Course Description

This course introduces various currents of thought in modern Japan. Ideas cannot be studied without studying the historical context or thinkers who advocated them. Every effort will be made to introduce the historical background and the lives of individual thinkers, for to concentrate on ideas alone would result in a highly abstract and insipid course. The period covered in the spring semester is from the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate through the outbreak of World War I.