Week 1: Introduction (Please view file prior to April 21)
Week 2 (April 21): Tokugawa Politics and Society
Mark Teeuwen, et. al, “Farmers,” Lust, commerce, and corruption: an account of what I have seen and heard, by an Edo Samurai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 95-96, 122-144.
Week 3 (April 28): The Fall of the Shogunate
M. William Steele, “Edo in 1868. The View from Below,” Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), 127-155.
Aizawa Seishisai, “Preface to the New Proposals,” “The National Polity,” “The Danger from the West” and “The Source of Western Unity and Strength,” in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition (Columbia University Press, 1970), 592-603.
Week 4 (May 12): The Meiji State
Stefan Tanaka, “Prelude: Time, Pasts, History”, New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-26.
“The Charter Oath,” “Constitution of 1868” and “Imperial Rescript on Education,” in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition (Columbia UPress, 1970), 641-647.
Week 5 (May 19): Building an Empire
Jun Uchida, “Building an Empire of Harmony,” Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UPress, 2011), 143-187.
Week 6 (May 26): Taishō Democracy (Essay Question will be distributed)
Harry Harootunian, “Introduction,” Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 3-28.
Asahi Heigo, “Call for a New ‘Restoration,’” in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition (Columbia University Press, 1970), 767-769.
Week 7 (June 9): Showa Restoration(s)
Max M. Ward, “Transcriptions of Power: Repression and Rehabilitation in the Early Peace Preservation Law Apparatus, 1925-1933,” Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke UP, 2019), 49-75.
Week 8 (June 16): Fifteen-Year War **Essay due**
“War means jobs for machinists” and “Life Goes On,” in Japan At War: An Oral History, edited by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook (New York: The New Press, 1992), 47-50 and 169-187.
Samuel Hideo Yamashita, “No Luxuries Until the War is Won,” Daily Life in Wartime Japan (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas, 2015), 35-57.
Week 9 (June 23): The Occupation
Jonathan Abel, “Introduction,” Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 1-20.
Week 10 (June 30): The Japanese Miracle
Oguma Eiji, "Japan's 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 11, No. 1, March 23, 2015.
Week 11 (July 7): The Bubble Bursts
Carol Gluck, “The ‘End’ of the Postwar: Japan at the Turn of the Millennium,” in States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection, edited by Jeffrey K. Olick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 289-314.
Week 12 (July 14): Final Exam