 Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Christopher Kurtis, I'm the historian of Japan here in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. One of the modules that I teach during Term 1 each year is Early Modern Japan. It's a lecture-based class with discussion-oriented tutorials. It's aimed at helping you better understand the period in Japanese history when the samurai ruled the country. It's not a military history module, not at all. Instead, we'll examine the history of early modern Japan in regional and global contexts, from the rise of Tohugali Ieyasu, the man who reunited the archipelago in the 1590s, to the start of the modern Japanese Empire in the 1890s. We'll explore the social and political contexts of modernization, industrialization, and the establishment of overseas empire, from the First Sino-Japanese War to the initial stages of Japan's economic and political modernization. It's a lot of reading, but you'll be asked to consider historical narrative alongside film, literature, and maps, as a means of examining the simultaneous transformations that defined early modern Japan.