From Female Emperors to Keyboard Warriors: Teaching Premodern Japanese History in a Digital Information Age

As digital mediums enable greater access to formal and informal sources of information, most of our students encounter representations of history through online platforms long before they enter our classrooms. Whereas anime, games, and other entertainment-driven images of Japan may bear some expectation of fictitious or fantastical adaptations of the past, news media and social media present greater challenges for students attempting to determine the credulity of content and its ties to historical realities.

Using examples of topics in premodern Japanese history that have been overlooked, misrepresented, or outright manipulated in contemporary popular media, this talk will discuss how and why addressing these issues in the classroom is of critical importance to teaching students fundamental skills in source evaluation, ethical writing practices, and the dangers of presentism. I address two related topics: the history of premodern Japanese female emperors and the rhetoric of “medievalism” in extremist communities in and beyond Japan. Whether resulting from ignorance or malicious intent, the (mis)representation of Japan’s premodern world that we now encounter in everyday spaces generates an important opportunity to demonstrate to students the transregional and transtemporal implications of how the past can be mobilized in the present, sometimes to malicious ends.