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Nationalism and national identity in Modern Japan
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This course is designed to encourage students to think critically about the concept of nationalism and national identity in modern Japan.
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We will examine the usefulness of the theoretical debates around the concepts by studying important moments in modern Japanese history when the nature of nationalism and national identity were transformed as a result of political, social and economic change.
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nationalism, national identity, postwar, nihonjinron
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Day 1: The state and nation building in Meiji Japan.
Session 1. Introduction.
Required Reading: Extracts from Leah Greenfeld, Anthony Smith, Ernest Gellner, Benedict Andersen, Ernst Renan in Smith and Hutchinson Eds: The Nationalism Reader.
Session 2. Film: The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958).
Required Reading: Read all sections of John Dower, Black Ships and Samurai at:
https://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/black_ships_and_samurai/bss_essay01.html
Session 3: Discussion-Nationalism as ‘ressentiment’: the Emperor, the city and the constitution.
Required Reading: Conrad Totman, ‘Ethnicity in the Meiji Restoration: An Interpretive Essay’, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol 37, No. 3 (Autumn 1982)
Question: To what extent was the emergence of Meiji nationalism a state-driven process?
Day 2: Empire and War.
Session 1. Creating the ‘other’, Imperial Expansion and popular nationalism.
Required Reading: Alan Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” positions 1.3 (1993) or Robert Eskildsen, "Of civilization and savages”, American Historical Reveiew, 107 (2002), 388-418.
Session 2. Showa Japan and Pan-Asianism.
Required Reading: Cemil Aydin, Japan’s ‘Pan-Asianism and the Legitimacy of Imperial world Order, 1931-1945’, March 2008, http://apjjf.org/-Cemil-Aydin/2695/article.html.
Session 3. Film: Wings of Defeat (2007).
Required Reading: Prasenjit Duara, “The New Imperialism and the Post-Colonial Developmental State: Manchukuo in comparative perspective” January 30, 2006 http://japanfocus.org/-Prasenjit-Duara/1715
Question: To what extent was Pan-Asianism merely an expression of Japanese nationalism between the Meiji period and the 1940s?
Day 3: Postwar-reconstruction, economic, developmental and anti-nationalism.
Session 1. Defeat, Occupation and anti-nationalism.
Required Reading: ‘Cultures of Defeat’, in John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.
Session 2. Economic growth and developmental nationalism.
Required Reading: Laura Hein, ‘The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy: developmental and cultural nationalisms in historical perspective’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2008, pp 447–465.
Session 3. Film: TBC
Required Reading: Yoshimi Shunya, ‘‘America’ as desire and violence: Americanization in postwar Japan and Asia during the Cold War’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 4, Number 3, 2003.
Question: What role did the state play in the transformation of Japanese nationalism after 1945?
Day 4: The Olympics, Consumerism and everyday nationalism.
Session 1. The Olympics, nationalism and internationalism.
Required Reading: Jessamyn Abel, ‘Olympic Diplomacy in the new Japan: The 1964 Tokyo Olympiad’, in The International Minimum: creativity and contradiction in Japan’s global engagement 1933-1964.
Session 2. The rise of consumer society and the everyday banality of nationalism.
Required Readings: Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Andrew Gordon Ed, Postwar Japan as History, 239-58.
Session 3. Film Tokyo 1964 (1964) Dir. Kon Ichikawa.
Required Reading: Martyn D. Smith, ‘A MAD Age: Heibon Punch, Student Protest, the Media and Consumer Society in Cold War Japan’, Japan Forum, Vol. 28 Issue 3, Sept 2016, p337-359.
Question: In what ways did the hosting of the Olympics transform the nature of nationalism and national identity in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s?
Day 5: Cultural nationalism, Nihonjinron and lost decades.
Session 1. Japan as No 1. Nihonjinron and cultural homogeneity.
Required Reading: Ishihara Shintaro, The Japan that Can Say No! (1991) available at http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/japan_no.html
Session 2. Japan as No 3 and the ‘Japan is Great’ discourse.
Required Reading: Sho Shimoda, ‘Memorializing the Spirit of Wit and Grit in Postindustrial Japan’, in Gerteis and George Eds. Japan Since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble, 2013.
Session 3. Film: Japan a Story of Love and Hate (2008).
Required Reading: Marc Driscoll, Mark Driscoll, ‘Debt and Denunciation in Post-Bubble Japan: On the Two Freeters’, Cultural Critique, 65, Fall 2007.
Question: What has replaced the cultural confidence of the Nihonjinron discourse?
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essay of 2,000 words (70%)
presentation (20%)
attendance and participation (10%)
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(See syllabus) For the first day, read
Extracts from Leah Greenfeld, Anthony Smith, Ernest Gellner, Benedict Andersen, Ernst Renan in Smith and Hutchinson Eds: The Nationalism Reader (request your pdf by email to i.haukamp77@tufs.ac.jp).
And all sections of John Dower, Black Ships and Samurai at: https://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/black_ships_and_samurai/bss_essay01.html
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