I am focussing on human rights discourse in Japan. For my undergraduate dissertation, I have written a discourse analysis on why Japan does not have a National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) to which I am now in the process of adding a historical perspective. My current topic deals with the rights conceptions within the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement during the Meiji period, as they were the first group in Japan to claim universal human rights for themselves. With my research, I hope to broaden the current Eurocentric approach towards the intellectual history of human rights and to connect legal, historiographical, sociological, and political theories to further develop interdisciplinary transnational and transcultural scholarship.