{"id":579,"date":"2009-03-23T19:17:31","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T00:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/japan\/?p=579"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:59:15","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:59:15","slug":"fields-and-periodization-yes-again-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2009\/03\/fields-and-periodization-yes-again-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Fields and Periodization (yes, again)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Vanke, now blogging at The Historical Society&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/histsociety.blogspot.com\/\">THS Blog<\/a>, was looking for some guidance on how to properly divide up the history of the world into fields of study. He <a href=\"http:\/\/histsociety.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/surveys-of-fields.html\">laid out a very ambitious world-wide agenda<\/a>, including Japan and China fields, and asked for feedback. His original Japan fields were: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ancient and Medieval<\/li>\n<li>Tokugawa<\/li>\n<li>Meiji and 20c<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I said (and this is just the Japan stuff; you can read the whole thing at THS Blog, or just the China stuff at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/2009\/03\/fields-and-periodization-yes-again\/\">Frog:C<\/a>).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In Japanese historiography, the roots of the &#8220;Tokugawa settlement&#8221; and early modern society have been pushed back into the Sengoku (Warring States), sometimes as far back as 15th century, and very little Meiji scholarship &#8212; outside of political science &#8212; doesn&#8217;t acknowledge the fundamental continuities across the 19th century. If I had to put dates on a three-field split for Japan, I&#8217;d probably use 1550 (high Sengoku, before the unification begins) and 1890 (the Meiji Constitution). (if you want to do a modern\/premodern thing, a lot of &#8220;Modern&#8221; textbooks start in 1800, so you could use that, but I prefer 1700.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jeff&#8217;s reply was <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I actually considered 1853, and was ignorant of 1890&#8217;s significance. For the transition to Japanese modernity, I favor 1853 over 1890. Is that reasonable? If I make only one break between 1550 and the present, how would you rank 1800 vs. 1853 vs. 1890? (1700 is only 33% of the way from 1550 to the present. And the fields should correspondent in part to plausible sequenced undergrad courses.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Good questions, I said, and <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A lot of Japanese histories and courses do break at 1853 still, though the old Toynbeesque stimulus-response model which informed it is pretty much defunct. There&#8217;s a lot to be said for that, though, since the period of relative isolation is certainly qualitatively different from the globally engaged era. My main complaint about that is the teleology: it makes modernity seem too inevitable, natural. I think the early Meiji &#8212; which is a period of experimentation, struggle and drama &#8212; makes more sense if you observe the Tokugawa-Meiji transition from the Tokugawa side rather than as the whiggish prelude to Imperialism, etc. (To be completely clear, I&#8217;m not accusing you of whiggishness, teleological thinking, etc.; it&#8217;s the historiography shaped by these break-points, much of which is still, unfortunately, embedded into the master narratives of Japanese history.)<\/p>\n<p>Constitutionalism changes things. Not right away, always, but there are also good economic and social\/cultural reasons to see the late Meiji as much more a part of the 20th century than the 19th. It makes international comparison more interesting, tends to reduce the Japanese exceptionalism in the narrative.<\/p>\n<p>1800 (or 1700) is a good transition point really only if you&#8217;re doing a 2-part sequence; if you have the freedom to do three parts, either of the later breaks make more sense. My three-part sequence is heavily influenced by the UC-Berkeley department&#8217;s division, which I replicated for a time (I&#8217;ve given it up because I don&#8217;t have a large enough student population to fill my Japan\/China courses if I subdivide them too much) and by my own training which took the 19th century as a unit more often than not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jeff has taken my advice on the 1550 break point, but decided that he didn&#8217;t want to span the Restoration divide, so he&#8217;s going to use 1853, which I think is fine. Perhaps the periodization question just isn&#8217;t as fluid in other areas, but I&#8217;m hoping that some more people <a href=\"http:\/\/histsociety.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/surveys-of-fields.html\">join the discussion soon<\/a>!  It&#8217;s nice to see a Europeanist taking World History as seriously as this, especially someone at THS &#8212; as much as I love <i>Historically Speaking<\/i>, it&#8217;s got a pretty strong Western center and not much World (outside of some of the more theoretical stuff). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeff Vanke, now blogging at The Historical Society&#8217;s THS Blog, was looking for some guidance on how to properly divide up the history of the world into fields of study. He laid out a very ambitious world-wide agenda, including Japan and China fields, and asked for feedback. His original Japan fields were: Ancient and Medieval&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[166,119,129,63,191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-english","category-historiography","category-japan","category-pedagogy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-9l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5539,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions\/5539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}