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PROFESSOR: Visualizing Cultures
is a web-based history program

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which John Dower and I
started in year 2001.

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John Dower is an eminent
historian of modern Japan.

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He won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1999

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for his book Embracing Defeat.

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I approached John in 2000 when
I knew that OpenCourseWare

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was about to go up.

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And I told John that
I thought that this

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would be a great platform to
do something new with history,

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specifically to look at history,
not just from text, which

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is what historians do, but from
looking at images, visuals that

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have been produced by people
from the historical era,

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and to try to understand
what was going on.

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John suprisingly said
yes, and so we started.

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We didn't quite know what
we were doing at first,

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but we got very lucky
with our first unit, which

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is Commodore Matthew
Perry's arrival in Japan

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in 1853, to open up Japan, which
had been essentially isolated,

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closed, for 250 years.

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And so you have America and
Japan come clashing together

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in this one moment in history.

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And from that, this explosion
of images from both sides--

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Americans depicting
the Japanese,

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and Japanese depicting Perry
and his men and his ships.

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It's just wonderful.

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And what's really interesting
is that when you look at images,

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you get to see things that
you cannot get from written

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material.

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We found lots of images where
the Japanese were really

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curious about Perry's men and
drawing costumes, instruments,

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weapons in minute
detail, and with notes

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to go along with them, showing
just sort of sheer curiosity.

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Who are these people?

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How do they live?

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How do they talk?

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And you saw the same
thing on Perry's side.

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Perry brought his
own artist, Heine,

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who was a 26-year-old artist
trained in Germany in sort

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of the romantic style.

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He just fell in love with Japan.

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You can tell that in the images.

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He absolutely fell in love
with this beautiful country,

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so much so that
he would sometimes

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paint himself into the picture,
interacting with the Japanese.

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And so what you got
was this one artist

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depicting Japan in a
very beautiful, very

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affectionate way.

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And that's what Americans saw
of Japan for the first time.

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This is why even to this
day, in this country,

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you have this image of Japan
as very beautiful, very

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beautiful nature.

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It really originates
with Heine's paintings.

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And so we very much
follow the OCW principle

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of not only making it
available and open and free,

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but that everything is
licensed under Creative Commons

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so that these images, which we
got from about 200 museums--

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and these are major museums.

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Boston MFA, Sackler
in Washington,

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Hong Kong, British Museum--

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we asked all of them
to sign an agreement

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that we could present
their images on Visualizing

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Japan on OpenCourseWare
under Creative Commons.

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And so anyone coming in and
studying Visualizing Cultures

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can take images and copy them,
distribute them, alter them

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into their own material and
use them however, they wish.

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One of the populations that
we really wanted to work with

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were schoolteachers.

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And so we did many, many
workshops over the years,

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and we trained face-to-face
around 2,000 teachers.

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I say we.

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We worked with a wonderful group
out of University of Colorado

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that specializes in creating
East Asian curriculum

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and working with
teachers directly

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to help them to incorporate
them into their classroom.

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And so they ran these series of
workshops all over the country.

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And as far as I know,
it's still being used.

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So high school teachers,
university professors

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tell us that they're using
it on a regular basis.

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A couple of years
ago, a university

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had an opening for assistant
professor in Japanese history,

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and they had four finalists.

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And they asked them how do
you teach Japanese history.

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And three of them
apparently said

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they used Visualizing Cultures.