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A weekly podcast on Japanese history, covering everything from prehistory to the modern era. Additional information available at the podcast blog, at www.historyofjapan.wordpress.com
We're starting a new series taking a look at an oft neglected classic of Heian literature: The Eiga Monogatari, or Tale of Flowering Fortune...
This week: in 1988, a Japanese company bought a paper mill in Port Angeles, WA, in a story that basically nobody except one reporter from th...
This week: rumors swirled around Port Angeles for decades after WWII that a Japanese man, Osasa Masaru, who had lived there from 1930-39 was...
This week: what role does a sleepy town in Washington's Olympic Peninsula play in Japan's history? Well, more than you'd think. We'll look a...
This week: how does the Taiheiki depict its most famous characters? How does it describe the downfall of the Hojo? And from that, what can w...
The Taiheiki is arguably one of the most dismissed works of literature in Japanese history, doomed to always exist solely in comparison to t...
This week: the manga industry during World War II. Plus some thoughts on the development of shojo manga, and finally a look at Tezuka Osamu...
Histories of manga tend to skip from the colorful woodblocks of the Edo period directly to the post-WWII industry we'd recognize today. But...
This week: manga is today one of the most ubiquitous forms of entertainment in Japan. But the idea of comics as we might understand them has...
This week, we're tackling the most legendary samurai in Japanese history: Miyamoto Musashi. Why is he so famous, what do we actually know ab...
This week, we cover how the legend of Yoshitsune as told in Gikeiki describes his demise. Which is how his tale ends, unless of course you k...
This week, we come to the text that more than any other helps build the Yoshitsune legend: Gikeiki. Here, at long last, we see the legend of...
This week, the Yoshitsune legend finds its legs with Heike Monogatari--one of the most epic works in Japanese history. Except that while Yos...
Note: I made a mistake recording this episode but did not have time to go back and fix it. It's episode 614! This week, we're starting a thr...
This week, we're covering one of the most titanic names in Japanese literature--Natsume Soseki--and the work that propelled him to fame. How...
This week: Japanese Manchuria comes crashing down as a combination of poorly planned colonial policies and a worsening war situation see imp...
This week: some reflections on the hollow nature of Manchurian "independence", and on what kept the state going if so few of its own residen...
This week on the podcast: the Japanese presence in Manchuria was never particularly large, even at its height. So how did Japanese rule in M...
In the last episode of 2025: a bomb "mysteriously" goes off just outside Mukden during the evening of September 18, 1931. Less than six mont...
As Japan enters the 1920s, national policy becomes increasingly liberalized--but Manchuria remains a holdout of extremists who, if anything,...
This week: Japan's military and civilian leaders find themselves at a crossroads in Manchuria in the 1910s, as views begin to split around w...
This week: after the Russo-Japanese War, Japan inherited a rather unusual arrangement in Manchuria, which would become the basis of its empi...
This week, we're turning our attention to possibly the most unique of Japan's colonial ventures during the imperial era: Manchuria. Most kno...
For a long time, the bureaucracy--in all its elitist, meritocratic glory--has taken a great deal of the credit for Japan's postwar economic...
This week: the Meiji Bureaucracy, in all its glory. How did the system actually work? What sorts of people did it attract? And what happened...
In America, when we think of bureaucracy, it doesn't conjure the best associations. In Japan, meanwhile, the bureaucracy has a long history...
One of the questions I get asked a lot is about grad school: what's it like, who's it for, what applications are like, and so on. But I've b...
Here we are again, my friends! It's been two years since our last Q and A, and now it's time for a new one. Thank you all for your questions...
This week, we're talking about one of the oddest moments of the final years of feudalism: a spontaneous outbreak of dancing and religious wo...
This week, we're finishing our time with Kawai Koume by looking at how life in Wakayama had changed by the mid-1870s. Feudalism is no more,...
This week, the Kawai family has finally made good in the world of feudal Wakayama--just in time for that world to come down around their ear...
After a long hiatus, the diary of Kawai Koume picks back up in 1853, a year of absolutely no world-shaking importance in Japanese history wh...
This week, we'll look at the first chunk of Kawai Koume's diary, which deals with life in the 1830s--or as she knew it, the Tenpo Era. What...
This week, we're starting a new miniseries focused on the life of Kawai Koume, a samurai woman living in Wakayama in the early 1800s. Today...
This week, we wrap up our series on Hiroshige with a few lingering questions about his career. How much does his "artistic borrowing" really...
This week, we're covering Hiroshige's emergence as an artist, which took 20 years after he finished his apprenticeship in the Utagawa school...
This week, we're starting a new miniseries on the life of one of the most famous artists in Japanese history: Utagawa Hiroshige. We'll start...
This week on the podcast, something completely different! I'm getting some help talking about poetry from Mike Freiling, whose new translati...
Our final episode in this miniseries brings conspiracism in Japan to the present day, as we discuss a wave of antisemitic conspiracy theoris...
This week, we're covering the postwar "Red Scare" in Japan, which has roots going back to the early 20th century but which was boosted durin...
This week, conspiracism takes a new twist in Japan, from paranoid worries about Christianity to paranoid beliefs in "Western encirclement"....
This week, we explore the "Christian conspiracies" of Edo Period Japan. Working backwards from the Osaka Incident of 1827, when a group of s...
Japan's "Christian Century" is the source of many fascinating aspects of Japanese history, from modern firearms to tenpura. But there's one...
This week, something a bit different: the start of a history of conspiracy theories in Japan. This first episode is mostly framing: what is...
This week: we take a look at the genre of the yakuza movie, or ninkyo eiga, which started off as a branch of the samurai film genre before b...
This week: we take a look at postwar samurai film/jidaigeki in order to understand better the trajectory of the most influential genre in th...
This week, we're starting a history of the most famous genre in the history of Japanese film: the jidaigeki, and its related genre of the ni...
This week: we wrap up the miniseries with the end of Akebono's career, as the first gaijin yokozuna takes his post-dohyo trajectory in a ver...
This week: Akebono becomes a yokozuna, and finds himself burdened with new expectations on and off the dohyo. Plus, a brief foray into pay a...
This week: in the span of just a few years, Akebono goes from a rookie in sumo to one of its most prominent names, and alongside Konishiki o...