Japan in the Twentieth Century
A Virtual Exhibit of Student Projects at the University of Hong Kong
about
The course JAPN2089, “Twentieth Century Japan: History, State, and Society,” offers a broad historical survey of Japan and its society throughout the twentieth century. Its focus is on gaining a deeper understanding of the key social, political, economic, international, and cultural changes that have transformed Japan during this time period and made it what it is today.
This project is intended as a way of reflecting, as a class, on the larger issues that Japan has faced during the twentieth century. Student teams are asked to consider different aspects of this tumultuous time in Japanese history, draw connections between them, and assess their meaning for the past and the present. With teams choosing their own topics and developing their own interpretation, the exhibit as a whole demonstrates the many different ways in which we can understand Japan in the twentieth century. It further offers a collective interpretation of the history that Japan made, and thus serves as a starting point for reflection about what Japanese modern history means today.
For the assignment, teams of two students are asked to first choose one decade of the twentieth century, and from within this decade, pick two events, two inventions/innovations, and two primary sources. Every poster contains the work of one group: short texts about the events, inventions, and primary sources that they picked, accompanied by images. A longer text places the six items into the larger historical context of the decade and offers an interpretation of their meaning and significance.
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When I taught the course for the first time in 2015, the students' work was printed on posters and exhibited in the university library; however, as physical exhibits are necessarily restricted in time and space, I decided to make student work more permanently visible, to a larger audience. The idea of this website was realized while I taught the course again in 2016. Differences in formatting and layout between the two cohorts result from the different conceptions of the initial exhibits.
projects 2015
In 2015, students submitted the texts and images of their projects, and I created a unified layout that was then printed on banners for the exhibit in the library. For reasons of space, the bibliographies were not included on the banners. Please contact me if you would like to know the sources of any of these projects.
Tangible exhibit: the posters at the HKU library, December 2015
projects 2016
In 2016, the exhibit project was conceptualized as a virtual exhibit from the beginning. Students created the layout for their projects themselves; therefore, every project looks different. In some cases, students were unable to find images for their events, inventions, or primary sources in the public domain; in these cases, no images were included. Image credits and sources are given in the bibliography.
Just like in 2016, the exhibit in 2018 was created as a virtual one. Students created their own layouts for the projects, at times also arranging the texts in creative ways. If students were unable to find images in the public domain, no image for the section was included. Image credits and sources are given in the bibliography.
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projects 2018
Disclaimer: The posters (PDF files) on this website are the work of students of the JAPN2089 classes in semester I of the academic years 2015/16 and 2016/17 and in semester II of 2017/18 at the University of Hong Kong. They have been published with the consent of the student authors. All responsibility for the content of the posters lies with their authors. All responsibility for the remaining website content lies with myself.
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Contact me: bibi dot schneider at gmail dot com