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

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

Fall. 4 credits.

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. We will examine this transformative 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.