History of Japan

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, Confucianism is a historical relic, and the samurai class are in the midst of being consigned to the dustbin of history; so what is Koume thinking and doing as she's watching the world she grew up with vanish in the final years of her life?

Show notes here.

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 ears. How did the family finally make it to the top, and what was it like for them to watch the shogunate and the samurai class itself implode?

Show notes here. 

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 can we learn about the lives of samurai and commoners in Wakayama during the final decades before the great crises that would end feudalism in Japan?

Show notes here.

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 is going to be all about framing her life--what do we know about her upbringing, and about the city she grew up in during the twilight years of Japanese feudalism?

Show notes here.

This week, we wrap up our series on Hiroshige with a few lingering questions about his career. How much does his "artistic borrowing" really matter? What's his relationship to Hiroshiges II and III? What about his second marriage and daughter? And ultimately, what makes him so damn famous--and what can we learn from that?

Show notes here. 

This week, we're covering Hiroshige's emergence as an artist, which took 20 years after he finished his apprenticeship in the Utagawa school. Why the long gap? And what changed to finally allow him to break out artistically?

Show notes here.

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 off this week with a general discussion of the world of ukiyo-e during the late 1700s before moving into Hiroshige's early life and his entry into the world of woodblock printing. 

Show notes here. 

This week on the podcast, something completely different! I'm getting some help talking about poetry from Mike Freiling, whose new translation of Hyakunin Isshu, entitled One Hundred Poems of Old Japan, will be out just a little over a week from now. We'll talk tanka vs. haiku, how translation works, and share a few favorites from one of Japan's most classic poetic compilations.

Show notes here. 

Our final episode in this miniseries brings conspiracism in Japan to the present day, as we discuss a wave of antisemitic conspiracy theorists from the 80s and 90s and the impact of the internet on conspiracism in Japan and around the world. Finally, we'll look at how things stand today, and go over some final thoughts on conspiracism in general.

Show notes here. 

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 during the postwar era by right-wing politicians and even members of the American occupation government. That conspiracy would, in turn, help shape both prewar and postwar politics on a profound level.

Show notes here. 

This week, conspiracism takes a new twist in Japan, from paranoid worries about Christianity to paranoid beliefs in "Western encirclement". How did this new form of conspiracism help drive Japan's descent into fascism, empire, and eventually the self-destructive decisions of the Second World War?

Show notes here. 

This week, we explore the "Christian conspiracies" of Edo Period Japan. Working backwards from the Osaka Incident of 1827, when a group of supposed Christian spirit mediums were uncovered as a part of a fraud investigation, we'll look at how Christianity was transformed from an actual religion into an evil spiritual threat to the foundations of Japan itself.

Show notes here. 

Japan's "Christian Century" is the source of many fascinating aspects of Japanese history, from modern firearms to tenpura. But there's one more way that the century from 1543-1639 shaped Japan--as the source of its first conspiracist moment!

Show notes here. 

This week, something a bit different: the start of a history of conspiracy theories in Japan. This first episode is mostly framing: what is conspiracism as a mindset, and how is it different from actual conspiracies? 

Show notes here.

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 becoming very much its own thing--and, for a decade  or so in the 1960s and 1970s, dominating the Japanese box office.

Show notes here. 

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 ninkyo eiga. This week: what do we know about early jidaigeki, and how do they fit into the wider history of early Japanese film?

Show notes here. 

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 very different direction from the other yokozuna before him (or at least, from most of the other yokozuna before him). Plus some final thoughts on sumo today.

Show notes here.