To all my Japanese history colleagues out there working on syllabi: may I suggest you include some articles from the rich archive of JJS? Here are some of my favorites. And remember to link students to the database! I’m teaching Edo history this semester so let me start there.
One of the best is Mary Elizabeth Berry’s “Public Peace and Private Attachment: The Goals and Conduct of Power in Early Modern Japan” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/132388). Berry’s essay is the perfect segue from medieval to early modern and is a great way to get the students reading scholarly prose rather than textbook prose.
Follow Berry’s effervescent essay with Fabian Drixler’s piece, “The Politics of Migration in Tokugawa Japan: The Eastward Expansion of Shin Buddhism,” which beautifully introduces the students to a number of themes in Edo history (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/609384/). Drixler exposes us to regional diversity, religious trends, maps and demographic data, and the very fundamental reality that people were on the move in early modern Japan for reasons of labor, family, and other social forces.
I also recommend Amy Stanley’s essay “Adultery, Punishment, and Reconciliation in Tokugawa Japan” as a perfect entryway into the politics of gender, marriage, and state regulation of the family (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25064722). Stanley’s piece contains compelling (and all too familiar in the age of #MeToo) stories as well as a new perspective on power and social justice under the Tokugawa that students will enjoy.
Contrast this with Kiri Paramore’s essay “The Nationalization of Confucianism: Academism, Examinations, and Bureaucratic Governance in the Late Tokugawa State,” which paints a very different picture of the state (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41337597).
And two articles to help end the semester: first, David Howell’s “Foreign Encounters and Informal Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan” (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549042), and second, Laura Nenzi’s “Portents and Politics: Two Women Activists on the Verge of the Meiji Restoration” (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/465140).
MORGAN PITELKA