i highly recommend taking this class with professor duthie. he is extremely knowledgable about everything he lectures about and cares about his students. i liked the structure of the class because it was very manageable. no midterms or finals, one 500-700 word essay about the readings due every friday and you are allowed to submit revisions during week 5 and week 10 on essays you want to do better on. there are no assignments or lectures on week 5 and 10 because he wants students to focus on exams for other classes. lectures can feel a little long sometimes but everything is recorded. i skipped lectures sometimes (lol) but had no issues doing the assignments because the readings have all the information you need. the readings were the most annoying thing about the class because it was around 30 pages per week but it was still VERY manageable and pretty interesting. very easy GE for being 5 units.

Favorite Professor so far and as a whole a pretty easy class (weekly essay based wholly on the lectures which the TAs grade). Make sure to go to TA discussion and establish a rapport with your TA as well!

TLDR: Prof Duthie is very aware most of the class is there for the GE and aims the class towards that student - the class is relaxed and as long as you dont completely slack on assignments an A is pretty easy.
Textbook-wise, don't bother getting paying for the most up to date one - there is a PDF of the combined "chinese and japanese history" version and with a little bit of work its pretty easy to find what pages are required.
If you are looking to take this as a GE and have any interest whatsoever in Japanese history definitely take this class. The workload of this class is super relaxed. Your entire grade is based of 10 weekly 700 word essays that are best looked at as "lecture and reading summaries" for the week. Most of the content you will be writing about will be summarized for you in the discussion sections and the TAs were super helpful in explaining what they thought was important to write about. You also get a chance to re-submit all of your papers in the midterm week and finals week for a regrade up to a max of 95.
Lectures were relatively engaging, I would say for most the first few weeks might feel a bit dry but the course definitely gets better. The low stress assignments made lectures feel more like an hour long documentary every week and the readings were really not that much work (lowkey not even super necessary as the TAs will be mostly focusing on the content from lectures).
You get a week off lecture in week 5 so you can focus on your revisions and your other midterms which is a nice touch.
Side note - while this wont affect future classes, the way Professor Duthie dealt with the strike is indicative of his vibe - he simply asked that people submit the remaining essays and as long as it did not look like it was simply copy-past from wiki, it would be given a generous grade based off past performance.

in this class, your entire grade is based on 10 500-700 word assignments (pretty much synthesis essays) due every friday on that week's content. these are super reasonable to do and if you need help figuring out which things are important to include, discussions are on friday so ur ta can help u out (once u get used to it/if u are rly opposed to friday discussions they aren't actually mandatory so dw ab showing up). u can also do revisions for all of them but ull probably get used to it after like 3. lectures are recorded and honestly i prefer doing them online so i can watch on a faster speed. professor is super knowledgable and is a pretty interesting lecturer (he always includes some cool tidbits that are obviously too niche to include in the assignment but still fun to learn ab) but also bc of that his slides aren't the clearest. this makes sense tho bc the assignment is for u to determine how to weave a cohesive narrative from the information he gives u. one of my favorite things ab the professor is how he manages to articulate historical nuances -- history isn't clear cut but he takes that into account so u get a well rounded view of the situation. would love to take another class w him fs

This class is hard now but when I took it it was really easy. Would not recommend anymore :/

This class is one of the three classes that I have taken at UCLA and I already know this is going to be one of the easiest things I take in my four years here. The class consists of two boring ass lectures that I payed maybe 20% attention to just to copy down what it says on the slides, and one discussion every week where your TA tells you exactly what to write on the weekly assignments. These weekly assignments are 500-700 words on some topic from that week's lectures. There are no finals or midterms. During those weeks there aren't even lectures, discussions, or regular assignments. Rather, there are revisions that you can do on your past 4 assignments to bring your grade up. I maybe spent 5 minutes MAX on each revision and at least received at least a 5% bump in my grade. Now, I don't go to lectures and just copy down the zoom slides. I make sure to go to discussions, but I didn't have one last week and the assignment was still absolutely light work. Take this class because it's easy. It is most definitely not interesting considering the amount of people asleep during this teacher's boring ass lectures that might as well be a wikipedia article put onto slides.

You don't really need the textbook, you just need to take notes on the slides, but the lectures are all recorded, so you can do that all asynchronously.

Professor Torquil was a very nice man. He did get a little boring sometimes and there were times when I didn't see the point in learning what we were learning (maybe I lacked the passion for the things we were reading, who knows). He's very knowledgable about old Japanese culture and is very passionate about the material that he teaches, which is great.

I took Japan 110A and 172 with him. Both were hard classes that I had to work hard in, but I ended up with A's in both. Classical Japanese is hard to learn in general, but it's good to know if you're seriously interested in Japanese culture. Likewise for 172; the literature gets weird sometimes but it reveals a lot about Japanese culture that, in the long run, proves to be insightful. They're not exciting, glamorous classes, which was honestly the only downer.

this is regarding the A portion of the class in the A/B series. you're supposed to study both grammar AND classical texts in this class, but in lecture he barely goes over the grammar (maybe about 10 minutes) and you're supposed to learn a new chapter of grammar for every single class. the rest of the class is devoted to translating the assigned texts. i wish he'd teach the grammar more because it's very difficult, rather than spending almost the whole time on the text, which you can look up translations for and explanations online.

When I took this course freshman year, it was his first time teaching it. Even so, he did a great job! The lectures were interesting and he mixed it up a lot so there were videos too. The material was not hard, just memorize what's on the midterm and final review sheets and you'll get a good grade. What you put in will reflect your grade in the class.