Links:
[1] http://www.iesabroad.org/study-abroad/programs/tokyo-language-intensive
[2] http://www.iesabroad.org/study-abroad/programs/tokyo-society-culture
[3] http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/tokyo_modern_01/index.html
[4] http://www.japanairraids.org/
History Of Tokyo
Sprawling in every direction, Tokyo is a city that burps and flashes with the flow of people and commodities. This course explores how the Tokyo metropolitan area has been produced and experienced through human and nonhuman movement. Beginning with how the city was built human and natural resources from all over the Japanese archipelago from the early seventeenth century, we will go over how the water-bound landscape of old city influenced the ways in which people built their homes, did business, and amused themselves. We will then move on to explore how this city of water was transformed into a city of land, as Tokyo was colonized by parks, statues, and railway systems within the context of empire. The course will end in the early 1980s with a discussion of how central and regional governments reshaped the littoral landscape of Tokyo Bay.
None
Attendance to all class meetings is required for all IES Abroad Area Studies courses. The three- hour format for classes makes missing a single class equivalent to missing a full week during a regular semester. Therefore, students are permitted a maximum of one unexcused absence. Additional unexcused absences will result in a penalty of one of letter grade from your final grade, for each additional absence—i.e. two missed classes turns an A into a B, three turns it into a C, and so on.
By the end of this course students will be able to:
Lectures, discussions, fieldwork, and student presentations
1. Participation (20%)
a. Active participation is evaluated, and I evaluate participation qualitatively, not quantitatively. I realize that some people are more comfortable than others with speaking
in class; therefore, students will be evaluated on their active listening as well as their speaking. I hope that those comfortable with talking in class will work on their listening skills, while those more comfortable listening will be prepared to talk as well. In-class discussion is your opportunity to work out your ideas with the other participants of the
class.
b. Each week, 2-3 participants will lead the reading discussion at the end of each class.
Your instructor will provide a sign-up sheet in the first week of class.
Note: Attendance to all class meetings is required for all IES Abroad Area Studies courses. The three- hour format for classes makes missing a single class equivalent to missing a full week during a regular semester. Therefore, students are permitted a maximum of one unexcused absence. Additional unexcused absences will result in a penalty of one of letter grade from your final grade, for each additional absence—i.e. two missed classes turns an A into a B, three turns it into a C, and so on.
2. Reaction Papers (25%)
a. You must turn in 5 out of a possible 9 2-page reaction papers. The instructor will provide an example.
b. Please send the instructor your reaction the night before class in an electronic format.
c. The first reaction must be a short field report on our first field trip, which will be held during the second class.
d. Your other reactions should engage directly with the readings and course themes of the week. Your reactions need not be profound, but they should be thoughtful and honest.
e. Each reaction must be double-spaced and written in Times New Roman 12-point font.
And make sure that you read your reactions aloud at least once before submission.
3. Proposal (15%)
a. Proposal (10%): You will produce a 4-page (double-spaced 12-point font) proposal for an “historical biography” on a public space in the Tokyo area. I will provide a list of spaces that you can choose from in the first class of the semester. (You are, of course, not limited
to this list. But you must clear your topic with the instructor.) The report should include descriptions of preliminary research, learning objectives, possible problems that you might
encounter along the way, and a list of research sources.
b. The instructor will provide an example proposal in the 2nd-session of the class. c. he proposal is due the night before the 5th session. Please submit it
electronically.
d. Participants are required to give a short presentation of their findings. This presentation is worth 5% of their final grade.
4. Final “Exam” (40%)
a. Report (35%): You will produce a written 7-page double-spaced (without pictures)
field report on their public space. You can use encyclopedia entries, brochures, journal articles, newspaper articles, interviews, etc. in the writing this report. Along with a brief- history of their chosen historical object, the field report should be an honest piece of scholarship that illustrates not only what you accomplished but also what you couldn't accomplish. The report must be accompanied by pictures and it must be an edited, polished piece of writing.
b. This report is due on the final day of class.
a. Presentation (5%): The students will present their work in the final session of class with, or without, visual aids. The presentation should run no more than 10 minutes.
Overall grading:
a. Participation (20%)
b. Short written reaction papers (25%)
c. Proposal (15%)
d. Final (40%)
Cases of Academic Dishonesty:
Plagiarism or any other form of academic dishonesty is not tolerated in this course. Any assignment (exam, paper, etc.) that is the product of deliberate academic dishonesty will receive a failing grade. Extreme cases (verbatim plagiarism) will be reported to the directorship of the center.
