Episode 444 - The Crysanthemum Taboo
Added 2022-07-01 18:45:59 +0000 UTCThe first thing I should say about this episode is that I did labor to try and find an actual copy of Furyu Mutan to read, but had a hell of a time doing so--fortunately, I was able to find an article summarizing the text, but one of these days I want to try and find a copy (especially a decent translation, because oh lord it would be interesting to teach that).
This was a bit of a challenging episode to put together because it required a deceptive amount of coverage--I had initially intended it to just be an episode on the Shimanaka Incident, but quickly found that little of the intensity of the reaction around the incident made sense without some discussion of the rise of the ultraright in Japan more generally. Striking a balance here was hard; far more than any episode I've done recently I ended up spending a lot of time 're-editing' by trying to move pieces of the outline around to see if it worked better one way or another. It just goes to show, I suppose, that you can never really tell which episodes will be straightforward and which ones will end up being a challenge.
Finally, I had planned to do a whole separate episode on the San'yu Incident (the abortive right wing coup of late 1961) but there's just so little to it that I ended up scrapping the idea. It might be something I'd return to in a newsletter or something like that, though...
