Modern Japanese Social History: Deciphering through Social Groups and Markets, 1868–1914

2022/07/28

The Faculty of Economics at Keio University has a subject called "Social History." I do not know of any other faculty of economics where "Social History" is established as a specialized subject. I do not have the space to discuss this in detail, but I believe this is a very good thing. However, since I am the instructor for that subject, this claim might need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Now, this book was written based on the lecture notes for one semester of this "Social History" course. Setting the time and space as Japan from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, I attempted to realize the totality required by the nature of the subject under realistic constraints by presenting its structure as holistically as possible. I rearranged topics individually handled in economic history, political history, education history, etc., by passing them through the axis of "markets and social groups."

There had been a plan to turn this lecture into a book for some time, but the catalyst that made it a reality all at once was the shift to online lectures in the 2020 academic year. At first, I even had to worry about the amount of communication data. If the lecture content is turned into text, the data volume becomes much smaller than video streaming. Thus began a life of writing one chapter of text every week and sharing it with the students.

Of course, I also did audio streaming. While supplementing the content every week, I introduced some comments from the students and replied to them. This was surprisingly well-received. Some said it was good to be able to encounter the reactions and thoughts of other students even without being in the classroom together. Needless to say, the students' comments helped improve the quality of the text.

This can hardly be called an ingenuity that takes advantage of the unique characteristics of being online. It was like a radio program introducing letters from listeners based on a text, a kind of thing that survived the crisis by retreating to old media. However, considering that there are many historical examples of disastrous consequences of trying to use a crisis as an opportunity for transformation, I pride myself that the fact that the lecture content culminated in this book in the very classical form of a "paper book" is, to say the least, not "disastrous."

Modern Japanese Social History: Deciphering through Social Groups and Markets, 1868–1914

Yusaku Matsuzawa

Yuhikaku

284 pages, 2,640 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.