Meiji Restoration

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

Professor Fred Notehelfer presented a stimulating lecture and slideshow on the Meiji Restoration on May 15. He started with the Tokugawa period and segued into the Meiji and explained how events in the Meiji era led up to Japan's involvement in the Sino-Japan war, and eventually World War II.
I asked Professor Notehelfer about "bushido". He explained that bushido was not formally codified until the Tokugawa era during which time the role of "samurai" was no longer of battling warrior. This California standard is misrepresented in the seventh gradehistory textbook. The standard is: (students) describe the lasting influence of the warrior code in the twentieth centuryThe textbook portrays bushido in a fairy-tale like manner, comparing the samurai to the European knight. I think this is an example of what Jeffrey Levick was discussing in his article,Japan in the U.S. Press: Bias and Stereotypes(Japan Digest). He discusses how damaging Western ideas about Asian culture can lead to stereotypes. I think that when students don't have a chance to examine history in the context of the society, they aren't getting a true picture of the past and therefore won't be able to make any kind of connection with the present.

[Anonymous]

I enjoyed Professor Notehelfer's lecture too. I especially liked the slides and seeing some examples/pictures of the Meiji Restoration that I had not seen before.

[Anonymous]

I agree with you that the seventh grade standard could be misrepresented. When I was doing extra research for my Japan unit, I didn't quite know how to explain the warrior code in the 20th century because the samurais were not going into battle as much as they were in the previous centuries. I had to focus my students broadly on the concept of militarism as a whole, instead.

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

I really enjoyed Professor Notehelfer's lecture. The slides really gave us how wide spread the Westernization movement was in the cities and how isolated the Japanese countryside was. I also agree that we should use caution when we use Western concepts to explain Asian culture.

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

It would be great to have students examine some primary documents and photos of Japan during the Meiji Restoration and have them compare those to primary documents and photos of China at the time. It would be important to discuss Japan's reasoning for Modernization and the ideals of Western Imperialism at the time. Japan went through an amazingly quick transformation during this period. It would benefit students to examine pictures of the Japanese country side and pictures of the cities and have them compare and contrast the two extremes.

John Yamazaki

[Anonymous]

I too enjoyed Prof. Notehelfer's lecture on hte modernization of Japan during the Meiji period. I was pleased that Dr. Notehelfer spent a good deal of time discussing the central importance of the Tokogawa Shogunate. Most text books offer a rather dry and formulaic tale of Japanese modernization. The Meiji are creditied with reinventing the Emperor into the figurehead of a Japanese psuedo-constitutional monarchy and puhing Japan into the adoption of western ideas and technology. The Meji are portrayed as the enders of the domination of the Daimyo's and control of the Samurai and Ronin warrior classes. While the Meiji did manage to strip the Samurai and Ronin of their swords, it is really the Tokugawa Shogunate that truly responsible ofr setting the seeds of Japanese modernization. In establishing of a system of local control that forced the Daimyo to continually move court and maintain seperate palaces, the Tokogawa set the stage for the adoption of a single line of political and military control in Japan. It is the Tokogawa Shogunate that sets the stege for modernization, and its is this shogunate that urges Japan into its first stages of modernization. The Meiji period is an turnign point in Japanese history--the period where the quest for modernity really flowered, but it is in the Tokogawa period where we can really find the roots of Japan's drive to modernize and enter the world of European colonization and domination in Asia.[Edit by="chellmold on Jul 13, 11:42:36 PM"][/Edit]

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