Japanese Empire Week 1 Reading Response

The foundation of intellectual inquiry is based on close reading and note-taking. The ability to concisely summarize and evaluate content is a difficult skill to master, and practicing it will help improve the quality of your work in this course.

Students will upload a 1-page single-spaced reading response (450-600 words) [Word file] to our Google Classroom on that week’s readings by TUESDAY, 11:59pm.

It should include the following four items:

(i) A concise summary of the authors’ arguments.

(ii) The authors’ methodological approach and use of sources.

(iii) An explanation of the strengths and weaknesses of the readings.

(iv) 2-3 questions for class discussion.

THESE ARE THE READINGS

Kirsten Roebeck, Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics From Empire to Cold War (2025): 1-91.

Introduction: “Sex, Race, and Rebirth,”; CH 1: In Praise of ‘Mixed Blood’: Imperial and Racial Expansion in Asia and the Pacific, 1895-1944″;

CH 2: “Biologizing Defeat: Racial and Sexual Anxiety Amid Imperial Crisis, 1937-1945.”

Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 (2011), “Introduction”: 1-31.