Modern Japan

Catalog description

This course focuses on modern Japanese history up to and including the aftermath of the Second World War. Emphases are upon social, cultural, political, and economic transformations that occurred following the country's forced opening to trade and diplomacy in the middle of the nineteenth century, subsequent industrialization and the formation of a unified nation-state with a constitutional monarchy, and Japan's imperialism and modern wars. Themes include analyses of the contradictions involved in processes of modernity and modernization as well as consideration of ways we remember the period in question in manifestations of culture and as history. Offered Alternate Years.