Modern Japan

Prof. Edwin E. Moise
Office: Hardin 102
Phone: 650-8845
Home phone: 654-7087
e-mail: eemoise@clemson.edu

Messages can be left in my mailbox in Hardin 126, or in the box on my office door.

Office Hours: I will try to be in my office at the following hours, but it won't always be possible. On the other hand, I will be in my office, and available to you, at a lot of other times. E-mail me, or just check and see if my door is open.

    Monday                  2:30-3:20
    Tuesday    11:00-12:00, 2:00-3:15
    Wednesday  10:10-11:00
    Thursday   (none)
    Friday     10:10-11:00 

Course Objectives

Learning Objectives

• Students will be required to think about, and formulate and justify opinions on, in a short paper and on tests, the extent to which Japan was westernized from the 1860s onward, and the ways this occurred.
• Students will write papers analyzing the way Japan was perceived, with particular emphasis on possible biases in those perceptions, during various recent historical periods. These papers will be based on contemporary sources.

What goes into your grade

I do not emphasize trivial factual details in this course. On tests and quizzes I will NOT ask you to name the Prime Ministers who served during the 1950's, much less tell me the exact dates they served. There are some facts you need to know, but they are more important things than names and dates.

The written work will be:
    --Three short papers, on assigned topics, worth 40 points each, two of which will be newspaper research exercises.
    --A test (70 points) and the final exam (120 points), which will be mostly essay questions.
    --One minor essay quiz, which will be announced in advance. 20 points.

This adds up to 330 points. I use a 90%, 80%, 70% scale, sometimes modified in favor of students but never against them. In other words, 297 points (90% of 330) is guaranteed to be an A, 264 points is guaranteed to be a B, 231 points is guaranteed to be a C. But 295 or 294 points might quite possibly become an A, depending on how the class as a whole is doing.

Any student who has an average of 90% or better, for work up to the final exam, will be permitted to exempt the final.

Academic Integrity Policy

Academic integrity requires that we not try to pass other people's work off as our own.

As far as I can recall, I have not caught any students committing plagiarism in this course, in past years. But experience with plagiarism in other courses at Clemson suggests that if there were to be a plagiarism case in this course, it would probably take the form of one student copying another student's 40-point short paper, maybe changing a few words and substituting synonyms, but leaving the two papers still so similar that it is obvious the resemblance could not be coincidence. I would be likely to bring charges both against the student who copied and the student who allowed his or her paper to be copied.

There are some ways in which it is perfectly all right for student to help each other. If two students want to study together getting ready for a test, great. Only if help were still being given after I had handed out the questions would the help become improper. But if two people work together on a newspaper research exercise, and turn in papers that are very similar because each has been getting a lot of help from the other in writing it, both will be in deep trouble. If one of your fellow students asks to look at your paper, to get a better idea of how the assignment was to be done, please say no. They should come to me to ask for further explanations of the assignment, rather than looking at a completed paper to give them their clues. If too papers are so similar it is obvious the author of one must have seen the other, I will file charges.

Policy on late work

Attendance policy

If I am Late

Assigned reading

There will also be reading that I ask you to do online.

Course Outline

The following course outline is tentative. It may be modified slightly because of unexpected events. Items marked >>> are required reading.

August 21: Introduction to the course.

August 23: Traditional Japanese Civilization
>>> Gordon, pp. 3-9
>>> Hane, pp. 3-9

August 26: Japan under Tokugawa Rule
>>> Gordon, pp. 11-34

August 28: The Western Impact
>>> Gordon, pp. 35-57

August 30: The "Meiji Restoration"
>>> Gordon, pp. 57-75

September 2: Initial modernization and reactions to it
>>> Gordon, pp. 76-95. (If you have seen the Tom Cruise film "The Last Samurai," notice that the events on which the film was based are covered on pp. 84-85 of Gordon.)

September 4: Rural Life
>>> Gordon, pp. 93-95
>>> Hane, pp. 9-27

September 6: Rural Life, continued
>>> Hane, pp. 29-49

September 9: Indoctrinating the peasants
>>> Hane, pp. 51-76

September 11: Rural women
>>> Hane, pp. 78-101

September 13, 16: Urban Life
>>> Gordon, pp. 95-112
>>> Hane, pp. 172-205

                September 16: Quiz

September 18: The Growth of the Japanese Empire
>>> Gordon, pp. 113-125

September 20, 23: Political development; Women Rebels; Outcastes
>>> Gordon, pp. 125-137
>>> Hane, pp. 246-292
>>> Hane, pp. 138-71

September 25: Poverty and Prostitution
>>> Hane, pp. 206-225

  TEST September 27

September 30: Economy and Society
>>> Gordon, pp. 139-148
>>> Hane, pp. 103-136

October 2: City life; Coal Miners
>>> Gordon, pp. 148-160
>>> Hane, pp. 227-245

October 4: Politics and International Relations in the 1920s
>>> Gordon, pp. 161-180

October 7: The Depression and the rise of Japanese militarism
>>> Gordon, pp. 181-201

October 9: The Second World War.
>>> Gordon, pp. 202-215

Short paper due October 9. Topic: To what extent had the common people of Japan gotten actual benefits from the modernization of Japan, up to the 1930s? Length: about 500 words, or more. As you write this paper you will need to think about how broadly you are going to define that phrase "the common people." The very poor are obviously included, but people of average wealth should also be included in "the common people," and perhaps even people of slightly higher than average wealth. You don't need to spend half your paper defining that phrase, but I need to be able to tell, as I read your paper, what you mean by it.

