Modern Japan

Catalog description

Few topics captivate historians more than Japan's remarkably rapid and "successful" transformation from an isolated agrarian society to a modern world power. In the past 130 years, that small archipelago on Asia's eastern fringe experienced political, economic, diplomatic, socio-cultural as well as intellectual change on a scale unprecedented in human history. This course pays particular attention to the ways in which ordinary people's lives were affected (or unaffected) by the forces that underlay national change. CR: So. stdg.