Ms. Kandra Polatis was first lured towards the Fulbright Program because it presented an exciting adventure—the opportunity to research medicine, history, and culture as an academic ambassador of the USA in Japan.

Growing up in an agricultural community in rural Idaho, Ms. Polatis admits that she did not know much about the Fulbright Program earlier—that was, until she started pursuing her PhD dissertation at University of California, Santa Barbara. In the presence of excellent mentors and role models, Ms. Polatis gained confidence. In her third year, she applied for a Graduate Research Fellowship with Fulbright, and was granted the same in 2020.

In 2021, the PhD scholar travelled from the State of Idaho to the University of Tokyo, Japan, to study “Death and the diseased body: Disease management and burial regulations in imperial Japan.” The seeds of interest for this area of work were sown in 2019, when Ms. Polatis received a scholarship from a different organization and started preliminary research in this direction at the National Taiwan University, in Taipei, but what further drove her to pick this as her research project was a seminar by Professor Suzuki Akihito. In the seminar, the professor highlighted links between the history of medicine in Japan and Europe. The renowned historian of medicine would go on to sponsor and mentor Ms. Polatis for her Fulbright Fellowship.

The Fulbright fellowship provided Ms. Polatis a wealth of new insights for her research on modern Japan and Taiwan. Talking about her research at the University of Tokyo, she describes her initial experience there to be “dreamlike”, because it was the first time that she had access to historic documents that were extremely important for her research, at the general library of the University. “I remember just holding texts in my hands and thinking, ‘Am I really here? Am I really holding this document? This is incredible!’” she recounts fondly.

However, with limited time at hand, and an ocean of knowledge to delve through, Ms. Polatis optimized. She chose to focus on one methodology in the practice of forensics—dissection.

She worked through comparative history perspectives of medicine and anthropology and began to appreciate the irony of how the root causes of all diseases are hidden in the lifeless body of a person but may not have been apparent when the person was living. “Now we had to navigate around respecting the dead and also making medical advances,” she says.

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Polatis’ topic of research proved extremely relevant, and the two-pronged nature of her work exposed her to multiple new experiences. On one hand, it gave her the brilliant opportunity to interact with stalwart historians, theorists, and medical experts, practitioners, and scholars, all of whom were experts in the field of her work. On the other hand, it provided her the chance to understand the Japanese culture and way of life first-hand. “I learned so much more about my project, the gaps that I needed to fill in, and different future directions that I could follow,” says Ms. Polatis.

Ms. Polatis fondly recalls street performances, culinary varieties, and celebratory rituals from religious and cultural holidays during her 12months grant period in Japan. While she somberly remembers that her child could not travel to Japan with her due to COVID-19 restrictions at the time, she is positive that she will be revisiting the country soon.

For other young scholars who are considering applying for the Fulbright Program, she says “Have faith in yourself and your abilities. And even if you have the smallest modicum of desire to apply, go for it.”