Modern Japan: Samurai to Superpower

During the spring of 2024, students in the Modern Japan: Samurai to Superpower class experimented
with narrative histories to explore the development of modern Japan across time and space. In doing
so, they discovered that narrative histories are themselves an argument about what happened in the
past. What aspects of society are important to histories of modernization? What do individual stories
mean in larger contexts? What does the experience of Japan have to do with a larger, modernizing
world? All of the narratives created for this class were drawn from the same class materials, but, as
you can see from the projects below, they prove that there is no single story of modern Japan.

In this project, students used a combination of Microsoft Sway, Timeline JS, and StoryMap JS to build
their interactive narratives. Tutorials were taught by Lab Assistant Annemarie Christiansen and
Dr. Jen Andrella.