Introductory and Intermediate

• HIST 103    Perspectives on Asia I
• HIST 105    Asia in Western Fiction and Film
• HIST 106    Origins of Japanese Culture
• HIST 286    Modern Japan
• HIST 287    The Pacific War
• HIST 288    Japan Since the Pacific War
• Modern Southeast Asia

Advanced

• HIST 360     The Warrior Tradition in Japan

Seminars

• Modernization and Education in Asia
• Culture, Race and Power in the Asia-Pacific

HIST 103    Perspectives on Asia I

        This course offers a thematic introduction to early Asian history and civilization.  Much of our time is spent reading and discussing seminal works of philosophy and fiction that continue to enjoy wide popularity and influence today.  Typical selections include the Analects of Confucius, the Tao te Ching, excerpts from the Ramayana and/or Mahabarata, Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings, and The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du.  This allows us to consider how these products of "traditional" Asian culture have been interpreted by later generations of readers in "modern" Asia (and beyond).

BACK TO TOP

      This course examines and compares descriptions of Asia and portrayals of Asian societies found in Western novels and short stories published since the late nineteenth century. It also considers selected twentieth-century cinematic portrayals of Asia , including films based on those same works of fiction. Novels, short stories and films can be valuable resources for the study of history. Since they often enjoy a wide audience, these works are influential in shaping popular perceptions. At the same time, they reflect the author's/director’s particular perceptions of her/his own society, of foreign societies, and of the times in which she/he lives. This course combines a study of fiction and films set in South, Southeast, and East Asia with a look at the particular historical contexts in which they were produced.

      The course assumes no prior study of Asia. It has four goals: (1) To introduce students to the study of Asian history and to the modern history of Western encounters with Asia; (2) To identify the major features of Western fictional and cinematic portrayals of Asia produced since the late nineteenth century. Do these descriptions change over time? Do they vary depending upon the country being described? Do individual authors/directors emphasize certain characteristics over others? (3) To seek historical explanations for these portrayals. What prompted these writers/directors to feature Asia so prominently in their work? How did they perceive the relationship between Asia and the West at the time they wrote, and why? What was the source of their knowledge of Asia (e.g., travel, employment in colonial administration, military duty, missionary work, etc.), and how did their particular experiences there shape their opinions of Asia? (4) To assess the accuracy of these fictional portrayals of Asia and their potential value for the study of history. How much should historians, or the casual reader, rely on fiction and film for insights into non-Western cultures? Or do they really tell us more about Western authors/directors and their own societies?

BACK TO TOP

Objectives
        This course provides a thematic introduction to Japanese history from prehistory to 1600 A.D.  Students will be exposed to diverse examples of Japanese culture, broadly defined, and will learn about the changing social and political contexts in which they emerged.  This approach is intended to highlight the relationship between cultural and political change.  In addition, students will be introduced to a variety of different resources that historians use to study the distant past: ranging from archaeological discoveries, official documents, and early narrative histories, to poetry, literature (creation myths, novels, folktales, epic war tales), and religious art and ritual.

Schedule
Part One       INTRODUCTION
    Asian history and the liberal arts
    Searching for the "origins" of Japanese culture

Part Two     JAPAN IN THE PREHISTORIC AND PROTOHISTORIC PERIODS (circa 4,500 B.C. - 550 A.D.)
    Early settlements: archaeological records of the Jomon and Yayoi peoples
    Myth as history: the Yamato race in the land of the gods
    Japan in the early Chinese histories

Part Three    CONTINENTAL INFLUENCES IN EARLY AND CLASSICAL JAPAN (circa 550 - 1185 A.D.)
    The impact of writing
    Law and government
    Buddhist philosophy, art, and ritual
    Literature and court culture

Part Four    "DECLINE OF THE BUDDHIST LAW" AND RISE OF THE SAMURAI IN MEDIEVAL JAPAN (1185 - 1600)

    Samurai rise to power
    Zen and the "dual way"
    Popular culture in the age of "mappo"
    From imperial restoration to civil war
    Road to pacification
    Early encounters with the West

EPILOGUE
    "Rediscovering" Japan's cultural heritage

BACK TO TOP

Objectives
        This course has two principal objectives.  The first, and most obvious, goal is to survey the process of Japan's transformation from a "feudal" to a "modern" nation between the seventeenth century and the present.  The second goal is to examine the field of Japanese historiography, in order to understand how different approaches to the recent study of modern Japan have influenced our interpretations and assessments of that history.

