Course description

This course is an introductory survey of Japan’s modern transformation during the 19th and 20th centuries, viewed through the lens of contemporary writing and film. Each week’s assignment—examples follow—takes as its conceptual anchor an historical actor who became iconic in Japanese culture—the samurai warrior, for instance; the Western-influenced educator Fukuzawa Yukichi (whose visage graces the 10,000–yen note); the emperor, symbol of Japan’s wartime empire and also of its postwar democracy; and the shojo, those prepubescent heroines of manga cartoons and anime films who appear on the front of some Visa cards. The assignments spur classroom discussion of how elements of Japan’s history have been cast and recast into the present day.

Required books

By Shiba Goro; Teruko Craig, transl.

Shiba Goro was a boy of 10 in 1868 when he witnessed the destruction of his clan’s castle and the Aizu way of life by an army of the ascendant Emperor Meiji’s supporters. The Aizu domain was the last feudal holdout. This memoir, written when Shiba was in his eighties, preserves the vanished society of high-ranking samurai families, in which boys wore topknots and “all samurai children . . . submit[ted] to a strict code of etiquette: “I was [never allowed] to look bored,” he writes; and as for “money . . . we were forbidden to handle it.” When the castle’s gates were breeched, Shiba’s mother, grandmother, sister-in-law, and two sisters committed ritual suicide (the seven-year-old “with great courage and determination”) to save food for the men fighting. As the young Shiba suffered grief and exile with other Aizu male survivors in the cold, barren north, he was reminded more than once, “You are the son of a samurai.” The bitterness fueled by Japan’s political and social transformation comes through. Also evident is how Meiji’s introduction of universal education and a modern military paved the way for Aizu integration and citizenship. Shiba went on to attend the imperial military academy, rose to the rank of general, and served Japan in World War I.

By Nakae Chomin; Nobuko Tsukui, transl.

Imagine three men talking politics over an unlimited supply of alcohol as their country awaits government promulgation of its first modern constitution (in 1889) and its first parliamentary election (1890). Through free-flowing argument, sometimes bumptious, sometimes poetic (or naïve), the philosopher, rights activist, and Rousseau-translator Nakae Cho¯min (1847–1901) tugs at the unsettling political questions of his time. Among these, he includes the colonial designs of the Europeans. How is a backward island nation to thwart them? Of the three debaters, the Gentleman of Western Learning is a stand-in for the young Meiji advisors returned from observing the state of affairs in Britain, Prussia, France, and Russia. “Ah, democracy, democracy!” he says. “Absolute monarchy is stupid . . . unaware of its faults. Constitutionalism is aware of its faults but has corrected only half of them.” Liberty, equality, fraternity—if a small country were to become a garden of these “great principles,” no nation “would have the heart to despoil it,” he holds. On the contrary, says the Champion of the East, a more earthy sort who views war as a “thermometer” for measuring a civilization’s robustness. He urges authoritarianism within Japan, the acquisition of colonies, and a well-chosen war, preferably with a large, resource-rich, and disorganized country (undoubtedly China). “If we are willing to give up our nation’s savings [for] several hundred battleships,” he says, “our nation will suddenly become large.” The two men’s host diagnoses both with “a common disease: excessive anxiety,” and continues drinking. Reissued in 1945, the book was a bestseller in a shattered Japan. The Champion’s prescription had won out. And the philosopher Nakae’s comically overblown expression of the 1880s proved a chilling prophesy.

By Junichiro Tanizaki; Anthony H. Chambers, transl.

