Papers should be 10-12 pages in length (1" margins, 12-pt. Type) and must adhere to the style of Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers or the Chicago style. If you wish to substitute books listed here, please check with the professor before proceeding to research your paper. As noted in the syllabus, please also check with me if you wish to define a topic not found here.

A. Tokugawa

1. Examine the nature of the Japanese state in the Tokugawa era by comparing Ronald Toby's State and Diplomacy in Early Modern japan with either Mark Ravina's Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan or Luke Robert's Merchantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 19th Century Japan (1999). Compare Toby's view of bakufu power with that of Ravina or Roberts. Contrast each author's definition/standpoint of the Japanese polity in the 18th century.

2. Compare and contrast Gary Leupp's Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan with Gregory Pfulgfelder's Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600 1950 in regard to the subject of Tokugawa homosexuality. How differently do they define and approach the subject? Which study do you find more convincing or useful, and why?

3. Compare and contrast any two of the following accounts of the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime:
a) Marius Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (1961)
b) Conrad Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu (1980)
c) Albert Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration (1961)
d) Thomas Huber, The Revolutionary Origins of Modern Japan (1981)
e) Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration (1998).

4. Compare the picture of Tokugawa life as presented in Nam-lin Hur's Prayer and Play in Late-Tokugawa Japan (2000) and Constantine Vaporis's Breaking Barriers. Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (1994).

B. Meiji-1945

1. Read one or both of the following primary sources: Mutsu Munemitsu's Kenkenroku (1982) and Miyazaki Toten's My Thirty-three Years' Dream (1982). Read one or both and consider whether they square with W. G. Beasley's interpretation in Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945. How and why do the perspectives of these several authors vary?

2. Compare and Contrast The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (late Tokugawa samurai and early Meiji intellectual, leader of the Japanese Enlightenment) and The Autobiography of Shiusawa Eiichi: From Peasant to Entrepreneur. What did their authors have in common in personality and experience, and how did their visions of a modern Japan differ? What issues of interpretation need to be kept in mind in using autobiographies as historical sources?

3. Read two accounts of foreigners in bakumastu/early Meiji Japan, such as Fred Notehelfer, ed., Japan through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama, 1859-1866 (1992); and Sir Ernest Satow, A Diplomat in Japan. From your reading of these journals, what impression do you form of the foreigners who lived in Japan during the bakumatsu period? Describe the relations between the Japanese and the foreigners who inhabited the treaty ports. Did their daily interactions have political implications?

4. Read Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella Bird, a Victorian travel writer, which the Tuttle Books publisher touts as "the adventures of a bold and energetic woman in the northern wilderness of Japan in 1878." Compare it to the Japanese impressions of the West in the mid-19th century in Masao Miyoshi's As We Saw Them (1979). For background you might also refer to Toshio Yokoyama's Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of Stereotypes Images of a Nation, 1850-80 (1987). Do Bird's perspectives, motives, and impressions of Japan share anything with those of the Japanese observers of the West?

5. "Meiji ideology" has been among the most controversial topics in the historiography of modern Japan. Compare its treatment in Basil Hall Chamberlain's The Invention of a New Religion (Pan Pacific, 1933 reprint) with Carol Gluck's Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (1985). How do their interpretations differ? On what kinds of sources are their arguments based? How does historical proximity vs. Distance condition the approaches of each other.

6. Read the introduction and Part One ("The Scope of Orientalism") of Edward Said, Orientatlism, and Richard Minear's article "Orientalism and the Study of Japan" (Journal of Asian Studies 39, 3 (May 1980), pp. 507 24). Then assess the character of "Orientalist" thought in any one or two of the following studies of Japan: Elliot Griffis, The Mikado's Empire; Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysantemum; Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation; Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese.

7. Read Gershenkron's "Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective," in The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas (1952), edited by Berthold Hoselitz, and Henry Rosovsky's Capital Formation in Japan, 1868-1940 (1961). How does the latter modify the former?

8. Read Frances Moulder, Japan, China and the Modern World Economy (1977) and compare her interpretation of Japan's "successful" economic course in the 19th century to that found in Henry Rosovsky's Capital Formation in Japan, 1868-1940 (1961) or in William Lockwood, The Economic Development of Japan (1954). Whose account do you find more convincing?

