Prospectus

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Modern Japanese History

Course
2009-2010

Description:

This course offers a general introduction to Japan-s modern experience from 1868 to the present. Popular images of Japan tend to emphasize how distant and different Japan is from us. In these static images, Japan almost seems like a nation apart, a nation without history at all. Yet history, and modernity, are not Western or Eastern; they are global phenomena. For better or for worse, the forces and processes that shaped Japan-s recent past were in many ways the same forces that shaped the rest of the world: industrialization, capitalism, nation- and empire-building, war, technological change, and struggles for political and social participation. At the same time, the global phenomena of modernity have combined with Japan-s particular place in the global order and its own local cultural and social evolution to produce a fascinatingly distinctive play on the modern theme. This course explores this complex history, keeping in mind the notion of Japan not as a nation apart but as a particular site in a global process of modern change.

Teaching method:

Lectures

Admission requirements:

No previous knowledge required

Required reading:

  1. Andrew Gordon,_ A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present_, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003

  2. Sources of Japanese Tradition Volume Two (Abridged) Part Two: 1868 to 2000, Second Edition, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedemann, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006

Examination:

  • mid-term examination 40%;

  • final examination 50%;

  • attendance and participation 10%

Those whose combined average of the above assessments is below a passing mark will subsequently be administered a combined resit examination (hertentamen) covering the entire course material. The outcome of the combined resit supersedes earlier results on the midterm and final.

Time table:

Time table

Contact

Dhr. Dr. E. Mark

Registration:

Via uTwist, check enrollment

Blackboard:

n.a.

Remarks:

This course is part of the “Keuzepakket Japanse studies”