Summary: This is a class that I have run once so far, and is an exercise in gamification applied to modern Japanese history’s Bakumatsu/Meiji Restoration. Students collaborated to build a deck of Top Trumps* themed on figures from Japanese history, as a means of exploring the diversity of motivation and approach amongst the historical actors.
Background: Japan in 1868/9 saw the end of 250 years of continuous rule by the Tokugawa family. They were overthrown by the ‘restoration of imperial rule’, that is, the return to political centrality of the Emperor (or Tennö), a religio-political figure who had been present but marginalised under the previous polity. This event, the Meiji Restoration (Meiji Ishin in Japanese), is one of the most pivotal events in Japanese history, ushering in a phase of rapid modernisation and reform and, although perhaps not widely known, should also be seen as an important event in global history, given Japan’s singular position as a non-Western state that approached Great Power status in the twentieth century.
The Meiji restoration is inevitably one of the main focal points of a module in modern Japanese history – it’s the pivot around which the first semester of my year-long survey course revolves. However, it’s a complex event, the culmination of decades of struggle and conflict, involving a wide range of actors, such as the Tokugawa family & loyalist retainers, the Imperial house & other aristocrats, regional powers such as samurai from the Satsuma and Choshu regions, foreign merchants and diplomats, peasants, different religious and philosophical factions, and more besides. Teaching this complexity has proven a difficult task, and this class is one of my responses to the challenge.
Aim: The range of participants in the Meiji Restoration is a large one – too large to really cover in any real depth in lectures in any but a schematic fashion. Moreover, the range of different motivations and approaches taken by different individuals and groups defies simple characterisation. It’s easy to say in a class ‘this was much more complex than modernising revolutionaries taking on an conservative establishment’, but that doesn’t necessarily convey much to students. The goal of the exercise is to substantiate this claim and really make it vivid in the classroom by getting students to research figures for themselves and see the range of different approaches taken by different actors and groups.
Method: The goal of the class is to assemble a deck of Top Trumps for the major players in the Meiji Restoration. The lesson took two parts: 1) preparation and research, and 2) classroom debate.
Preparation: I put the students into pairs, and allocated each pair one of a list of the major actors in the Meiji Restoration, together with some basic readings (general and specific to their figure) to research in advance of the class. In addition to their reading, they were also asked to find an image of their actor
Classroom: The aim of the classroom session was to convert the students’ research into Top Trump cards. There are three main elements to a card:
The categories are common to all the cards, and each card/historical actor then has individual scores within the categories. The first stage of the debate was to decide upon a set of common categories for the deck of cards. I put students into small groups of 5-6, so that 3 or so of the historical actors were represented in each group.
As far as possible, I didn’t want to force categories onto the class as a whole, but let them explore what they thought critical variables were, although. Some prompting was inevitably necessary: some of them (strength of pro- or anti- Tokugawa feeling, say) were immediately obvious, but I wanted to reach towards the idea that there were some commonalities that bridged factions (for example, individuals could have a high degree of ‘loyalty’, despite being loyal to different figures or institutions).
Once we had decided on a set of categories, each pair had to score their figure for each category, and then report back their thinking to the class as a whole.
Results/observations: The exercise was well received and generated a lot of debate and activity. Some of the students were very engaged and creative.
The central idea of the flaws in simple characterisations of the major factions and their motives emerged very clearly, as did some lessons about the critical dimensions in Bakumatsu thinking.
By distributing the study of individual figures across the class, each person was able to study one figure in depth, but also gain some insights from the wider spectrum of actors, benefiting from the rest of the class in discussion.
The class proved a nice balance of classic university skills (reading, research, evaluation) with some others (creativity, teamwork) – despite the different feel to the class, it was still teaching conventional academic disciplinary material, and it was adding some more occupational skills to boot.
The preparation for the class was somewhat involved – it required me to assemble a much larger reading list than for a usual class. But this was a one-off, and also meant that I’ve done a much wider survey of this topic than I might otherwise do, so there were ancillary benefits.
As a conclusion, I used the uni print office to make a physical deck of cards to give to each student. These came out quite well and quite cheaply (except for my dodgy use of the guillotine).
* I’m not sure how well known Top Trumps are outside of the UK, but it’s a card game beloved of children, available in a wide range of themes such as football stars, off road vehicles, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Dinosaurs, etc etc etc. Players seek to use their cards to defeat those of their opponent, by comparing the scores in individual categories. For the sake of clarity, I should say that this exercise isn’t in any way tied to the company that owns Top Trumps, although I note that there is an app where you can make your own cards, so I’m working on the assumption that they don’t mind unofficial decks.
Fireflies 