SCHEDULE
Week I (9/27): Course introduction and self-introduction
PART 1: Making Sense of the Enemy (the 1940s)
Week II-III (10/4, 10/11):
Ruth benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. (Chaps.1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 13)
C. Douglas Lummis, “Ruth Benedict’s Obituary for Japanese Culture” Japan Focus (July 3, 2007)
PART 2: Modernization and Japan (the 1960s)
Week IV-V (10/18, 10/25):
-Nils Gilman. “Modernization Theory and American Modernism,” Mandarins of the future: modernization theory in cold war America (John Hopkins 2003), 1-23.
-John W. Hall. “Changing Conceptions of the Modernization of Japan” Marius B. Jansen, ed., Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization. 1965. pp.7-98.
-The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars Statement of Purpose (1969)
-John Dower. “E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History” (introduction to Origins of the Modern Japanese State, Selected Writings of E. H. Norman) (Pantheon Books 1975), pp.31-65.
PART 3: Critical Study of the Nation, the 1980s-1990s
Week VI-VIII (11/1, 11/8, 11/15):
-Prasenjit Duara. “Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When” Becoming National, A Reader (1996), 150-177.
-Hobsbawm and Ranger. The Invention of Tradition (1983). 1-14.
-Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Reinventing Japan (1998) (Intro, Chaps 1, 2 & 9).
First response paper due 11/15 by email
PART 4: Postcolonial History of Empire
Week IX-XI (12/6, 12/13, 12/20):
-Andre Schmid. "Colonialism and the 'Korean Problem' in the Historiography of Modern Japan" Journal of Asian Studies (2000). 951-976.
-Louise Young. Japan's Total Empire (1998).
Second response paper due 12/27 by email
PART 5: New Directions of Japanese Studies?
Week XII-XIV (1/10, 1/17):
-Michael Fisch. "Tokyo's Commuter Train Suicides and the Society of Emergence" Cultural Anthropology 28, No.12 (May 2013), 320-343.
-Hoyt J. Long. "(Il)legibility and Handwriting in Meiji Letters: A Media History" Positions 25, No.2 (2017): 255-292.
Final paper due 1/31 by email