• BE ORGANIZED AROUND A SPECIFIC THESIS STATEMENT 
• INCORPORATE SPECIFIC ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES DRAWN FROM THE ASSOCIATED ASSIGNED READINGS
• INCLUDE APPROPRIATE ANNOTATION (AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES CITED) CREDITING THE SOURCES FOR YOUR ILLUSTRATIONS.

CONSIDER ONE OF THE FOLLOWING FOUR POSSIBLE TOPICS IN YOUR JOURNAL ENTRY: 

Under Neo-Confucian political, social and economic principles adopted after 1600, the agricultural peasantry in Japan played a key role in assuring the successful (economic) maintenance of Tokugawa power and authority in exchange for which the state provided the administrative apparatus needed to assure local and national peace, stability and order. 

1. In light of this critical inter-relationship, what measures did the regime undertake to assume and assure control of the peasant majority?  How extensive were these efforts?  How initially accomplished?  How effective?  What responsibilities did the state also assume to assure revenue sources emanating from peasant economic productivity?  How did the state carry out its responsibilities towards local communities?  What recourse did peasants have if the state failed to live up to its part of the bargain?

  
2. To what degree did rural life during the Tokugawa period continue to reflect, relatively unchanged, the influences of past religious, social, economic, cultural and political patterns, values, practices and institutions? 

  
3. Beyond the impositions of the state on rural life, how and to what extent did external forces beyond the village impose themselves on peasant life after 1600, influencing patterns and institutions at the village level as framed within the changing context of the "larger world" outside the village?

  
4. During the two and one-half centuries of the Military-Bureaucratic era, how did peasant life change despite Tokugawa attempts to maintain the status quo?  Did these changes undermine or strengthen Tokugawa centralized control over rural affairs?  Why / why not?  How, if at all, did they contribute to the eventual downfall of the regime?  What consequences from modernization changes introduced during these centuries are still present in present day Japan?