9.What are the main contentions of Karen Wigen's The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1994) and David Howell's Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995). Do they have similar views on the development of Japanese capitalism?

10. Examine the various views of the People's Right movement as found in two of the following works:
a) Roger Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (1980)
b) Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (1985)
c) George Akita, Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modern Japan, 1868-1900
How do the writers differ in their interpretations and perspectives? Who seems more persuasive?

11. Contrast the government role in the development of the NYK Lines in William Wray's Mitsubishi and the NYK, 1870-1914: Business Strategy in the Japanese Shipping Industry (1984) and the later development of an automobile industry in Michael Cusumano's The Japanese Automobile Industry: Technology Management at Toyota and Nissan (1985). How and why did the government role change? In what ways did it remain the same? How comparable are the two cases?

12. Colonization of Korea: Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seisure of Korea, 1868-1910 (1960); Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword. The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (1995). How do each of these accounts analyze the historical process of Japan's colonization of Korea? What theories or frameworks do they employ in their analysis? Where do the accounts agree/differ? Which seems more persuasive?

13. Compare the subject of Japanese colonial modernization and assimilation policy of the 1930s in Susan Townsend, Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy: Redeeming Empire (2000), Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson's Colonial Modernity in Korea (1999) and Duus,Myers and Peattie, eds., The japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 (1996). What were the intentions behind the colonial social policies of the 1930s? In what ways were they a continuation of or departure from the policies of the 1910s or 1920s? Explore some of the contradictions in these policies and consider how colonial assimilation policy influenced "Japanese" identity.

14. Japan's First Wars: David Wells and Sandra Wilson, ed., The Russo Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904-1905 or Okamoto Shumpei, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War and Stewart Lone, Japan's First Modern War. Read also the chapter in J'S NEGLECTED TRADITION on Hibiya Riots. What was the nature of Meiji Japan's experience with war? (How did its experience in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars differ?)

15. The Meiji State and Women: Read "The Meiji State's Policy Toward Women, 1890-1910" by Sharon Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (1991), Patricia E. Tsurumi's Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (1990) and Sharon L. Sievers, Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. What picture of Meiji women and their relation to the state emerges from these sources. How might you account for the differences in portrayals of women? How does Tsurumi's treatment of female labor alter the picture that Nolte and Hastings offer?

16. The Countryside: Compare Nagatsuka Takashi's account of village life in The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan (1989) with John Embree's Suye Mura (1939) and/or Ronald Dore's Shinohata (1978). Does Nagatsuka's novel tell us anything about peasants and farming that we cannot learn from accounts written by social scientists such as Embree or Dore?

17. Japanese intellectuals and empire: Life Along the South Manchurian Raiway: The Memoirs of Ito Takeo (trans. Joshua Fogel, 1988) is a valuable English-language account of Japan's colonial project in Manchuria. What is the relationship between Japanese intellectuals and Japan's modern empire? How did Japan's quest for an empire in Asia shape the actions and lives of Japanese intellectuals? You should examine this source along with Louise Young's Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (1998) and/or James Crowley, "Intellectuals as Visionaries of the New Asian Order," in James Morley, ed., Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (1971).

18. Japanese militarism: Identify one or two crucial aspects of the rise of militarism, and compare and contrast their treatment in two of the following: Ben Shillony, Revolt in Japan (1972), James Crowley, Japan's Quest for Autonomy (1966) and Gordon Berger, Parties Out of Power in Japan, 1931-1941 (1977).

19. Compare Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (2002, Pulitzer Prize winner) and Steven Large, Emperor Hirohito and Showa Japan: A Political Biography (1992). Why was Emperor Hirohito such a controversial historical subject? What are the main differences beween the perspectives presented by Bix and Large, and how would you account for them? In addition to providing some divergent view of Hirohito himself, how do these biographies differ in what they say about he history of modern Japan more generally?

20. Examine at least two account of the Allied Occupation of Japan: John Dower, Embracing Defeat (1999); John Dower, Empire and Aftermath (chapters 8-9); Takemae Eiji, Inside GHQ. The Allied Occupation of Japan and its Legacy (2002); Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation (1987); Kazuo Kawai, Japan's American Interlude (1964); Ray Moore, Partners for Democracy: crafting the new Japanese state under MacArthur (2002). Discuss the Occupation's impact on Japanese society and/or polity, paying specific attention to the question of continuity and discontinuity.

