Department of History

I have begun a project to study the modern history of the noh theater in Japan.  How did a medieval theater form that was closely associated with the feudal order before the Meiji Restoration revive itself in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries?  My study will look into such subjects as the relationship of the leading schools of noh actors to Japan's royal family and to the newly created imperial mystique. I am also involved in a study of industrial policy in late nineteenth century Japan.  In the 1880s, a debate broke out over whether to develop  the economy  through top-down reliance on the transplantation of  Western heavy  industry  or through reliance on the rice-roots modernization of pre-existing industries such as sericulture, tea, and agriculture in general.  If the central planners had not won out in 1885-6, would Japan’s economic and even political development  have taken place in a more open and democratic way?