The Modern Japan History Association is delighted to be sponsoring the 2025 MJHA Distinguished Annual Lecture, which will be given by Andrew Gordon (Harvard) and is titled "After the Pandemic: Revising a Textbook and Rethinking History." A talk abstract is below.

Our flagship annual event, the Modern Japan History Association's Distinguished Annual Lecture recognizes the achievements and contributions of a foremost scholar in the field of modern Japanese history, as voted on by MJHA members. Each scholar in the field can give the lecture only once.

The Lecture is scheduled for Monday, September 15, 2025 from 7:00-8:30 pm ET (Tuesday, September 16 from 8:00-9:30 am JST). This Zoom lecture is free and open to the public. Advanced registration is required.

As E.H. Carr famously wrote in 1962, to write history is to engage in an unending dialogue between the past and present. This talk will try to give specific life to this well-worn but still important claim. I will introduce the internal dialogue through which I have considered and rethought the Japanese past since the mid-1990s in the process of writing and rewriting A Modern History of Japan. I will briefly touch on key revisions in the second, third, and fourth editions, and discuss in greater depth my planned revisions for a fifth and final forthcoming edition. The present moment of relevance here is the COVID pandemic which has led me to rethink, or (more honestly put) to for the first time seriously consider the history of disease, medicine, and public health as core aspects of the modern history of Japan.