[Matthew Hurwitz]

One thing that I noticed during the lecture was the effectiveness of charts and data in presenting stories. Reading and listening to the story of Japanese economic growth and current economic challenges is one thing, but seeing it displayed as graphs over time was both easy to read and allowed us to see change over time. I realized that although I present students with a lot of data and facts, very little of it is presented in any kind of graph or chart form. The format of the lecture made me think about how I can alter or tweak my own presentation of data when I go over either economic information, or try to show students information about something over a long period of time.

As someone learning more about Japanese history, I was struck in particular by a lot of the data about the modern day Japanese family, and the ways in which gender expectations, family expectations, job expectations, and social expectations all combine to create an economy that has a lot of strengths, but also faces a lot of challenges moving forward. I was left somewhat curious as the which aspect of this system will change the most in the near future, and how changing one aspect will, or will not, change the other economic/social/familial aspects that go hand in hand with it.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I agree on finding the discusssion on the transition to some extent from economic power to cultural power to be an interesting one. Just as you did, after the lecture I went back through my mind to think about all the Japanese cultural influences on my life that I haven't really thought about. I didn't get into Pokemon Go!, but I distinctly remember being in elementary school when the original Pokemon gameboy game came out, and how obsessed everyone was with it, and how the fervor only died down when it was replaced by another anime game...Yu-Gi-Oh. These, along with the Tamagotchi (remember those?) form some key memories from growing up. It made me think about ways of tying together the current "fads" that students are into, analyzing what they say about our society right now, and comparing those to fads from history and what they tell us about the way that kids and adults saw certain events/movements/stories at the time as a way of connecting the past and the present in a way that elicits student buy in.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I was interested in this too, and it made me think about the idea of economic growth vs. economic success that was discussed in class. It seems to me that although the economic growth over the last 60 years has left Japanese people with an incredibly high standard of living on paper, that many people can't necessarily enjoy it. The overworking of many workers, and the inability to work for others who want to was interesting to explore in an economy, which by most economic metrics, is one of the most successful in the world. It made me think about what economic/societal solutions could be introduced which would make people feel less economically frustrated while still achieving the economic and demographic goals of the country.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I was also struck by the amount of government involvement in the economy during and after World War II, and the degree to which the economy was successful because of it. Do you wait for the market to shift resources where they need to go, even if that takes years, letting people suffer in the meantime? Or do you have the government take control and direct resources where they are needed, which runs the risk of creating opportunities for corruption and inefficiencies? In many ways, it seems like Japan is an example of the best and worst of both approaches. As Japan faces increasing economic pressure from other countries and their increasing welfare costs, it'll be interesting to see which approach they take going forward over the next 50 years or so.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I also thought it was interesting to hear about both how the Japanese approach disaster in their movies, and the ways in which they've reacted to disasters in real life. I agree with you that the Americans response to a giant earthquake would be much more chaotic than the Japanese response. The idea that this is based in part on our overwhelming focus on the Individual as the center of everything here in the States made me think about how that focus is reflected in the way our movies/tv deal with (or don't deal with) disaster. As a sci-fi fan, I immediately thought of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. BSG being the show that focused on all the destructive ways in which individuals are selfish and self-destructive in the wake of the apocalypse and highlighted a kind of depressing "realism" about how most Americans would react to bad situations, and Star Trek (I'm thinking of Voyager in particular here) which was reassuring in it's sunny opitmism about pulling together in the face of adversity, an approach which was comforting in it's naivete.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I was also interested in how the U.S. and Japan reckon with our trauma through disaster movies. One of the things that I was thinking about after the lecture was how this Japanese approach to the Godzilla movies/franchise will change given the demographic challenges that Japan now faces. Will the movies become even darker, focusing on further acts of "destruction" and conflict in Japan as it faces more real world challenges, or will they become more nationalistic and focus on Japanese preserverence and ability to overcome obstacles? 

 

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I was also very interested to learn about Zaibatsu and how this facet of the Japanese economy was structured, and how this structure changed and adapted to the economic period after the war. It was interesting to think about how culture and economics merge together, something which many of us don't take into account when we think about Capitalism and how it works. The ways in which common economic systems are implemented differently was not something I had thought about before, but something that I'm going to have to do some more research on before teaching economics and economic systems in the Spring!

