- HIST 2718 History of Japan Through Cinema

Course Credits: 3
Asian Studies Major/Minor Course
Asian Studies Graduate Certificate

Semester(s) Offered

• Spring 2025

Catalog Description

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Japan produced some of the world’s most acclaimed films. Directors like Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ichikawa and, of course, Miyazaki, created unforgettable portrayals of Japanese life across the ages. This rich corpus of dramatic films provides an opportunity for students of history to explore Japan’s past through the medium of modern film. This course seeks to use careful and contextualized viewing of a selection of Japanese films as a way to understand key issues in the history of the late medieval, early modern, and modern periods in Japan, roughly covering the years 1500-1990. Among the issues we will explore: the changing role of the samurai in the late medieval and early modern periods, women and the “floating world” in early modern culture, the modernization of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the devastation of war in the 1930s and early 1940s, the postwar recovery in the 1950s-60s, and the downside of prosperity in the 1980s. All the films we will watch were made by Japanese directors, in Japanese but subtitled in English.

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