Think about the relationship between post-World War One capitalist crisis (elaborated by Young), transformations in colonial policy (examined in lecture 6), and new conflicts that emerged between colonial subjects and ordinary Japanese people as a result. …

The Ainu are an ethnic group native to the Hokkaido region of Northern Japan with distinct physical features, culture, and language than Japanese people. If I were an Ainu person who lived through the Tokugawa regime’s takeover of my ancestral homelands, I would not be pleased. Under the Tokugawa regime…

Much of recorded history is often Eurocentric and focused on upper-class men, rather than addressing the life experiences of marginalized groups such as women and minorities. The result of which being that their experiences are often dismissed. This leads to the discussion of the ethics of history-writing. Since the advent…

Prompt: Why is Tsurumi’s argument about the importance of Japanese women’s labor power to nation-building an important intervention to week 1’s theorizations of nationalism? On the flip side, what experiences might focus too much on this point occlude obstruct/stop? During week 1, we examined nationalism through the work of Benedict…

The reason I want to study Japan is that it has never been the focus of any history class I have taken in the past. “World History” classes in high school were clearly Eurocentric and yielded minimal time to the study of East Asian cultures and even less so to…