HIST 3611 - [Conflicts and Transformations in Early Modern Japan, 1700 - 1890]

(crosslisted)
(also ASIAN 3361) @ (HA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

Next offered 2012-2013. Co-meets with HIST 6611.

K. Hirano.

Explores Japan’s tumultuous transformation from a samurai military government to a modern nation-state and its political and cultural implications for the present. It has been debated among both Japanese and American historians whether or not Japan’s modern transformation is best understood as a “restoration (of imperial rule)” or as a “revolution.” The choice of word as a descriptive category matters to the extent that it reveals one’s perspective on this event. “Restoration” expresses the view that Japan’s metamorphosis into a modern society was a relatively uneventful and smooth “transition” carried out by a handful leaders, whereas “revolution” recognizes Japan’s experience as one of the great transformations in which people from different segments of society participated for various reasons and motives. In this class, we will examine this event as a revolution, thus paying close attention to a wide range of ideas, activisms, and practices such as samurai loyalism, peasant uprisings, popular culture, millenarianism, the exploration of western forms of knowledge and power, nation-state building and new ideologies of time (progress) and space (national identity). In other words, we seek to understand Japan’s transformation as a fairly long, multifaceted, and widely participated process of intense intellectual and cultural criticism as well as social and political activism. In addition to primary and secondary texts, we will read a few important theoretical works on revolution/social transformation for the purpose of critically examining the history of the fall of the Tokugawa samurai regime and creation of a modern social order, called bakumatsu-ishin in Japan.