Participants in this course will use a focus on gender to explore important aspects of Japanese social history. The course introduces theoretical issues as well as covers a broad sweep of the past, starting in prehistoric Japan and stretching up until the Meiji Restoration. We will go back to the early period of Japan's history to discover the beginnings of those cultural institutions and characteristics which are still operative today, influencing behavior. We will read from various Japanese sources (in translation), consider theories that claim that that Japan was originally a matriarchy, and try to understand how by the time the histories were written it had become sexist, and in what ways