        Accordingly, this course is divided into two parts.  Part One provides a chronological overview of Japan's transition from an early modern, to a modern, to a "postmodern" state and society.  As will be seen, this approach tends to emphasize evidence of continuity and gradual change in its attempt to interpret the modernization process.

        With this historical background, Part Two adopts a narrower focus to reexamine, in greater detail, the major economic, political, social, and cultural developments that took place in Japan between the 1860s and the 1930s.   This approach will be used to probe some of the underlying discontinuities and resulting dilemmas of Japan's modernization that tend to be overlooked in standard, chronological surveys.

        The course will conclude with a brief discussion of the respective strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, and what each has contributed to present-day perspectives on modern Japan.

Schedule
Part One        THE SEARCH FOR CONTINUITY
    Tokugawa eriod
    Meiji period
    Taisho period through World War Two
    Japan since World War Two

Part Two        DISCONTINUITY AND THE DILEMMAS OF MODERNIZATION
    Industrialization and economic change
    Ideology, politics, and pocial policy
    Ideology and foreign relations
    Expressions of culture

Epilogue        BETWEEN "TRADITION" AND "MODERNITY": CONTINUITY OR DISCONTINUITY?

BACK TO TOP

Objectives
        There are no prerequisites for this course, and no prior study of Japanese history is assumed.  We examine the origins, conduct, impact, and legacy of the Pacific War.  While the primary focus is on the years between the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and Japan's surrender to the Allied Forces in September 1945 (Sections II through IV), attention is also be given to the period between 1868 and 1930 (Section I)--when Japan came of age as a modern imperialist nation competing with the Western colonial powers for power, territory, and influence in East and Southeast Asia--as well as to the legacy of the war in the years since 1945 (Section V).

        The task of understanding the Pacific War has grown more, not less, challenging over time as new information comes to light, and continues to generate new, often conflicting, interpretations and reinterpretations.  By studying and comparing the views of others--participants and non-participants, Japanese and non-Japanese--through historical documents, films, and recent scholarship, we can not only learn more about the war itself, but the intervening half-century which stands between the war and the present, and which links the two more closely than we may realize.

Schedule
Part One        PROLOGUE TO THE PACIFIC WAR
    What is the "Pacific War"?
    Creating a "nation in arms"
    Between imperialism and internationalism

Part Two       PACIFIC WAR CHRONICLE: THE BATTLEFRONT
    The Manchurian Incident and the "China War"
    "Co-prosperity" and the "Greater East Asia War"
    Retreat and defeat

Part Three    PACIFIC WAR CHRONICLE: THE HOMEFRONT

Part Four     IMAGES FROM THE WAR
    The war in Western eyes
    The war in Japanese eyes

Part Five     The "PACIFIC WAR" IN THE POSTWAR ERA
    Victims or victimizers? The question of responsibility
    History and memory

BACK TO TOP

HIST 288    Japan Since the Pacific War

Objectives
        There are no prerequisites for this course, and no prior study of Japanese history is assumed.  Its goal, however, is not simply to survey the major political, economic, social, and cultural developments that have taken place in Japan since World War Two.  The course also examines the dynamic, complex process underlying those developments, both to try and understand why they occurred, and to assess their significance for Japan today.  While numerous historical forces have contributed to that process, particular attention is devoted to the recurring struggle for power between the individual and the state.  Suppressed during the Pacific War, this struggle between the individual and the state erupted with new intensity following the military's defeat in 1945, and it has assumed a variety of forms in the decades since, amid successive attempts to alternately challenge and preserve the status quo.  A number of examples drawn from the political, legal, economic, and cultural spheres of thought and action are studied and compared.