21. Compare and contrast Patricia Tsurumi's Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895-1945 (1977) with Raymond Myers and Mark Peattie's The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945 (1984). You will need to consider what elements are appropriate to compare; the latter book has a wider scope than the former.

22. What was the political significance of the labor movement in modern Japanese history, and how did the state impact the history of the labor movement? Consider Andrew Goron, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (1991) and Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan, 1987.

23. Read Beate Sirota Gordon's memoir, The Only Woman in the Room (1997) in conjunction with chapters 12 and 13 of John Dower's Embracing Defeat (1999) and Susan Pharr's article "The Politics of Women's Rights" in Yoshikazu Sakamoto and Robert Ward, eds., Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation (1987). Consider what Gordon's acount tells you about the motives that guided the American drafters of Japan's postwar constitution. Does the claim that it was based on the will of the Japanese people derive from a conscious cynicism on the part of the Occupation authorities? How would you assess the role of Sirota Gordon? Focus your discussion on the constitutional guarantee of civil and/or human rights, and women's rights in particular. You may also compare the stipulations of the postwar Constitution in this regard to its Japanese predecessor and to the constitutional realities in contemporary US or elsewhere.

24. Compare Hidaka Rokuro's The Price of Affluence: Dilemmas of Contemporary Japan (1984 translation of 1980 Japanese edition) and John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958). Are these two critics reacting to the same or related phenomena despite the difference in time of publication? How do their attitudes differ or converge?

25. Compare Mary Brinton's Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (1993) to Sumiko Iwao's The Japanese Woman: Traditional Image and Changing Reality (1983). The latter ranges far more broadly, so you should limit yourself to the areas of overlap in their treatment. How do their interpretations differ? Whose work is more convincing to you?

26. Over the past decade, and at present, many Western observers are skeptical of claims made in Tokyo that the political and economic system is changing drasmatically. Read two or more of the following: Chalmers Johnson's Japan: Who Governs? (1995); Gerald Curtis, The Japanese Way of Politics (1988), Ronald Dore, Shareholder Capitalism, Stakeholder Capitalism (2000); Richard Katz, Japan: The System that Soured; Frank Gibney, ed., Unlocking the Bureaucrat's Kingdom. Assess the extent and the future potential for change in Japanese politics and economic policy. Draw on press account or other sources to incormporate in your analysis some specific evidence form recent developments in administrative reform and deregulation, trade liberalization or defense and/or foreign policy.

27. Compare William Tsutui's perspective on the quality control movement in Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth Century Japan (1998) with those presented in Ishikawa's What is Total Quality Control? (1985). How does their views of the quality control movement- its origins, progress, achievements, etc. differ? How do they converge?

28. Examine the views offered on the Japanese electronics (television) industry by Simon Partner in Assembled in Japan (1999) and from the biography of Morita Akio, the found of Sony, in John Nathan's Sony: The Private Life (1999). What do these two works tell you about the history of the electronic industry in Japan? Consider the experiences of Morita as presented by John Nathan with the broad overview offered by Simon Partner.

29. Article 20 of the 1947 Japanese Constitution states: "Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all. No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any political authority. No person shall be compelled to take part in any religious acts, celebration, rite or practice. The state and its organs shall refrain from religious educationor any other religious activity." In To Dream of Dreams: Religious Freedom and Constitutional Politics in Postwar Japan (1996) David O'Brien presents three contemporary legal cases surrounding the issue of religious freedom in Japan. Helen Hardacre, in Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (1989) propvides a historical perspective detailing the complex relationship between the state and religion in modern Japan. Consider the three legal cases presented by O'Brien and mentioned by Hardacre in her examination of the role of Shinto in public rites and rituals. To what extent are the religious pracices at issue in these cases rooted in social customs beyond the reach of the legal system? How would you characterize the nature of religious freedom in postwar Japan?

30. Compare Helen Hardacre's approach to the issue of religion, gender and ritual in Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1997) to an earlier work by William LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (1992). Does Hardacre challenge the views presented by LaFleur? What do these works tell us about the role of religion in contemporary Japanese society?

