SUMMER 2005

HIST HIST 192 Japan Past & Present

This course offers students an introduction to Japan and Japanese. In the first half of the course, we journey through Japanese history from the beginnings to 1945. Along the way, we meet the emperors, aristocrats, shoguns, philosophers, priests, oligarchs, militarists, and others who made history. But we also tell the stories of women, peasants, workers, revolutionaries, common people, youth and the myriad others whose individual and collective actions changed the course of history. In the second half of the course, we examine the impact of history on the present, focusing our attention on key elements of contemporary Japanese society and culture: the postwar economic miracle, consumerism, invented social traditions, urbanization, youth culture, rural decay, postmodern society, economic superpowerdom, and more.