HIST 335C - The Politics of Space/Place in Modern Japan

(Same as ANTH 335c.) This travel course will explore Japan through history and anthropology to uncover the specific politics of different places: museums, temple complexes, and Tokyo Disneyland. The class will analyze how memory and memorialization play key roles in the built environment. Memory is shaped by personal and communal identities and popular understandings and interpretations of the past. It also has prompted a sense of nationalism, both during and after the Pacific War. So too have myths been an inherent part of Buddhist institutions and their dual roles as spiritual centers and sites for capital accumulation. Tokyo Disneyland acts as a place for mass consumption, but also as a space to highlight Japanese uniqueness vis-à-vis the Western world. Through onsite visits to various sites such as: Hiroshima Peace Museum and Peace Memorial to evaluate various ways in which memorialization occur in a Japanese context; and Yasukuni Shrine and Yushukan to contextualize the military history of Japan as institutionalized in its national spaces; and Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, founded in the 770s, is a World Heritage Site, to reveal how a religious space was used and how it has changed over time into a tourist site; and Tokyo Disneyland to understand the ways in which Japan and the West have been reconstructed, post-war entertainment for a Japanese audiences. Students will make an in-depth examination of the politics of these sites, as their primary source data, through historical and anthropological approaches to produce scholarship demonstrating an understanding of the history of these places/spaces and the ability to make social-science informed arguments. Letter grade. With consent, this course may be repeated for credit. (Offered summer session.) 3 credits