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Episodes from History of Japan
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. How did his time at Hōsei University set the idealistic young man on a collision course with the ideologies of "anti-Japanism", and from there to embracing…
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 the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front - Wolf Cell. This week: how did this radical movement grow out of Japan's 1960s, and what does it have to do with the wider…
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 many today seem to think the matagi will be extinct themselves before too long? Show notes here.
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 fit into our knowledge of premodern Japan? Show notes here.
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 it? How did the breakout itself play out? And what are its legacies, both in terms of Australia-Japan relations and the wider question of Japanese "fanaticism"…
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 history of Japan-Australia relations all the way up to 1940 and the role Australia played in Japanese militarist thought. Show notes here.
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 here.
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 foremost bureaucrats--would become so frustrated with the experience that it would crush him completely. In the process, the fight would reveal some deep…
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 phenomenon in the history of modern urbanism, and with the history of Edo's transformation into Tokyo and all the modern vices that came with it. Show notes here.
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 seismic shift within the nation's political sphere. This week: who was Ito Noe, and how did her murder in a time of national emergency reflect a shift in…
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 policemen and soldiers. What animated the survivors to engage in such horrific violence, and how does it reflect both the wider history of the Japan-Korea…
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 often overshadowed by the destruction of the Second World War. This week we'll kick off a multipart series on the quake and its legacy with a simple question:…