午夜剧场

The Faculty of Economics at 午夜剧场 offers a course titled "Social History." I am not aware of any other Faculty of Economics that offers "Social History" as a specialized subject. While I do not have the space here to discuss the details, I believe this is a very good thing. However, since I am the instructor for that course, you may need to take this claim with a grain of salt.

This book was written based on the lecture notes for one semester of this "Social History" course. By setting the time and space as Japan from the late 19th century to the early 20th century and presenting its structure as holistically as possible, I attempted to achieve the wholeness required by the nature of the subject under realistic constraints. I rearranged topics that are individually handled in economic history, political history, and educational history by passing them through the axis of "markets and social groups."

There had been a plan to turn these lectures into a book for some time, but the catalyst that made it a reality all at once was the shift to online lectures in the 2020 academic year. At first, I even had to worry about the amount of communication data. If I turned the lecture content into text, the data volume would be much smaller than video streaming. Thus, a life began where I wrote one chapter of text every week and shared it with the students.

Of course, I also did audio broadcasts. Every week, while supplementing the content, I introduced some of the comments from the students and replied to them. This was surprisingly well-received. Some said it was good to be able to encounter the reactions and thoughts of other students even if they weren't in the classroom together. Needless to say, the students' comments helped improve the quality of the text.

This can hardly be called an innovation that takes advantage of the unique characteristics of being online. It was like a radio program that introduces letters from listeners based on a script, the kind of thing that survives a crisis by retreating to old media. However, considering that history is full of disastrous consequences from trying to use a crisis as an opportunity for transformation, I take pride in the fact that the lecture content culminated in this book—a very classical form known as a "paper book"—which is, to say the least, not "disastrous."

Yusaku Matsuzawa

Yuhikaku Publishing

284 pages, 2,640 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.