Session 1: Introduction: Reading Tokyo as Text
Our course will begin with a discussion on how we can use history as a method to read the complex human and nonhuman ecology of Tokyo. I will also outline the mechanics of the course. The second part of the class will be devoted to talking about Japan’s first national project: The construction of the city of Edo. How did a marshy backwater become one of the largest cities in just over 50 years. What kind of caloric demands does a city of close to a 1,000,000 people place on the human and nonhuman resources of the Japanese archipelago?
Readings:
None
Session 2: City of Water
After beginning the class with reading Edo’s landscape from the center (Yamanote), we will attempt to read it from the perspective of the lower parts of the city. How might we approach the history of Edo from outside-in? How did the littoral landscape of Edo affect people’s everyday lives? How did the Tokugawa government deal with the constant movement of people, things, and waste along the waterways of the city? What can we learn from the state’s failure to control people and things that didn’t want to be fixed?
Readings:
Vaporis, Constantine N. "To Edo and Back: Alternate Attendance and Japanese Culture in the Early
Modern Period." Journal of Japanese Studies 23, no. 1 (1997): 25-67.
Markus, Andrew J. "The Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles from Contemporary Accounts." Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 45, no. 2 (1985): 499-541.
Session 3: End of Edo
From the 1850s, life in Edo shuttered with the gradual deterioration of the Tokugawa regime. How did the Tokugawa regime contend with the difficulties that came with Euro-American imperialism, and then how did the people living in Edo read how government decisions play out on the ground? Part of the answer to the second part of the question might be found through material and print culture.
Readings:
“ The End of Tokugawa Rule,” in David John Lu, ed. Sources of Japanese History. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
Steele, M. William, “Edo in 1868: The View from Below” (45:2)
Session 4: The Making of the Imperial Public
In this class, we will discuss the difficulties that the central and metropolitan governments had in instructing imperial subjects to act publicly. The governments’ instruction of the people living in the city was located in a number of public spaces. The most of important places of instruction were, of course, schools, but the governments also attempted to instruct people on proper public behavior in public squares, temples and shrines, and parks.
Readings:
“Early Meiji Political Development,” in David John Lu, ed. Sources of Japanese History. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
“Civilization and Enlightenment,” in Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo from Edo to Showa, 1867-1989: The
Emergence of the World's Greatest City. Tokyo: Tuttle, 2010.
Session 5: Field Trip to Ryogoku (Proposal Due: Send it to me electronically.)
We’ll spend our afternoon walking in two spaces of memory. Our starting point will be the Edo-Tokyo Museum, one of the world’s largest municipal museums. Our second stop will be Yokomichô Park. We will read the park as a preface to our discussion of the 1923 Great Kantô Disaster (Kantô Daishinsai) at the beginning of the next session (Session 6).
Session 6: “Erotic Grotesque Nonsense”
From the 1920s, mass consumption became a means of expression in a rapidly modernizing and urbanizing Japan. How did the mass consumption of the 1920s and 1930s differ in terms of gender, class, and location in Tokyo? In conversation with Kawabata Yasunari’s richly descriptive The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, we will work our way through the excesses of the time as they spilled onto the city’s streets and public spaces as “erotic grotesque nonsense.” There are limited copies of this text in both libraries.
Readings:
* Kawabata Yasunari. The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Translated by Alisa Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 3 - 181.
Session 7: From Civilian to Wartime Rule
The Show era (1926-1989) got off to a turbulent start. The metropolitan area became a heavily militarized place. Militarization is normally thought of as a process by which the state enhances its capacity to defend or attack in the case of war. In this class, we will also approach militarization as process by which people and the land become controlled by and became dependent on the military as most dominant institution of its time. How did people live in a situation of “total war”?
Readings:
Koizumi, Kishio. "Koizumi Kishio's '100 Views' of the Imperial Capital (1928-1940)." MIT Visualizing
Cultures, http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/tokyo_modern_01/index.html [3].
Selections from Haruko Cook and Theodore F. Cook, ed. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: New
Press, 1992.
"Chapter 7: The Bombing of Japan." In Sensô: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War, edited by Frank
Gibney, 201-14. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
Karacas, Cary, and Bret Fisk. "Japan Air Raids.Org: A Bilingual Historical Archive." http://www.japanairraids.org/ [4].
Session 8: City Under Siege: The U.S. Occupation of Tokyo
This session will go over how people lived within the occupied city of Tokyo, after being almost bombed to oblivion. How did residents of the city put their lives back together again? Japan’s postwar period began with the Emperor’s August 15 broadcast to his subjects announcing Japan’s intention to accept the terms of surrender. Soon after, the U.S. military established its base for command of occupations in Tokyo. How did occupier and occupied experiences differ? How much of an impact did this seven-year period have on people who lived through it, and how does it continue to linger in the physical landscape
of Tokyo today?
