Louise Young

Louise Young is Marilyn B. Young WARF Professor of Japanese History. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including Fulbright, Japan Foundation, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching interests include social and intellectual history, Japanese imperialism, the Asia-Pacific War, and postwar Japan. She is the author of the Fairbank Prize-winning Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (University of California Press, 1998) and Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan (University of California Press, 2013).

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University
M.A., Columbia University
B.A., University of Wisconsin–Madison

Books

Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan

Louise Young. Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan. University of California Press, 2013.

In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute “the city” took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining four second-tier cities: Sapporo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and Okayama. As prefectural capitals, these cities constituted centers of their respective regions. All four grew at an enormous rate in the interwar decades, much as the metropolitan giants did. In spite of their commonalities, local conditions meant that policies of national development and the vagaries of the business cycle affected individual cities in diverse ways. As their differences reveal, there is no single master narrative of twentieth century modernization. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, but rather co-constituted through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and beyond.

Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism

Louise Young. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. University of California Press, 1998.

Selected Publications

• “The Breakdown in Democracy in 1930s Japan,” (pdf) in When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse from Ancient Athens to the Present Day, eds Archon Fung, David Moss & Odd Arne Westad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, 1-35.
• “Past and Present in Japanese Historiography: Four Versions of Presentism,” (pdf) in Forum: History and the Present, Modern Intellectual History (2022), 1-18.
• “When Fascism Met Empire in Japanese-occupied Manchuria,” (pdf) in special issue on Axis Empires: toward a global history of fascist imperialism, Journal of Global History, Vol.12, no. 2 (June 2017): 274-296.
• “Rethinking Empire in the Twentieth Century: Lessons from
Imperial and Post-imperial Japan,” (pdf) in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, eds., Andrew Thompson and Martin Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• “Urban Life and the City Idea in the Twentieth Century,” in Handbook of Modern Japanese History, eds., Christopher W.A. Szpilman and Sven Saalar. London: Routledge, 2017.
• “Japan’s New International History,” (pdf) introduction to AHR Forum: Early- Twentieth-Century Japan in a Global Context, American Historical Review, 119, 4 (October 2014): 1117-1129.
• “Ideologies of Difference and the Turn to Atrocity: Japan’s War on China,” in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937-1945, eds., Roger Chickering, Stig Forster, and Berndt Greiner. London: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• “Japan at War: History-writing on the Crisis of the 1930s”, in The Origins of the Second World War, Reconsidered (Rev. ed., Routledge 1999).
• “Marketing the Modern: Department Stores, Consumer Culture and the New Middle Class in Interwar Japan”, in International Labor and Working-Class History (No. 55, Spring 1999)

Advisor To

• Emir Karakaya
• John-Coahle Merryfield
• Edwin Pietersma

History Courses

• History 104 – Introduction to East Asian History: Japan – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)
• History 200 – Historical Studies: The Atomic Bomb in American and Japanese History – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: How Do Empires End? Defeat, Occupation and Post-Imperial Japan
• History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: Japan After 1945: Cold War Asia and the Atomic Age – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History 455 – Japans Modern Century, 1853-1952: Rise & Fall of the Imperial State
• History 456 – Japan and World War Two in Asia – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
• History 500 – Reading Seminar: Japanese Imperialism – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
• History 500 – Reading Seminar: The Atomic Bomb in American and Japanese History – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• History 600 – Militarism and Fascism in Japan – Syllabus 2007 (pdf)
• History 600 – Japanese Urbanism – Syllabus 2011 (pdf)
• History 680/690 – Honors Thesis Colloquium
• History 703 – History and Theory
• History 710 – Professional Development Seminar – Writing Dissertations and Grant Proposals – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History 725 – Seminar in East Asian History: Postimperial Japan and Asia – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
• History 855 – Historiography of Modern Japan – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
• History 855 – Theory/History/Japan – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 855 – Modern Japan as Chronotope – Syllabus 2017 (pdf)
• History 952 – The Atomic Bomb in American, Japanese & Global History – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)