Episode 646 - A Fief By Any Other Name, Part 1
What is feudalism? It's a surprisingly hard question to answer, and one that raises an interesting follow up. Here on the podcast I've been...
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History of Japan
A weekly podcast on Japanese history, covering everything from prehistory to the modern era. Additional information available at the podcast blog, at
Episodes
20 of 662 episodesEpisode 645 - The Forgotten Radicals, Part 3
This week: the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front publishes its manifesto, and spreads beyond its original four members. But after a few month...
Episode 644 - The Forgotten Radicals, Part 2
Daidoji Masashi's trajectory from college student to terrorist has a lot to do with the student movement and the New Left in 1960s Tokyo. Ho...
Episode 643 - The Forgotten Radicals, Part 1
On August 30, 1974, a bomb went off at Mitsubishi corporate HQ in Tokyo's Marunouchi neighborhood. The culprit was a group calling itself th...
Announcment - No episode this week
Heads up folks: no new episode this week. I came down with a pretty bad bug and it's put me very behind on production, plus my voice is a bi...
Audio unavailable
Episode 642 - The Hunters, Part 2
How does a matagi hunt actually work, and how has matagi culture evolved over the course of the 20th century? And finally: why is it that so...
Episode 641 - The Hunters, Part 1
Not many have heard of the Matagi, the hunters who live in northern Honshu. What do we know of their origins and history, and how do they fi...
Episode 640 - The Great Escape, Part 2
This week: the Cowra breakout seemed, to those who lived through it, like it came out of nowhere. But nothing does, so what factors led to i...
Episode 639 - The Great Escape, Part 1
In a wide-ranging episode intended just to be the introduction to the largest mass prisoner breakout of WWII, we first have to tackle...the...
Episode 638 - The Catastrophe, Part 6
At long last, the fight over how to reconstruct Tokyo is done. But what did rebuilding the imperial capital actually look like? Show notes h...
Episode 637 - The Catastrophe, Part 5
After Tokyo was burned to the ground, the battle over how to rebuild it began almost immediately. The man leading the charge--one of Japan's...
Episolde 636 - The Catastrophe, Part 4
Why did so many greet the destruction of Tokyo not with consternation, but seeming joy? The answer has to do with one of the most complex ph...
Episode 635 - The Catastrophe, Part 3
This week: the Great Kanto Earthquake was also the backdrop for one of the most famous murders of 1920s Japan, one that set the stage for a...
Episode 634 - The Catastrophe, Part 2
This week: in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, thousands of Koreans living in Tokyo were massacred by angry mobs as well as poli...
Episode 633 - The Catastrophe, Part 1
The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 was one of the most devastating catastrophes in modern Japanese history, but in English scholarship it's...
Episode 632 - The Pretender, Part 2
This week: the question of whether Hirohito would remain emperor of Japan or be replaced with "Emperor Kumazawa" was, in fact, decided befor...
Episode 631 - The Pretender, Part 1
In January, 1946, a man came to the headquarters of the American occupation government of Japan and claimed to be Japan's true emperor. Who...
Episode 631 - An Interview with Evelyn Iritani
First thing's first: I made a numbering error a few weeks back, and so to get us back on the correct count we're just going to skip episode...
Bonus episode - The Chishima Incident
We're coming up on the end of the school year here in the US and will have to briefly interrupt our normal programming. To tide you over, he...
Episode 629 - Flowering Fortunes, Part 4
Fate twists once again in Fujiwara no Michinaga's favor as an unfortunate accident of birth sees him solidify his grip on power. This week:...