At the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
1. Understand the impact of the dramatic technological, infrastructural, and cultural changes to everyday life in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
2. Analyze how those changes were depicted in popular culture, focusing on an 1872 sugoroku board game by Utagawa Toyokuni IV about a race from Tokyo to Yokohama and back again.
3. Evaluate what this game can tell us about the relationship between technological modernization and cultural Westernization in Japan during the nineteenth century.
At the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
1. Understand the social and material world of the characters of the Tale of Genji and the Heian period of Japanese history.
2. Explore how the lives and motivations of the female characters from the novel intersected within the walls of Genji’s palace.
3. Analyze the role that family networks and individual agency played in establishing the social position of both men and women in Heian society.
At the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
1. Understand the relationship between author, censor, and state in the censorship systems of modern Japan.
2. Explore how censorship systems were negotiated by censor and artist alike how flexible rules and regulations could be, and what real world consequences could result from a censor’s choices.
3. Analyze censorship as both an enduring process and an evolving system that is specific to the sociopolitical concerns of a given state and society at particular moments in history.
