I took this class last minute for a GE as a P/NP. It was easy and I only attended the discussion. My TA gave us study guides for the test, and if you studied that enough your test grade was fine. I had to study a lot for the final (over the period of a day). If I had just attended lectures, no studying, I would have been fine. If you attend the lecture and try even a little bit in the discussion, you could probably get an A.
One thing I did not think about when taking the class, is that I have zero knowledge/understanding of the Japanese language so everything sounded like jibberish to me making memorization way harder. The people in the class with me who knew a bit more of the language found it way easier than I did.

Selling textbook for the class (text me **********) as of Dec. 2018

HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS GE. It may not be the class with the least workload since you're expected to submit a response to a prompt about the week's lectures every week (10 assignments total). However, you can resubmit all of them for a better grade so it's not that stressful or intimidating once you get used to it. Professor Duthie is an incredibly amazing lecturer and well-versed in Japanese history. He was also really considerate of the circumstances and he and the TAs offered late submissions with no penalties as long as you let them know. Overall, it has been one of the most interesting history GEs I've taken. The only downside I could see from this is that going to lecture is necessary to get an A so you really do have to go (sections are optional though).

I also recommend taking the course with TA Suong, she grades within a day of the deadline with feedback and is super lenient. Her sections also basically tell you what to write about and her notes are really helpful and detailed.

I am selling the textbook for $10, contact me @ **********.

This class was an easy and interesting GE. The professor was definitely passionate about the topic and knew his stuff. I often had difficulty paying attention in class and retained information better when rewatching the recorded videos at 2x speed outside of class. Attendance is not required/necessary and there is definitely no need to get the textbook. Also, there is no class during midterms week which was nice. There were also no tests/projects/quizzes. The only grades in the class were the weekly assignments. The weekly assignments were pretty easy, usually asking a pretty broad question from the week's lectures. I'm pretty sure you had to write 500-700 words per assignment. They were not graded too harshly. Discussions were not mandatory but definitely were helpful as the TAs basically went over the entire prompt/what you should include.

I love Professor Duthie and his class, I would 100% take again. I found his lectures to be interesting, but I will admit that he does basically read what is on the slides most of the time. Overall I found the workload manageable, you have to do a 750 word essay every week by Sunday making sure to cover the topics he outlined in the assignment, but basically it’s a summary of the history covered that week. I think this class heavily relies on what TA you get, my TA was Rachele Mansi and she told us what she wanted us to include in our essays and did a recap of the lecture/reading for that week during discussion so I found it easy to write the essays. I liked the class and the topics covered, Professor Duthie makes the class engaging, and he does assign reading from the textbook each week but most of the time it’s not needed because he covers the topics in class. Easy enough GE.

One of the best classes I've taken. Duthie is an amazing professor that made me wish I majored in Japanese so that I could take more classes with him. No tests, no papers, only review assignments that can be written from the lectures and are only 500-700 words. An absolutely amazing class, this is one of the easiest GEs you can take which covers a great amount of information. Please take Duthie!

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 :/