Schedule
Part One        PROLOGUE TO "POSTWAR"
    Dilemmas of modernity in prewar Japan
    The Pacific War
    The occupation and its legacy

Part Two       POLITICS, LAW, AND THE DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
    Institutions, Access, and Political Consciousness
    The politics of peace and prosperity
    Political opposition and passivity
    Law and social change

Part Three     ECONOMIC GROWTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Part Four      CULTURE AND HISTORY
   Coping with the past
    The tryanny of tradition
    Identity crisis: the search for meaning

BACK TO TOP

Objectives
        One of the most popular and durable of Japanese icons is the samurai warrior.  Like all traditions, that of the Japanese warrior has evolved over time through a combination of fact and fiction, reality and myth.  That is, the warrior class and the tradition surrounding it each has its own history, and while the two histories often overlap, they are not identical.  This course examines both of these histories: the rise and fall of the warrior class itself between about the tenth century and the 1870s; and the evolution of the warrior tradition, which arguably began even earlier and persists today.  Each of these histories has, in its own way, contributed to the larger political, social, economic and cultural history of Japan.

Schedule
Part One        ANCIENT AND CLASSICAL PERIODS
    Ancient Japan: Historical Background and Early Warrior Legends
    Polity, society, and cultural currents in the classical period
    The warrior in classical Japan

Part Two       THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
    Medieval polity, society, and cultural currents
    Early literary representations of the samurai tradition
    Tale of the Heike
    Minamoto no Yoshitsune
    Tale of Great Peace (Taiheiki)

Part Three       TRANSITION TO THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
    Buddhism and the Sword
    Pacifying the realm

Part Four        THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
    Early modern polity, society, and cultural currents
    Redefining samurai authority, inventing samurai tradition
    Challenging samurai authority and tradition

Part Five        THE MODERN PERIOD
    Impact of the Meiji restoration
    Nationalism, internationalism, and the "way of the warrior"
    Imperialism and the "way of the warrior"
    Competing legacies in postwar Japan
    American perceptions of Japan's warrior tradition

BACK TO TOP

       If there is one thing that advanced industrial societies have in common with the so-called newly industrialized countries (NICs) and late developing countries (LDCs), it is the conviction that education is an indispensable component of modernity.  Education has never been a monopoly of modern societies, but modernity has always been a monopoly of educated societies.  Political leaders value its role in forging a cohesive soeicty through its promotion of a common national identity and culture.  Business leaders value its role in forging an efficient, prosperous industrial economy through its dissemination of scientific knowledge and technical skills.  Workers value its role in forging more comfortable, prosperous lives for themselves and their families through increased social mobility based on merit.

      While this sanguine view of the relationship between modernization and education is supported by empirical evidence, it overlooks or ignores other evidence that reveals a far more complex and unpredictable relationship between the two.  It tends to assume, for example, that both the process of educational development and its specific contributions to modernization can be carefully controlled, and that the outcome will be the same regardless of when and where it takes place.  As such, it ignores the influence that history, culture, and politics exert upon education and modernization alike.  Hence, one of the objectives of this course is to challenge and supplement this view, by problematizing the relationship between education and modernization that it takes for granted.  We begin by examining how people's views of education and its relationship to social change have evolved and changed over time.  We will discover that this view has not gone unchallenged, and that there are other theoretical perspectives--each with its own strengths and limitations--from which to examine this problematic relationship.

        A second objective is to reintroduce history, culture, and politics into the equation, by focusing on educational development and modernization in Asia since the nineteenth century.  To do this, we first turn to our primary "case study": Japan.  Japan has been singled out for emphasis because it is routinely praised as the first Asian country to modernize successfully, and is seen by many as a suitable model for other developing nations to follow.  After gauging the historical and contemporary accuracy of the "Japanese model," we will then be in a position to compare Japan's experience with other Asian countries.  Along the way, we will pursue a third objective: to gain new insights into the modern history of these Asian countries.

BACK TO TOP

Culture, Race and Power in the Asia-Pacific

      This seminar examines the development of “race” and “culture” as categories of difference, and as bases of political power and social control in the Asia-Pacific region, from the advent of European colonialism in the 16 th century up to the present. Special attention is paid to: (1) the applications of racial and cultural categories in the management of portions of the British Empire (the Malay Peninsula, Australia); (2) comparisons between rival American and Japanese racial and cultural discourses, within the context of American and Japanese competition for territory, wealth, and power in the “Far East” during the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, which culminated in the Pacific War; (3) the legacy of these discourses in America and Japan in the decades since World War Two; (4) the legacy of British racialist discourse and colonial policies in three of its former colonies (Australia, Malaysia, Singapore).

      We also discuss recent debates among scholars regarding theoretical and methodical alternatives employed to study constructions of race and culture in colonial and postcolonial Asia , and their often contentious interpretations.

BACK TO TOP