The four half-century phases of modern Japanese history

November 9, 2012 6:30 PM (finished)


Professor Ronald P. Dore

(London School of Economics)

Date/Time November 9, 2012 6:30 PM
Location Room 549 5th floor, Akamon Sogo Kenkyuto Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo  [map]
Abstract A crude periodization of Japanese history according to salient preoccupations that would doubtless give real historians the horrors. 1. 1790-1840: Endogenous economic growth and increasing sophistication of intellectual and aesthetic culture 2. 1840-1895: Coming to terms with the dominant West 3. 1895-1945: The disastrous challenge to Western dominance 4. 1945-20??: The willingly prolonged American occupation 5. 20??-2050: Coming to terms with a dominant China, Most of the talk will be about the probabilities and possibilities of the last phase.
Bio Ronald Dore learned Japanese during the war and has spent most of his life studying Japanese society and economy. Much of his writing has been concerned with what comparison with Japan can tell one about third world development, and about the problems of education, industrial relations and corporate governance in the OECD countries. He has taught at London, University of British Columbia, Sussex, Harvard and MIT in departments of sociology, history and political science. Two collections of his writings have been published, Social evolution, Economic Development, Culture, Change: What it means to take Japan seriously (Edward Elgar, hb and pb. 2001) and Collected Writings of Ronald Dore (Routledge-Curzon 2002). In the last decade he has taken to writing polemical books in Japanese on corporate governance, work, foreign policy and nuclear proliferation.