HIST 285: Modern Japan

When The Nightless City was first published in 1899, it was deemed taboo in polite circles. It is now considered a valuable historical document--albeit still provocative--as a pioneering sociological study of the Yoshiwara Yukwaku: Tokyo's infamous red-light district where the giving of pleasure became both a tradition and a business. 

Four times in the nineteenth century, popular protest movements spread across the northern Japanese rice plain of Shonai. This study skillfully portrays the changing character of the protests, their relationship to one another, and their role in the societal transformation of Shonai first during Japan's shift from tributary polity to nation state and then from mercantilism to capitalism.

More than one-half million people of Korean descent reside in Japan today--the largest ethnic minority in a country often assumed to be homogeneous.

Historical analysis of the discourses of nostalgia in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. Through an analysis of the experience of rapid social change in Japan's modernization, it argues that fads and the desires they express are central to understanding Japanese modernity, conceptions of gender, and discourses of nationalism.