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.