Japanese History
A major center of East Asian studies in Middle America, the University of Illinois offers one of the most respected and innovative graduate programs in Japanese history in the country
The graduate program emphasizes the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, grounding historical analysis within a general understanding of theoretical and historiographical issues. Within the U of I Library, the largest at any US public university, we have the support of a fine East Asian Library collection containing over 200,000 books and journals in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, our program offers a broad range of courses and research topics, ranging from cultural history, ethnicity, and identity, and intraAsian relations in the Tokugawa period to problems of nationalism and citizenship in contemporary Japan. The program has its major strengths in the cultural and intellectual history of Japan from 1600 to the present, especially in relation to issues of national and ethnic identity.
In addition to the Japanese language program offered on campus, the University of Illinois offers opportunities for advanced language study in Japan. UIUC is a member of the Consortium governing the Interuniversity Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama, where students often spend a year of advanced, intensive language training as part of their graduate training.
Core faculty in Japanese history
Ronald P. Toby specializes in premodern and earlymodern Japan. Toby's current research focuses on notions of ethnicity and identity, at the intersection of cultural history and international relations: His main current project examine the ways Japanese of the early-modern era constructed and reproduced ethnic and cultural identity through representation of the Other - peoples beyond Japan's borders, border peoples like the Ainu and Ryukyuans, inner aliens like the eta (pariahs), etc.and asserted difference from Other in popular culture. A corollary project investigates the representation of the spatial boundaries of Japan in early modern mapping practicesthe margins of what are "Japan" and "the Japanese" in both official and popular representation. He is particularly interested in issues of visual representation and iconography, and the problem of reading the visual as text. He has written widely, in both English and Japanese, on the history of Japanese-Korean relations in the early modern era, on the international roots of Japanese ideology and politics, on popular culture, identity and ethnicity, and on credit and banking in early-modern Japan.
Selected publications include State and Diplomacy in Early-Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Princeton University Press, 1984; Stanford University Press, 1991); Gyoretsu to misemono (Asahi Newspaper Company Publishing, 1994, coauthor); "The Indianness of Iberia and Changing Iconographies of Other," in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart Schwartz (Cambridge University Press, 1994) 323-351; "Kinsei Nihonjin no etonosu ninshiki" (Early-modern Japanese ethnic consciousness), in Yamauchi Masayuki & Yoshida Motoo, ed., Nihon imêji kôsaku: Ajia Taiheiyô no toposu (Interimplicated Japanese images: The AsiaPacific topos). (Tokyo University Press, 1997): 122132; and "Imagining and Imaging 'Anthropos' in Early-modern Japan," in Visual Anthropology Review, 14, 3 (Spring-Summer): 1944.
Sho Konishi, also specializing in Japanese History, will be joining the History Faculty in the Fall of 2005.
Other Faculty with an interest in Japan include
- Botond Bognar (Architecture)
- David Desser (Cinema Studies)
- David G. Goodman (Modern Japanese Literature)
- Kimiko Gunji (Japanese Arts)
- Emanuel Pastreich (Tokugawa Literature)
- David Plath (Research Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Cultures)
- Brian Ruppert (Japanese Religions)
- Koji Taira (Economics)
- Ronald Yates (Journalism)
Weblinks to Japanese History and Culture Sites
General Indexes and Information
- Japanese Studies Resources Guide (From Duke University: A superb guide to bibliographies, articles, manuscript collections, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. If you only look at one site this should be it.)
- Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at U of I
- Stanford Japan Guide
- Japan Information Network
- Japanese Studies Resources
- Japan Information Network
- Japanese Art
- Japan Text Initiative (full text translations of works of Japanese literature)
- Japan Foundation
- Japan Foundation Asia Center
- Library of Congress Japan Documentation Center
- AAU/ARL Japan Journal Access Program
- A Reader's Guide to the Arts of Japan
History, Maps
- Library of Congress Japan Page (highly recommended)
- National Museum of Japanese History
- Tea Ceremony at UIUC
News and Current Information
- Washington Post Japan Page
- Yomiuri Newspaper
- Asahi Newspaper
- Japan Documentation Center
- The Japan Foundation
National Research Institutes
- Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties
- Nara National Research Institute of Cultural Properties
- The National Language Research Institute
- National Institute of Japanese Literature
- International Research Center for Japanese Studies
- Historiographical Institute: The University of Tokyo