日本的世界观：200年来的变化Japan's View of the World: Two Hundred Years of Change

This session draws on a short book by Marius Jansen, general editor of The Cambridge History of Japan: Japan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change. It takes three slices of time, the Tokugawa shogunate, the Meiji Restoration, and the years around the Second World War, and explores how the Japanese of each era understood the world, how that understanding changed, and what it meant for Japan's later development. Although the topic sounds vast, the approach is very concrete: for each era Jansen picks a less famous figure and, starting from that person's own experiences, shows how the Japanese of the time perceived the world. This session will focus relatively more on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some questions worth exploring: Before the modern era, how did the Japanese view the Chinese and European powers? How did Japanese intellectuals view Chinese culture? How did they see their own place within the Chinese cultural sphere? Why, under the Tokugawa shogunate, did a small group of Japanese know Dutch and translate a large number of Western scientific works? Did their work have any influence on the upheavals Japan later went through? After the Opium War but before the arrival of the Black Ships, was Japan aware that the world was changing? What did they do about it? Why, after the Meiji Restoration, did the core leadership choose to leave the political centre and tour the world for more than a year? What did they do, and whom did they meet? Did this affect the course the Meiji Restoration later took? How did Japan, rising after the Meiji Restoration, rethink its position in East Asia? How did Japan's understanding of the world change after the war? How do the Japanese see the effects of the US bases, the security treaty and Article 9 of the constitution on Japan today?