HIST 375-01, Modern Japan, Spring 2000

Abstract

This course examines Japan’s transition from a closed, traditional society through the processes of modernization, imperial expansion, defeat and occupation to its postwar recovery and emergence as a global economic power. We will investigate the values that have informed Japanese society during this tumultuous era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and attempt to analyze those changes which have affected traditional values as Japan has transformed itself into a modern society and member of the global community.