Nicolas Stassar

About

Nicolas Stassar holds a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Language and Area Studies (Japanese studies) from KU Leuven. Additionally, he has stayed one year at Kyūshū University, Fukuoka, Japan, as a special auditor. From October 2022, he is a foreign research student at the Faculty of Law Tokyo University, Tokyo, Japan. He is fluent in Dutch, German (both on a native level), English (C2 [TOEFL 116 points]), and Japanese (Current official level: N2). He is able to read classical Japanese (focus on Taishō an Shōwa era) in addition to handwritten Japanese sources (kuzushi-ji 崩し字). And is learning French. Nicolas is mainly interested in the fields of modern and contemporary history as well as global history in general, in particular to the history of mediatization and media events, in addition to the field of military history. He initially worked on the mediatization of large-scale military pageantry in Japan, with the focus on so-called "large-scale special army maneuvers" (tokubetsu dai-enshū) and naval reviews (kankan-shiki) in Japan between 1890-1937, as political tools by the Imperial Japanese Military. In this project, he was interested in the learning process of military personnel regarding mass media, and the utilization of large-scale military pageantry by the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy for improving public relations (e.g. creating sympathizers with their institutional mission or familiarizing audiences with military matters) and acquiring political benefits (e.g. improving recruitment numbers or receiving budget increases). As of October 2020, Nicolas moved to the Freie Universität Berlin, where he was recruited for the ERC funded project "Law without Mercy: Japanese Courts-Martial and Military Courts During the Asia-Pacific War, 1937-45". As a doctoral research fellow, Nicolas shifted his focus towards the treatment of Allied and Asian POWs from a military and international legal perspective. His tentatively titled dissertation project "Trying the Enemy: Punishment and Justice against Japanese-Kept Prisoners of War during the Asia Pacific War 1894-1945", focuses on the administration of ad hoc, group, disciplinary, and judicial punishments against Allied POWs as a distinct problem pertinent in the maintenance of enemy troops within a belligerents territory.