This course explores Japan's role in world orders, past, present, and future. It focuses on Japanese conceptions of security; rearmament debates; the relationship of domestic politics to foreign policy; the impact of Japanese technological and economic transformation at home and abroad; alternative trade and security regimes; Japan's response to 9/11; and relations with Asian neighbors, Russia, and the alliance with the United States.
We will explore images that pertain to the emergence of Japan as a modern state. We will focus on images that depict Japan as it comes into contact with the rest of the world after its long and deep isolation during the feudal period. We will also cover city planning of Tokyo that took place after WWII, and such topics as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. A unique feature of this offering is that we will run it concurrently with the edX MOOC and two University of Tokyo MOOCs, Visualizing Postwar Tokyo and Four Faces of Contemporary Japanese Architecture, for much of the remainder of the class.
