal of Popular Music Studies case mentioned in my last blog: how could anyone possibly know if a "third party referee" report was in fact written by a journal editor? The simple answer, I’m afraid, is that you couldn’t. All you can do is try and get a feel for what ordinary publishing practice is like, and then look out for any anomalies. Anomalies in themselves don’t prove editorial corruption, but may indicate that something is not as it should be.

In this case, there were a few red flags. Initially, I simply heard from an editorial assistant, saying I should receive the results of a review in 3 to 4 months. So after 5 months had passed, I wrote to ask when I was likely to hear something. No reply. A few weeks later I wrote again. Again, no reply. But when I wrote a third time, now seven months after the initial submission, I received a reply from one of the two editors in just an hour. This reply stated:

Apologies for the delay in responding to your inquiries. Since the earlier days of JPMS, we’ve tried to encourage a more thorough review process for each of our submissions. We also have a substantial backlog of essays awaiting reviewers, which can be difficult to secure depending on the range of sub-specialties addressed in each essay. We wanted to make sure we found someone with expertise in Victorian culture and 19th-century popular musics, which took some time given our usual pool of reviewers focus on the 20th-century and beyond. We finally had the opportunity to have your essay read by someone who is a trained Victorianist and a scholar of popular music.

The email included a report by this “trained Victorianist.” On the surface this all seemed clear enough, but there was certainly something odd about the report suddenly being available just after I’d enquired about it. Reputable journals also, on the whole, solicit two readers’ reports, and I knew that had been how the Journal of Popular Music Studies had worked in the past (I’d published in the journal under a previous editorship). But the really big red flag was the reader’s report itself. It was a single short paragraph just crudely dismissing the article. There was no sign of expertise in the area of the essay. The idea that a big effort had been made to find someone qualified to write such a dismissal seemed quite absurd! It didn’t occur to me that the report may have been written by the editor, as I couldn’t think any prestigious journal would sink that low, but I was pretty sure that the story about the difficult hunt for an appropriate reviewer was complete BS.

So I wrote to complain that the reviewer selected was clearly not the sort of “expert” advertised. And this was a case, it turned out, in which a villain’s pride would prove their undoing, for I now received a reply:

Our review process is blind, and we cannot divulge the identity of your reviewer. Suffice it to say that your reviewer received a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley for writing a dissertation on Victorian literature with Catherine Gallagher and Sharon Marcus, and also published an essay in the volume, THE IDEA MUSIC in VICTORIAN FICTION published by Ashgate.

And THAT gave the game away completely, though remarkably both editors still took the line that nothing was amiss, and that the essay had simply fallen short of their high standards!! I would bet a sizable sum of money that the "reader's report" was written in the one hour period between the arrival of my third enquiry and the editor's reply.

I should add that the editorship of the journal has since changed again, thank goodness.

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A Tale of Two Journals

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 02:23:01 +0000

I published my first article in an academic journal back in 1993 -- a very memorable moment! Writing for journals and submitting to journals is a big part of academic life, and one in which a sometimes strange interdependency is played out: the journals need authors just as the authors need journals. I've since published in about 30 academic journals (some more "academic" than others) and have had many different kinds of experience with them.

Over the last year I've experienced a remarkable contrast. In 2020 I wrote two, slightly-related articles concerned with the appearance of New Zealand in English literature in the 1840s. In the autumn, I sent one to the Journal of New Zealand Literature, and the other to the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies. The contrast was remarkable. With the first, I had to write to the editor four times before she even acknowledged that I'd submitted something. And then, six months later, when I started asking when I was likely to hear from her (having, in the interim, heard nothing), there was no reply. I felt very skeptical as to whether anything was happening at all. Eventually, after nine months, I wrote to say I was withdrawing the article -- even that failed to get a reply! With the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies things could not have been more different. The submission was immediately acknowledged, in a very friendly way, and despite the challenges posed by Covid 19, there was a clear editorial procedure that I was guided through. The article, slightly revised, was accepted in April. As of now, I've had eight emails from the editor.

The real takeaway here has been the impact an editor's personality and sense of professional standards has on a journal. Most academic journals are not large-scale operations, so the editor has a huge influence on how things get done. Often there will be very little accountability. My worst experience with a journal came some years ago with the Journal of Popular Music Studies. It's a long, in many ways unbelievable story, but in essence one of the two editors wrote a very dismissive report on my submission, but claimed that this dismissive report had come from a third party referee. This of course was a total corruption of the "peer review" process most journals follow. I complained to the publisher, who initially supported the editor. I then, for the first and only time, complained to COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) a wonderful organisation that tries to ensure ethical standards are followed in journal publication. They eventually obtained an admission that the editor had been at fault, but it was a lot of hard work to get to that stage, and of course in the end as an author you've proved a moral point, but not actually got your work published.

However, journals do need authors! So it's important that we support those journals that treat authors well, while trying to withdraw support from journals that treat authors badly.

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Napoleon and Cimarosa

Sun, 02 May 2021 01:16:48 +0000

I was wondering whether anyone actually reads these occasional blogs, but surprisingly my "Monthly Traffic Report" from Google says they have been looked at over 40 times. Well, since the last one, one thing that has come out is a piece marking Napoleon's bicentenary. Napoleon died on St Helena (a place I've always wanted to go!) on 5 May 1821. Amazingly, it then took two months for the news to reach England! Napoleon was a great lover of Italian comic opera, so I wrote about him from that point of view for Opera, and my "Opening the opera drawer" is in the May issue. One of the Italian composers Napoleon really admired was Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801), who is a favourite of mine, too. And as luck would have it, the Opera Studio at the New National Theatre, Tokyo, put on a wonderful production of Cimarosa's L'impresario in angustie in March -- the first ever production of this opera in Japan. It's a delightful little one-act piece about an impresario running out of money and then deserting an opera production -- a very relevant story in a time of Covid. My long and highly appreciative review of this production also appears in the May Opera, so altogether Cimarosa gets mentioned a lot more than usual, though no more than he deserves. In the late eighteenth century, he was considered the greatest opera composer of the age. Mozart was one of his many rivals.

A new website

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 01:00:00 +0000

Well, there was nothing wrong with the old website, originally created in 2003; "There is no doubt whatever about that." But in 2020 Zoho updated all their platforms, and no longer offered updates for the older sites. Rather than just trying to copy the old site, I made a decision to redesign it completely. I wanted to make it a homage to Italo Montemezzi and my favourite opera, L'Amore dei Tre Re, and came up with a basic concept, which was then brilliantly realized by my brother-in-law, Johnny. Many thanks to him! This new site was published on 1 March 2021.

A major reason for creating the site in 2003 was to be able to make texts available to students as downloads. It seemed a pretty advanced thing to do at the time, and came two or three years before Doshisha created an e-class system. For a brief period, the students saw me as on the cutting edge of new teaching technologies! But now it's totally normal to expect students to download things, and I could just use the university's system, but I still like having everything directly under my control, as it were!

The old site didn't have any sort of blog feature. I decided to have one this time so as to make occasional reports on what I'm up to.