In “What Happens When the Dutch Show Up,” Nadia Kanagawa discusses how the resilience of commonly-held beliefs about early modern Japanese foreign relations and encounters with Europeans are perceived by different student bodies and strategies for adapting to challenging classroom environments. J. Elijah Bender tackles balancing student excitement, misconceptions, and teaching nuanced histories of the samurai in “Bushidō or Bust.” He addresses the role educators play as mediators of received knowledge and how they can engage with many of the more resilient forms of warrior mythos embedded in popular culture in and beyond the classroom. Finally, in “From Female Emperors to Keyboard Warriors” Paula R. Curtis speaks to digital representations of premodern history in modern day media to highlight the importance of teaching students digital literacy and how seemingly innocent omissions as well as malicious misrepresentation of the past can shape our everyday historical knowledge. Together, these papers demonstrate how the premodern history of Japan (and other places around the world) is anything but the distant past; rather, it is an important tool for teaching students information literacy, the contested nature of myths and memory, and the contemporary stakes of constructing and understanding historical narratives.