Japanese History tutors, lessons & classes

Japanese history is one of the world's longest continuously documented national histories, and a serious student is reading across roughly fifteen hundred years of written record. The arc begins with the eighth-century compilations Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720), the foundational texts of the Yamato court that combined origin myth, dynastic genealogy, and historical chronicle into a single narrative for the emerging Japanese state. It runs through the Heian aristocratic culture (794-1185) that produced the world's first novel in Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari and Sei Shonagon's Makura no soshi, through the Kamakura and Muromachi shogunates and the warring-states sengoku period of the sixteenth century, into the long Tokugawa Edo peace (1603-1868) and the Meiji restoration (1868) that transformed Japan into a modern industrial state in a generation, through the imperial expansion of the early twentieth century into the Asia-Pacific War, and onward through the postwar Showa, Heisei, and Reiwa decades. A student studying Japanese history with a tutor is being taught to read across that arc with the apparatus that the academic field of nihonshi (Japanese history) has developed over the past century and a half, in dialogue with the English-language Japanology tradition built by scholars like Edwin Reischauer, Marius Jansen, Carol Gluck, and Andrew Gordon.

This page is a subject-tutoring specialty rather than a language one. Tutors teach the historical material in English by default, and language preparation is a separate track on the broader Japanese classes roster. A reading knowledge of Japanese is helpful for advanced work with primary sources but is not assumed for most students, and the Anglophone scholarly literature is deep enough to carry an undergraduate or general-reader student through the major periods without it. Where students do read Japanese, tutors can work bilingually on selected primary texts, on excerpts from the major chronicles, on Meiji-era political writings, or on contemporary historiography. The standard reference English-language overview is Andrew Gordon's A Modern History of Japan; the major reference encyclopedia is the Cambridge History of Japan in six volumes; the standard biographical reference is the Iwanami Nihonshi jiten.

The periodization the field uses, and the one a tutor will introduce in the first weeks, runs as follows. The Asuka (538-710) and Nara (710-794) periods, when the centralized Yamato state took shape under heavy borrowing from Tang China: Buddhism arrives, the Taika reforms restructure landholding, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki are compiled, the capital is built at Nara on a Chinese grid. The Heian period (794-1185), when the court moved to present-day Kyoto and the Fujiwara regents dominated politics: court culture flourished, vernacular Japanese literature emerged, Buddhism developed the Tendai and Shingon schools, and the warrior class began to consolidate. The Kamakura (1185-1333) and Muromachi (1336-1573) shogunates, when warrior government replaced court authority, Zen Buddhism arrived from China, and the Onin War (1467-1477) tipped Japan into the warring-states sengoku period. The Azuchi-Momoyama era of unification under Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1568-1603). The Tokugawa Edo period (1603-1868), when the shogunate enforced sakoku (the closed-country policy), urbanized Edo into the largest city in the world, and produced the Genroku cultural flowering of Saikaku, Chikamatsu, and Basho. The Meiji period (1868-1912), when the restoration of imperial authority opened the country to Western institutions and Japan industrialized at unprecedented speed. The Taisho (1912-1926) and early Showa years, when democratic experiment gave way to militarism and the Asia-Pacific War. The postwar Showa (1945-1989), Heisei (1989-2019), and Reiwa (2019-present) decades, when Japan rebuilt under Allied occupation, became an economic power, weathered the post-1990 stagnation, and entered the present.

A serious reading list for an undergraduate-level tutorial runs across that arc with depth in two or three chosen areas. Heian aristocratic culture rewards a student with Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari (in Royall Tyler or Dennis Washburn's English translations, or in the original for advanced students), Sei Shonagon's Makura no soshi, and Ivan Morris's The World of the Shining Prince for the cultural background. Medieval warrior culture is anchored by Heike monogatari (the Tale of the Heike, the chronicle of the Genpei War, translated by Royall Tyler), Karen Brazell's edition of the Noh drama tradition, and Andrew Goble's work on the Kamakura period. Tokugawa Edo opens through Conrad Totman's standard one-volume Japan Before Perry, through David Howell's work on social order, through Mary Elizabeth Berry's work on Hideyoshi, and through Eiko Ikegami's The Taming of the Samurai. The Meiji transformation runs through Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan, through Carol Gluck's Japan's Modern Myths on the construction of imperial ideology, and through Albert Craig's work on Choshu. The wartime decades open through John Dower's War Without Mercy and Embracing Defeat, both essential reading. Postwar Japan is anchored by Andrew Gordon's A Modern History of Japan and by Sheldon Garon's work on social management. For a one-volume entry across the whole arc, Conrad Totman's A History of Japan, second edition, is the standard general-reader option.

The historiographical traditions a serious student should know about run in two streams. The Japanese-language nihonshi tradition built up across the modern period in the historical departments of the imperial universities (especially Tokyo and Kyoto) and the postwar reconstruction of historical writing under figures like Ishimoda Sho and Toyama Shigeki. The English-language Japanology tradition built by Edwin Reischauer at Harvard, Marius Jansen at Princeton, Carol Gluck at Columbia, Andrew Gordon at Harvard, John Dower at MIT, and the broader postwar generation of American Japanologists trained partly through the Allied occupation. A tutor in this specialty will name the historiographical schools as they come up, point out where a particular interpretation comes from a particular tradition, and help a student read primary sources with the appropriate critical apparatus rather than as standalone documents.

Most students who come to Japanese history tutoring at Strommen fall into a few recognizable groups. Undergraduates preparing for or supplementing a course in Japanese history at a US college. Graduate students in adjacent fields (literature, religion, art history, political science, international relations) building reading depth in Japanese historical context as background for their primary work. General readers with serious interest in a particular period (often Edo, often the Meiji transformation, often the wartime years, often Heian aristocratic culture), who want a tutor to walk them through a sequenced reading list rather than navigating the literature alone. AP World History and high school students preparing for advanced placement or for college-application portfolios. Independent scholars writing books or articles in adjacent fields who need historiographical depth on a particular Japanese chapter. Each of these arrives with different background and different goals, and a working tutor calibrates the syllabus to the student in front of them.

A few honest tutor observations on where Anglophone students typically stall in Japanese history. Names and dates do not come up first; the field has reasonable overview literature in English and most students arrive with chronological scaffolding. The deeper friction tends to come from three places. The first is the assumption that pre-modern Japan can be read through Western categories: feudalism, the early modern, the renaissance. The categories sometimes fit and often do not, and a tutor spends real time disentangling what the field has decided about each. The second is the discontinuous record on certain topics (popular culture in the Tokugawa period, women's history before the modern era, the experience of non-elite populations in any period), where the sources are thinner and the historiography is younger. The third is the difficulty of reading wartime and immediate postwar history without prior framing: the field has had decades of revisions, controversy is alive, and the primary sources require careful contextualizing. And one pleasure rather than a trap: Japanese history has produced some of the finest narrative history writing of the last fifty years in any language, and a reader who reaches Dower or Gordon or Jansen finds work of real literary quality.

The Strommen Japanese history tutors include PhDs and ABDs in Japanese history from US graduate programs, current college instructors and lecturers teaching Japanese history in the LA-area university and college network, Japan-trained academics with degrees from Tokyo, Kyoto, or other major Japanese universities working in Los Angeles, and one or two specialists in particular periods (Heian literature, Tokugawa social history, Meiji intellectual history, the wartime years) who teach this material as part of their professional practice. Each tutor's bio describes their training, their period of specialization, and what they most like to teach. Most students begin with a free 30-minute trial so the tutor can see what they have already read, what they want to read, and what level of engagement they are bringing to the work.