October 11: The Second World War, continued
>>> Gordon, pp. 215-223
>>> Schlesinger, pp. 19-30

No Class October 14 (Fall Break)

October 16, 18, 21: The American Occupation of Japan
>>> Gordon, pp. 224-241
>>> Schlesinger, pp. 30-45

October 23, 25: The New Japan
>>> Gordon, pp. 243-67
>>> Schlesinger, pp. 46-58
>>> Hane, pp. 295-320

October 28: The Cold War in Asia

October 28: Short paper . Newspaper research exercise. Go to the library or go online, and check to see what one or two newspapers or newsmagazines were saying about Japan in 1960. (There were particularly dramatic protests in May and June, by Japanese who disliked Japan's alliance with the United States, but you don't have to focus on those if you don't choose.) Use at least four articles. Write an essay of about two pages (typed double spaced), or more, about what you found. Say what there was in the articles that you found interesting or surprising. Evaluate the attitudes of the authors. Is there anything that leads you to distrust them, or to think that the facts may be being distorted to fit the author's viewpoint? Notice the source; did the reporter say that something was true, or only that somebody else had said it was true? If you say there is bias, please make it clear exactly what was said, that you consider biased. What kind of bias was it (false statements, or use of emotionally loaded language, or just careful selection of facts so that only facts favorable to one side get mentioned)? I want to see one essay based on several articles, not a string of essentially separate mini-essays, each based on a single article. Try to select articles that will allow you to have some unifying themes in your essay.

Please give source notes. I want to be able to tell in each section of your paper which article or articles you are discussing in that section. It is not enough to have a list at the end, if I can’t tell as I read the paper which article you are discussing where. Source notes must give page numbers. I don’t care about the format of source notes as long as they tell me what I need to know. Any format that allows me easily to discern the name of the author if it was given, the title of the article, the title of the publication, and the date and page, is OK.

There is no requirement that you use The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or The Times of London, but those papers have the advantage that you can access them online through the Clemson Library's Databases Page. If you want to use newspapers other than those, your best bet is to go to the Microfilm Reading Room on level 2 of the Library, which has quite a few newspapers on microfilm. Or you could use weekly newsmagazines. Some are available bound into volumes, on the shelves on level 1 of the library. The only weekly newsmagazine whose back files are available online, so far as I know, is Time. You can get to it by going through the Clemson Library's online catalog.

October 30: Politics in the New Japan
>>> Gordon, pp. 268-284

November 1: Kakuei Tanaka and his political machine
>>> Schlesinger, pp. 59-90.

November 4, 6: The Strange Victory of Kakuei Tanaka
>>> Schlesinger, Part II

November 8: The Bubble of the 1980s
>>> Gordon, pp. 285-307

November 11: Japan in the 1980s; the changing international environment

November 13, 15: The Second Generation of the Gundan
>>> Schlesinger, Part III

November 18: Major problems for the economy
>>> Gordon, pp. 308-322

November 20: The Gundan in decay
>>> Schlesinger, pp. 229-264

November 22: The possibility of political change?
>>> Gordon, pp. 322-329.
>>> Schlesinger, pp. 264-285

November 25: Aftermath
>>> Gordon, pp. 329-335.

November 27, 29: Thanksgiving: No Class

December 2: Japan since 2008
>>> Gordon, pp. 336-354.

December 4: Hand in short paper . Newspaper research exercise. Go to the library or on the Internet (LexisNexis is good) and check to see what one or two newspapers or newsmagazines have been saying about events in Japan in 2013. Use at least four articles. Write an essay of about two pages (typed double spaced), or more, about what you found. Say what there was in the articles that you found interesting or surprising. Evaluate the attitudes of the authors. Is there anything that leads you to distrust them, or to think that the facts may be being distorted to fit the author's viewpoint? Notice the source; did the reporter say that something was true, or only that somebody else had said it was true? If you say there is bias, please make it clear exactly what was said, that you consider biased. What kind of bias was it (false statements, or use of emotionally loaded language, or just careful selection of facts so that only facts favorable to one side get mentioned)? I want to see one essay based on several articles, not a string of essentially separate mini-essays, each based on a single article. Try to select articles that will allow you to have some unifying themes in your essay.

Please give source notes. I want to be able to tell in each section of your paper which article or articles you are discussing in that section. It is not enough to have a list at the end, if I can’t tell as I read the paper which article you are discussing where. Source notes must give page numbers if they are available (even when you read a newspaper article online, the web site will usually tell you what the page number was in the newspaper). I don’t care about the format of source notes as long as they tell me what I need to know. Any format that allows me easily to discern the name of the author if that was given, the title of the article, the title of the publication, the date and page, and where you found it on the Internet if that is where you found it, is OK.

December 6: Review

FINAL EXAM Tuesday, December 10, 8:00 a.m.

Other Links

Web site of the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas

Clemson University Academic Success Center, which provides help and tutoring for students encountering academic problems. It does not, however, have tutors specifically for History courses.

The Nikkei 225, Japan's equivalent of the Dow-Jones Average.

Edwin Moïse's homepage

Regional geography

Revised September 22, 2013.