The first reading for the semester was an overview of the land of Japan itself. Perhaps the most important and basic fact is that Japan sits along the meeting of several tectonic plates. This leads in turn has led to the formation of the mountains that dominate much of Japan. I would expect these mountains to play a major role in how Japanese history unfolded, acting as natural barriers and obstacles for expansion or military action. More basically, the mountains dictate where the population centers are, or rather where they are not. The text points out that much of Japanese society lives on coastal plains, where farming is more easily done.
Another key feature of Japan that the text points out is the natural disasters. Once again owing to the tectonic plates sitting beneath them, the Japanese islands experience massive earthquakes as well as tsunamis that are a result of offshore earthquakes. Additionally, the islands include several volcanoes. All of this leads to a land that can be deadly on a large scale and would have been completely unpredictable to the people of Japan for most of its history. I would expect this to have a direct impact on the traditional cultural attitudes of the Japanese people; indeed, the reading attributes the sense of fatalism that is present in Japanese society to these natural disasters.
The second reading of the week focused on what made society in general, specifically pre-industrial society. The article investigated how a society was born out of a collection of equal farmers, especially how control was born. The suggestion of the article was that supervising agriculture would be first separation between worker and boss. This dichotomy would then expand into a working class and a class (or at least set of people) who defended the workers from outside threats. While I do not feel qualified to state whether or not this is the way society is indeed created, it is a very interesting angle to see Japan through. My understanding of traditional, medieval Japan is one of feudal society where the military class ostensibly protected the working class. Additionally, the text points out the issue that the people in power will always have the ability to extort more goods out of the workers without the workers able to do anything about it. This again is an interesting angle to view Japanese history through, as it could lead to an investigation of how strains created by the top aristocracy could seriously damage the society as a whole.
Barnes, Gina. “Japan’s Natural Setting”. In Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850, edited by Karl Friday. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2012.
Crone, Patricia. Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. London: Oneworld, 2015.
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