What do you think as "The classics"? The "The Republic" and "Meditations" paired with the plastic figures we saw in politics and ethics textbooks, the "Analects" and "Records of the Grand Historian" with their impressive crowns, the "Eiga Monogatari" and "Azuma Kagami" if not the "Kojiki". There may be those who say "The Social Contract" or "Self-Help".
There are many commentaries on these "The classics", and there are also websites like "Quick Reference". Above all, if you read them in a normal way, you will be swallowed up.
In this class, therefore, we will steadily read important historical (but short) texts that everyone seems to have read but has not, or pretends to have read, and we will all think about their implications. There are no commentaries or 'quick-understand' websites. Only the intellectual work of the participants there are.
The subject matter will be the documents that have influenced modern and contemporary Japan from the opening of the country to the present. We would like to discover new possibilities of "Classics and Modernity" by reconsidering what this country has thought and when from a modern perspective.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)