Japanese History 1

Between War and Peace

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Course objectives:

Japan’s experience with modernity was ridden with conflicts, outright wars, and the continuous threat to the nation’s survival in a voracious, Hobbesian world. This introductory course outlines the international dimensions of that experience, and demonstrates the ways in which this experience inexorably shaped the contours of the policy debates with regards to the country’s international positioning. Concretely, we study the dynamics behind and meaning of the ambition to ‘leave Asia’ (脱亜論 datsu-a ron), become the ‘Great-Britain of the East’; and yet later, to return to Asia as the region’s savior (the ‘yellow burden’).

Course Goals

The important hallmark of this course is its explicitly anti-humanist or sociological stance. Rather than focusing on key historical figures and their decisions, we will identify social forces that extend far beyond the limited scope of human agency. Instead, we focus on the ways in which technologies (of warfare, the law, telecommunications, transport, finance etc.) possess a self-propelling dynamic: they reinforce their importance, so to speak, and become both tools and objectives of modern development. Taken together, they demonstrate the inherently international outlook of modern society, while paradoxically employing a vocabulary of segregation: the semantics of the ‘nation state’ and ‘national culture’. How the latter relates to and interacts with internationalization, and how this interaction produces regimes of rewards and punishment are core themes in all sessions. In this course, a truly international perspective on Japanese history (‘Japan in Asia’ / ‘Japan and the West’) is paramount. As a reference guide to existing debates in a host of interdisciplinary fields (medium theory, systems theory, and so on), each session provides links to broader secondary sources.

Introductory reading:

• Gordon, Andrew. 2013. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. 3 edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Goto-Jones, Christopher. 2009. Very Short Introductions: Modern Japan. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Topics to be covered:

1. Wake-up call: the Opium wars
2. Gunboat diplomacy and the ‘imperialism of free trade’
3. The threat of irrelevance and annihilation: the bakumatsu currency crisis
4. Rebellion and its aftermath: inflation and induced deflation
5. The Sino-Japanese War
6. The Boxer rebellion: victory of Western technologies
7. The Anglo-Japanese alliance: Japan as a linchpin in the Great-Britain led world order
8. The Russo-Japanese War as World War Zero
9. Japan in World War I
10. The Siberian Intervention
11. Japan returns to Asia
12. The Manchurian incident
13. Militarism and Japanese Lebensraum in Manchuria
14. ‘Use the war to feed the war’: the road to World War II
15. The total defeat of blocism and the Pax Americana

Homework

From session 2-3 onwards, small student groups will be assigned to introduce topics to be discussed. This may include both historical matter and/or their contemporary implications. Students are expected to:

1. participate in the course as a whole: doing the essential reading for each week’s topic, and coming prepared to question and intervene.
2. provide written and oral comments;
3. research, write, present, and defend your argument and choice of topic to be discussed.
4. When presenting, students should go beyond the narrow content of the reading to be presented; develop an argument as a coherent whole, e.g. by focusing on theoretical issues (e.g. the relationship between (political) power and violence, methodological ones (for instance the nature of the relationship between ‘ideas’ and the material/technological/… contexts in which they are shaped)

How to read?

Undergraduate students often find it challenging to read scientific articles; and indeed, the format that characterizes scientific publications is quite different from what may have been familiar in highschool. Here is a digest of a comprehensive reading method called SQ3R; there also exists a longer guide.

UPDATE: I am also very fond of this discussion on the LSE Impact blog.

Grading System

As this course (just as my other courses) does not believe in the usefulness of final grades, evaluation will be based on: reading notes (to be turned in weekly), class discussions (other means of evaluation may be discussed with the students), and so on. There is no paper to be written; instead, students are asked to make ‘smart’, elaborate and interactive presentations (these are a must: presentations will aid you in keeping track of the idea you intend to develop, and are a great tool for your colleagues). They are responsible for putting the presented reading in context, and act as ‘moderator’ for the follow-up discussion. Although all grading is characterized by an inherent opacity (if only for the simple reason that every presentation relates to different material and takes place in a different session), here are some simple rules:

1. all students are required to be in charge of at least 1 presentation; presentations can be done on an individual basis, or in little groups. When presenting in a group, all students will receive the same grade, so do not fail your colleagues.
2. students making elaborate presentations (including audiovisual material, links to relevant primary sources, etc.) will be rewarded for the extra effort. It all boils down to respect for your audience; hastily constructed and shallow arguments are a waste of everybody's time.
3. showing that you mastered the readings by actively partaking in the discussions is central.
4. if you want to have an idea of where I have gotten the inspiration for this teaching paradigm, check the following ideas by Jesse Stommel.

As this class is an example of problem-based learning and the 'flipped classroom', it strongly encourages and rewards participation; vice versa, it penalizes a passive or absent behavior. Concretely, 80 percent of your grade is based on class discussion; the remaining 20 percent is reserved for presentations.

How to write reading notes?

In order to enhance the student's understanding of the structure of a scientific argument, reading notes are to be prepared so to demonstrate the logic of an article/chapter in a book. Here are some tools to present this logic as a discursive 'tree', a hierarchy of argumentative building blocks:

• Cacoo
• coggle
• draw.io
• gliffy
• lucidchart

What are the necessary elements of a presentation?

• historical outline of the topic to be discussed: see the aforementioned A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present; a host of online sources (including Wikipedia) may be used for encyclopedic material.
• an indication of the sources used to assemble your presentation
• a clear outline of what you intend to discuss
• if applicable, references to recent or contemporary events (e.g. the role of financial imperialism in the 21st century)
• indications of what you found difficult to understand
• a timeline of events
• references to primary materials in online databases: search the Japan Center for Asian Records, the National Diet Library's Digital Collections, the Kobe University Archive of Newspaper clippings, and so on...
• when using illustrations and or citations, provide the necessary references.
• it is better to be exhaustive rather than being too concise

!!The schedule of the presentations will be decided in one of the first sessions; students are free to meet with the professor one week before doing the presentation, and will receive feedback.

Some rules: whereas attendance is considered crucial, merely being present in class is insufficient to get a high grade (a passive attitude may even lead to fail the class). Active participation is prerequisite. Checking social media or constantly looking at your phone during class is discouraging and even disturbing for your peers, so should be avoided. This class demands a considerable degree of commitment; do not take this class if you are not motivated.