Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Meiji Restoration
After reading the passage in Strayer, my hypothesis changed quite a bit. Before i thought that the Japanese were oblivious to other countries ideas and did not take any into consideration. However after the reading my thesis changed a lot. I learnt that they overthrew the shogunate, and assembled a whole knew government with influence from a lot of other countries. The reason I think that I, and many other people in the class thought so before is because that the documents were created by Japanese, in other words biased and were propaganda. The textbook was written by a non Japanese so it is a lot less biased and more of the truth comes out. Now my thesis stands as such. With a lot of foreign help, the Meiji restored order in Japan by overthrowing the shogunate and assembling a whole new government.
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Roshan brings up a key point in his blog post: history depends on perspective (a.k.a historiography). In other words, a country's story and success differs from one view to another, depending from which country the story is told. Japan glorified their nation and openly declared its natural and superior success to the rest of the world. However, from another perspective, Japan inherited a lot of its industrial ideas from western powers in Europe. Evidently, the telling of history depends on perspective and can sometimes make it hard to form a central and collective thesis.
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