The West’s technological advances and opinionated women equally fascinated and intimidated the Japanese, from their first exposure in the 1850s. Indeed, during the 1920s the “modern girl”—a universal icon of social and sexual bravado—held a fraught attraction in Tokyo society. There, a “Westernized” culture of cafés and dance halls was taking hold and a street view might include “a geisha under an umbrella; a young woman wearing flannels.” The novelist Tanizaki introduces Joji, 28, an electrical engineer from the countryside who likes all things “chic and up-to-date.” Joji adopts/marries Naomi, 14, drawn to her western-sounding name, her Eurasian looks, and her receptive demeanor. Lessons in English, piano, and foxtrot follow, as he sets her up in increasingly westernized clothes and a “shoddy Western-style house.” Are East and West irrevocably “two worlds”? Do they harmonize? It’s a matter of confidence, Joji believes, and, “like most Japanese,” he confesses, “I tended to feel helpless when I came into contact with Westerners.” “I had wanted to make Naomi beautiful both spiritually and physically,” he says, and concludes he “failed with the spiritual side.” The book was serialized in 1924 in the Osaka Asahi newspaper, which cut it short to appease scandalized traditionalists and government censors. In truth, Japanese readers either hated it or loved it, and the story resumed in another publication. In Naomi, Japan’s foremost modernist writer raises questions of gender, sexuality, orientalism, and what it means to be “modern.”

By Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook

The authors, Japan specialists at William Paterson University, interviewed 66 survivors of Japan’s “15-year war” (1931–45): among them a ballroom dancer, a diplomat, a cartoonist, an army doctor, a dressmaker, a Korean guard, and “industrial warriors,” who manufactured balloon bombs and poison gas. And, of course, combatants, some who, as students, longed to make a difference (“I wanted to build Greater East Asia”), and some who just muddled through (“As long as I don’t fight, I’ll make it home”). Veterans paint a picture of delusional leaders and miserable conditions: “I remember that war as mainly one of suicides and mercy killings”; “the feeble firepower of our planes” compelled the “special attack” air corps (Kamikaze). Overcoming his long silence, an interviewee tells of the systematic dehumanization that impelled him to experiment on live human subjects under the Military Secrets Protection Law: “Don’t look, don’t talk, don’t listen.” On the home front, too, there was censorship, but also quiet resistance. And then the “living hell” of melted flesh and disfiguring keloids for weeks, months, and years after the atomic bombings.

By Shotaro Ishinomori; Betsey Scheiner, transl.

This graphic novel is the most challenging and simultaneously entertaining read of the course. Celebrated manga artist Ishinomori presents a sophisticated analysis of Japan’s trade wars with the United States in the mid-1980s, couched in the social dramas of a half-dozen employees (male and female) of the fictional Mitsutomo auto manufacturer. The occasionally giddy comic action spans from Japan to London to the White House (“Let’s get going on a ‘policy of international cooperation’ . . . he he he,” Ronald Reagan tells his staff slyly). At the bottom of the book’s pages, runs a completely serious scroll of historical facts, data, laws, and theorems. The book says as much about the world of the salaryman as it does about Japan’s postwar economic miracle.

Hayao Miyazaki, director

No course on modern Japan would be complete without a sample of director/animator Hayao Miyazaki’s visually rich and inventive storytelling. His anime productions—distributed in this country by Miramax and Disney—were a signature mark of Japan’s “gross national cool” by the turn of the millennium. This film is set in a fictional past when gods and demons roamed the earth—the princess, agile and self-assured, is a human raised by powerful wolf-gods. Miyazaki visits many of the themes, myths, and icons of Japan’s modern transformation: the uneasy cohabitation of industry and nature; the strength of women committed to a cause. Japan is revealed to be anything but ethnically homogeneous; and the emperor doesn’t count: “The emperor? Who’s he?” says one of the women workers in the industrial fortress of Irontown. The women are weapons-producers in the war against the forest spirits and that role trumps their marginalization as former prostitutes. The specter of environmental catastrophe that Miyazaki depicts mimics eerily the effects of nuclear radiation. Evocative of Japan’s history and today’s global challenges, the complex Princess Mononoke is not primarily for children; Disney’s connection notwithstanding, it will test many an adult.

Associate professor of history Franziska Seraphim is the author of War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (2006).