Good thread, but I’d add that more important than studying conflicts is understanding the biases and preferences that underwrote how those actors approached those conflicts, which means studying political theory and institutional culture, and there’s even less of that in English https://twitter.com/beijingpalmer/status/1288283276898074630

And another thing - Japan’s military history from ~1200AD-1905 is pretty well known here (so much so that I’m sick of looking at topknots on every NHK historical drama), but there’s not much, let’s say, meaning to what happened, beyond maybe samurais-were-cool-and-war-is-futile

Which is to say that to unpack a lot of the meaning from these conflicts, foreign observers would have to do it themselves which means unpacking what happened from a foreign lens which gets problematic

Now obviously that shouldn’t stop the effort from teaching non-western history - having more stories and perspectives is intrinsically good - but we (westerners) also need to be careful about how we engage with those histories and take meaning from what happened

God knows I’ve tried this with Japan’s approach to political philosophy and most Japanese analyses are either “yeah we got nothing” or “here’s 15 nuanced varieties of neoconfucianism”