Different dates, different years

[Matthew Hurwitz]

This struck me as well. I was also trying to go back and think about how centering our own American perspective has impacted even the facts that we think of as irefutable. I was struck in one of our early lectures about the whole concept of "East" and "West", and how those terms only really make sense if you live in certain parts of the world, and yet have become so ingrained in our way of thinking about the world that it's now how many people in the world refer to areas, regadless of if the term makes sense to them based on where they live. I was also struck by the fact that even when learning about and processing Japanese history, the way we frame the story in many ways skewed. For example, we learn that Commodore Perry visited Japan in 1853. But I'm sure it wasn't 1853 on the Japanese calendar. Even our different calendar/year system changes the way we view history.