Postwar Japan

Catalog description

This course focuses on transformations and continuities following Japanese defeat at the end of the Second World War. The course covers how US occupation policies transformed Japan from a modern nation-state with a colonial empire into a Cold War client state that became an economic superpower. After analyzing the costs and benefits of the postwar "economic miracle," the course investigates significant changes that followed the end of the Cold War in 1989, the death of the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) who had reigned since 1926 in that same year, and the bursting of Japan's "bubble economy" in 1990. The course ends with a consideration of what has happened in Japan since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and what the future may or may not entail. Offered Alternate Years.