Study Abroad Application Required
In 1867 Kusakabe Tarō (1844-1870), a samurai from Fukui, left Japan to study at Rutgers. He was followed by dozens of Japanese students who studied at Rutgers College and Rutgers Grammar School during the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, in 1870, Kusakabe’s mentor and friend, William E. Griffis, a Rutgers alum, was invited to teach Western-style education in Kusakabe’s hometown, Fukui. He was the first of many Americans who crossed the sea to discover their role in rapidly modernizing Japan. This seminar examines a crucial moment of early U.S.-Japan relationship and cultural exchange focusing specifically on Rutgers students and alumni. Through extensive reading of primary, secondary, and visual sources, students will learn to critically examine the diverse perspectives through which the encounter was experienced, remembered, and told. The course ultimately explores how cultures meet, conflict, and achieve mutual understanding and appreciation. It also examines how cultures may be misrepresented or redefined during the process. Assignments consist of using primary sources and prints from the Rutgers’ own William E. Griffis Collection and the Zimmerli Art Museum.
About Professor Wakabayashi
Haruko Wakabayashi is a cultural historian of 12th-16thcentury Japan. She received her B.A. in Japanese Studies from Sophia University, Tokyo, and her Ph.D. in Japanese History from Princeton University. Her interest lies in the social, cultural, and intellectual development of medieval Japan, and the use of visual sources in the study of history. She is currently working on medieval Japanese perceptions of natural disasters, and how these views were framed to serve various social and political circumstances in the late twelfth century. She has also been working on medieval images of the foreign Other. Meanwhile, as a historian raised in a bicultural and bilingual environment (Japan and the U.S.) and having attended a Catholic international school in Yokohama, she has been intrigued by the history of early cultural encounters between Rutgers and Japan.
Her recent publications include The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (2012, University of Hawai’i Press) and “Disaster in the Making: Taira no Kiyomori’s Move of the Capital to Fukuhara” (2015, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 70, No. 1). She has taught Japanese history, religion, and art history at Princeton University, the University of Alabama, and at Sophia University, International Christian University, Meiji Gakuin University, and the University of Tokyo in Japan.