31. Two views of the nature of the yakuza (gangsters) and their place in Japanese society can be found in Miyazaki Manabu's Toppa-mono (English translation available on-line at http://www.zorro-me.com/MIYAZAKI ENG/toppa eng/) and Robert Whiting's Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan (1999). How do these accounts differ, and what factors do you thik are responsible for the difference? Are Miyazaki and Whiting describing the same kinds of yakuza?

32. How repressive was the Japanese state during the 1930s-1945? Read at least two of the following: Richard Mitchell, Thought Control in Prewar Japan or Censorship in Prewar Japan, Ben Shillony, Politics and Culture, Thomas Haven's Valley of Darkness: the Japanese People and World War II; Gregory Kasza, The State and Mass Media in Japan, 1918-1945; Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Under the Shadow of Nationalism. Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women (1998); Elise Tipton, The Japanese Police State: The Tokko in Interwar Japan.

34. What role did foreign experts play in Meiji Japan? Compare the accounts of Hazel Jones, Live Machines: Hired Foreigners and Meiji Japan and Edward Beauchamp and Akira Iriye, Foreign Employees in Nineteenth Century Japan.

35. The Pacific War: Compare the views of John Dower, War Without Mercy. Race and Power in the Pacific War, and Akiya Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945. Are they talking about the same war? How do you explain the differences?

36. The Japanese wartime occupation in Southeast Asia. Read at least one of the following: Theodore Friend, Blue Eyed-Enemy; Alfred W. McCoy, ed., Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation; Shigeru Sato, Nationalism and Peasants: Java under the Japanese Occupation AND Joyce Lebra, ed., Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in World War II (documents). What were the aims and goals of the Japanese in Southeast Asia? Did the Japanese efforts in there live up to the rhetoric of the Co-prosperity Sphere?

37. Prewar education (two or more): Donald Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study in the Culture of a Student Elite; Mark Lincicome, Principle, Praxis and the Politics of Educational Reform in Mejij Japan; Byron Marshall, Academic Freedom and the Japanese Imperial University, 1868 1939.

38. What is the nature of Japan's postwar world role and the place of the military in the state? Malcolm McIntosh, Japan Re-armed; Meiron and Susan Harries, Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarization of Postwar Japan; Joshua Katz, Japan's New World Role; Richard Samuels, Rich Nation, Strong Army: National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan.

39. Women in the postwar economy: Mary C. Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (1993); Janet Hunter, ed., Japanese Women Working (1995) and Yuko Ogasawara, Office Ladies and Salaried Men. Power, Gender and Work in Japanese Companies (1998). What role did women play in the economic miracle? Has there been much change in recent decades?

40. Compare the views expressed in the following works on the nature of, and difficulties faced in developing, "Taisho democracy": Tetsuo Najita, Hara Kei and the Politics of Compromise, 1905-1959; Bernard Silberman and Harry Harootnunian, ed., Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taisho Democracy; Peter Duus, Party Rivalry and Political Change in Taisho Japan.

41. How has feminism developed in Japan since Meiji times? In what ways does it resemble or differ from feminism in other parts of the world? Sandra Buckley, ed., Broken Silence. Voices of Japanese Feminism (1997) and Vera Mackie, Fighting Women: A History of Feminism in Modern Japan (1997)

42. How has Japanese education changed over the past several decades? What problems have the Japanese encountered and how have various reforms fared? Select two or three: Byron K. Marshall, Learning to be Modern: Japanese Political Discourse on Education (1997); Thomas Rohlen, Japan's High Schools (1983); Christopher P. Hood, Japanese Education Reform: Nakasone's Legacy (2001); Yoshimitsu Khan, Japanese Moral Education: Past and Present (1998)

43. What role have the arts played in modern Japan? To what extent have the arts in Japan developed an independent course? (Select 2 or 3)
Marlene J. Mayo and J. Thomas Rimer with H. Eleanor Kerkham, ed., War, occupation, and creativity : Japan and East Asia, 1920-1960 (2001); Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dancing into darkness : Butoh, Zen, and Japan / Sondra Horton Fraleigh; Mark Sandler, ed.,
The Confusion Era : art and culture of Japan during the Allied Occupation, 1945-1952 (1997); Barbara E. Thornbury, The Folk Performing Arts : traditional culture in contemporary Japan (1997).