Readings:
Waterman, Talbot. "Sunday Afternoon in Tokyo." American Scientist 35, no. 3 (1947): 377-87.
John W. Dower, “Chapter 3: Kyodatsu: Exhaustion and Despair,” and “Chapter 4: Cultures of Defeat” in
“Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999. 87-
167.
Session 9: The Breakdown and Reconstruction of Tokyo
In this class, we will explore two postwar national movements centered in Tokyo. The first was the Anti- Security Treaty Movement. The second was the city’s hosting of the 1964 Olympics. The second movement was initiated from the top, but was embraced by much of the public. The Olympics provided the catalyst not only for restructuring the parks and other places of leisure in the city, it also transformed metropolitan and national transportation system.
Readings:
Igarashi, Yoshikuni. "From the Anti-Security Treaty Movement to the Tokyo Olympics: Transforming the Body, the Metropolis, and Memory." In Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, 131 - 63. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Selected readings from Tokyo Olympic News. Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 1960-1964.
Session 10: Trip to Shin-Urayasu
We’ll be taking a field trip closer to home -- unless this trip will make me unpopular. Preluding our class on the industrialization of Tokyo Bay, we will take a tour of Urayasu. Our first stop will be Urayasu Museum. The second stop will be Kasairinkai Park.
Session 11: The Industrialization of Tokyo Bay
By the early-1960s, the consequences of the breakneck speed of Japan’s economic growth were apparent; Tokyo had, arguably, become the most polluted place on the planet and people suffered for it. In this session we will talk about the ways in which people could feel through their bodies how their lives were tied intimately to the landscape that they lived.
Readings:
Huddle, Norie, Michael Reich, and Nahum Stiskin. "Urban Explosion." In Island of Dreams: Environmental
Crisis in Japan, 194-228. New York: Autumn Press, 1975.
Yamazaki, Kenji, and Tomoko Yamazaki. "The Grassroots Movement to Save the Sanbanzae Tidelands, Tokyo Bay." In Local Environmental Movements: A Comparative Study of the United States and Japan, edited by Pradyumna P. Karan and Unryu Suganuma, 187-206. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008.
Session 12: Final Presentations of Research Findings
Note on Possible Changes to the Syllabus: The instructor reserves the right to adjust the syllabus based on the general capabilities and interests of the students enrolled in the class.
* denotes that required text is in the library.
Cook, Haruko and Theodore F. Cook, ed. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: New Press, 1992.
Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.
Gibney, Frank. "Chapter 7: The Bombing of Japan." In Sensô: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War, edited by Frank Gibney, 201-14. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
Huddle, Norie, Michael Reich, and Nahum Stiskin. "Urban Explosion." In Island of Dreams: Environmental Crisis in Japan, 194-228. New York: Autumn Press, 1975.
Igarashi, Yoshikuni. "From the Anti-Security Treaty Movement to the Tokyo Olympics: Transforming the Body, the Metropolis, and Memory." In Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970, 131 - 63. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Kawabata, Yasunari. The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. Translated by Alisa Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Lu, David John, Ed. Sources of Japanese History. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
Markus, Andrew J. "The Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles from Contemporary Accounts." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45, no. 2 (1985): 499-541.
Murphey, Rhoads, and Ellen Murphey. "The Japanese Experience with Pollution and Controls." Environmental Review 8, no. 3, Special Issue: International Dimensions of Environmental History (1984): 284-94.
Seidensticker, Edward. Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake. New York: Knopf, 1983. Steele, M. William. "Edo in 1868: The View from Below." Monumenta Nipponica 45, no. 2 (1990): 127-55.
Tokyo Olympic News. Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 1960-1964.
Vaporis, Constantine N. "To Edo and Back: Alternate Attendance and Japanese Culture in the Early Modern Period." Journal of Japanese Studies 23, no. 1 (1997): 25-67.
Waterman, Talbot. "Sunday Afternoon in Tokyo." American Scientist 35, no. 3 (1947): 377-87.
Yamazaki, Kenji, and Tomoko Yamazaki. "The Grassroots Movement to Save the Sanbanzae Tidelands, Tokyo Bay." In Local Environmental Movements: A Comparative Study of the United States and Japan, edited by Pradyumna P. Karan and Unryu Suganuma, 187-206. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008.
Bestor, Theodore C. Neighborhood Tokyo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.
———. "Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World." Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Fujitani, Takashi. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Gluck, Carol. Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan from Tokugawa Times to the Present. Second ed. London: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Smits, Gregory. "Shaking up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints." Journal of Social History 39, no. 4 (2006): 1045-78.
Colin Tyner is a PhD candidate in Modern East Asian History at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is now in thick of writing his dissertation on history of the Ogasawara Islands, a group of subtropical oceanic islands that have just be designated as a UNESCO world heritage site.