A thematic treatment of Japanese history from ancient state formation to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, this course covers a variety of cultural and political topics. Features a particular emphasis upon cultural heterogeneity differences and tensions between the different status groups: aristocrats, samurai, clerics, peasants, merchants - and also upon gender constructs and sexuality/s. Students are encouraged to reflect upon issues of historiography such as: the pitfalls of linear narrative histories; how the Japanese past has been constructed by scholars and to what ends; and the extent to which interpretations of the past are the products of our present.

By the end of this course students will have developed a more critical and sophisticated understanding not just of Japan's 'history' (if by that term we mean its past: past political institutions, cultural forms and traditions, changes and continuities in these over the centuries, and so on). The focus on the historiography of Japan should encourage in students an awareness that the two, history and historiography, are inseparable.