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I found the connection between History and Pop Culture that was discussed in the lecture fascinating. In particular, the way in which pop culture, in this case the Godzilla movies, can be a way of venting societal pain and frustration that cannot, or will not, be talked about openly. It made me think about how I can incorporate more popular culture primary source materials into my lessons, looking more at what ordinary citizens were reading or watching, and not just focusing on official documents. It also made me think in paritcular about Godzilla and how that character has (or hasn't) been translated into a "mainstream" Hollywood blockbuster by American studios. Without the cultural history and baggage that goes with the Godzilla character in Japan, the American movies have turned the character into a somewhat generic monster action movie, stripping out all of the orignal deeper meaning to them, and replacing the Japanese fears and societal issues with American fears and issues. It's interesting to look at clips from both the American and Japanese movies, and compare how each side interprets the same character through their own cultural lens.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I was also quite struck by getting to read and learn about the different perspective on the war in Japan. I've used primary sources from Japan in my teaching of World War II, but I didn't realize until we talked about it in class that my sources almost all come from the generals and admirals at the top, and not from the ordinary people living and fighting through the war. I'm looking forward to going through some of the resources that were shared with us to find more texts from the period for students to read that convey the full array of perspectives from people at all levels of society during the war.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I too was surprised to learn that the architects of the Japanese attack had spent a lot of time in the United States. I think because we (or at least I) tend to focus on one country or region at a time when I teach, it's sometimes easy to lose sight of the human connections that may not be as obvious in the textbook. For World War II, I tend to go over America in the 1930s, and then look at Japanese expansion in Asia during the 1930s another day, which unitentionally may serve to wall them off from each other in the eyes of some students. I guess I fell into that same trap! It was a good reminder that nothing happens in isolation, and that there was in fact a fair amount of movement in people and ideas between Japan and the United States.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I found the lecture interesting in that it presented a complete picture of Japan as it transformed and changed over the course of 100 years. I realized that I have only ever learned about Japanese as a series of "moments", short snippets of time when something "important" happened. Getting the chance to look beyond the "moments", the Rape of Nanking, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Russo-Japanese War, has been interesting. It's made me think about how our selective telling of only certain events throughout history colors our understanding of those events. It's made me think about what I skip, and what I don't skip in my own curiculum, what's "important" and what's not. Obviously, you can't teach all of world history in the course of 40 weeks, hence the eternal history teacher struggle of what the rush through/skip and what to spend more time on. But it's sobering to realize that our time constraints mean that something inevitably ends up getting the short straw, and that that lack of attention impacts the way that our students view the history of certain regions.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

This struck me as well. I was also trying to go back and think about how centering our own American perspective has impacted even the facts that we think of as irefutable. I was struck in one of our early lectures about the whole concept of "East" and "West", and how those terms only really make sense if you live in certain parts of the world, and yet have become so ingrained in our way of thinking about the world that it's now how many people in the world refer to areas, regadless of if the term makes sense to them based on where they live. I was also struck by the fact that even when learning about and processing Japanese history, the way we frame the story in many ways skewed. For example, we learn that Commodore Perry visited Japan in 1853. But I'm sure it wasn't 1853 on the Japanese calendar. Even our different calendar/year system changes the way we view history.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I also found myself thinking about the relevance of Hong Kong to what we're learning, and how what's happening there is in many ways a perfect encapsulation of the themes and history that we're studying. Whether it's the legacy of European intevention, the conflict over forms of government and westernization, the response of a centralized government to internal dissent and crises, and discussions about where China is headed going forward, it seems to be a great connection between the past and the present. Following it in real time is also a good reminder for us, and our students when we use examples like this in class, that although things seem inevitable in hindsight when we look at them in the history books, things are never certain in the present.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

One of the things that I really enjoyed this week was getting to analyze the perspectives of the historical people in power making radical decisions. Too often in history, I think we overemphasize WHAT was done, and underemphasize WHY things were done. Both the debate that we had in class, and the reading "Fundamentals of National Reconstruction" by Sun Yat-Sen were great because the focus was on the justification behind the actions that were taken. While the fight over the direction of China under Cixi is very specific to China in that moment, the idea that there were multiple perspectives, each with it's pros and cons is one that can be applied to any number of important moments in history. Analyzing primary source documents and using them as evidence to support an argument is a skill that I spend a lot of time in class working on with students, but I've never had students practice those skills orally in a debate structured quite like the one that we did in class. I'm already thinking about how I can implement something similar in my own classroom!

As for Sun Yat-Sen, reading the "Fundamentals of National Reconstruction" was interesting as a government teacher, because it seems like an interesting mashup of the Federalist Papers (which I thought of because we're going over them in AP Gov this week) with the focus on Montesquieu, Separation of Powers, and the preoccupation with how to set up a Republican form of government, while trying to fix some of the weaknesses inherent with that type of governance, with a kind of Socialism that is most definitely NOT in the writings of Madison and Hamilton. The paper was an interesting mix of ideas, ideologies, and influences that seemed to combine both European/American and Chinese ways of thinking about politics and government in interesting ways. It made me curious to learn more about Sun Yat-Sen, and the Nationalist Party in future classes.

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I found myself in a similar position during class! I kept waiting for the familiar narrative of missionaries coming in and destroying the local culture through violence and indoctrination, thinking that at some point that was going to be the all too predictable and depressing result. I was surprised and a little thrown when that narrative did not play out in exactly that fashion, and also found myself curious to learn more about how Christianity was integrated with far less violence (or so it seems) than in other parts of the world. I would have liked to hear about how the Christian church is seen today in Korea given the past history of foreign intervention by a variety of countries and people in the 19th and 20th century, and whether that has led to any tensions in current day religion/politics in the country.

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