Nancy K. Stalker - Japan: History and Culture From Classical to Cool

While at the University of Texas at Austin, I taught a course called Introduction to Japan for over a dozen years. It is a gateway class, intended to entice students into deeper studies by providing a survey of a millenniums worth of Japans cultural, social, and political highlights. Searching for a textbook for the course brought the story of Goldilocks to mindthis one focused too much on elite and premodern culture or was too expensive, that one minimized gender or religious matters or lacked illustrationsbut unlike the girl in the fairy tale, I have never found one that was just right. The opportunity to present my own version of Japan arose when Reed Malcolm at the University of California Press, at the suggestion of Professor Peter Duus, invited me to submit a proposal for an introductory textbook on Japanese history and culture. I am deeply grateful to Reed, Zuha Khan, and other members of the UC Press staff for their support of this project.

I had several goals for the text. As a historian, I knew that providing a basic historical narrative was important for helping students understand the context of cultural developments and see important continuities and discontinuities over time. I would devote significant attention to the visual and literary arts and to material culture, because aesthetics and tradition occupy a central role in modern Japanese national identity, to a degree seemingly unparalleled among the worlds wealthiest nations. I would also occasionally attempt to relate problems of the past to present situations, as students tend to relate well to contemporary examples. While an introductory text can never be truly comprehensive, the development of colonies under the Japanese empire, everyday consumer culture, religious modernity, gender norms, and cultures of protest would receive some of the coverage they warranted. Postwar and contemporary art and popular culture would not be relegated to a brief afterthought. The resulting work admittedly reflects my own biases, but it also addresses areas that, I have found, most fully engage students.

The chapters are arranged both chronologically and thematically, resulting in some historical overlap. Thus, chapters 6 and 7 both cover the Edo period (1600s to mid-1800s), but chapter 6 addresses the Tokugawa shogunates systems of governance, along with intellectual and religious developments of the era, while chapter 7 is focused on the flourishing of new forms of urban culture. Similarly, chapters 9 and 10 both address the first four decades of the twentieth century, with the former devoted to discussion of domestic modernity and the latter focused on Japans expansion abroad as an imperial power.

At the conclusion of each chapter, Ive provided a list of ten to twelve suggestions for further reading, which does not begin to include all the works I have drawn upon in writing this book. Instead, these sections provide readers an eclectic combination of classic works and cutting-edge scholarship. Each is followed by a brief selection of recommended films, including features, documentaries, and animated works. These lists, too, are idiosyncratic, reflecting available works on the period (more scarce for pre-Heian eras) along with my own preferences.

I am indebted to numerous experts in diverse fields of Japanese studies, on whose scholarship this text is based, and to several thoughtful reviewers who provided important insights and corrections. Any remaining errors and omissions are my responsibility alone.

Names are provided in Japanese order, with family name preceding given name. Many names in the earlier chapters include the possessive pronoun no, such as Sugawara no Michizane, meaning Michizane of the Sugawara family.

Macrons are used to indicate a drawn-out vowel sound in the pronunciation of some Japanese names and terms, such as Prince Shtoku, the Ryky Islands, or wartime tokktai attack squads. In names of the main islands and major cities, however, and in words that have become familiar in Englishsuch as shogun, Shinto, and daimyomacrons have been omitted.