Episode 442 - The Transistor Salesman
Added 2022-06-17 20:33:34 +0000 UTCThis episode and the following two have their genesis in a scrapped episode topic that morphed into something very different. I was initially planning an episode on the "Sanyu Incident," as it's called, a very abortive attempt to organize a right-wing anti-government coup in the winter of 1961. I quickly discovered there wasn't a lot of material to actually work with on the subject, mostly because the coup plot was quickly uncovered and broken up. But Nick Kapur's Japan at the Crossroads was one of the few books to cover it at all, and in the process of doing the initial research I decided that Kapur's ideas could form the backbone of some really interesting episodes.
This is the first result; the second will be next week, with a postmortem of the post-1960 Japan Socialist Party. The final episode will be on right wing terrorism in the early 1960s, an extremely interesting subject that (to be frank) I knew very little about. Together, I think these episodes will do a good job showing just how much 1960 as a year helped shape a lot of what postwar Japan became.
Hopefully you found this an interesting start to that discussion! I'd like to do a few more biographies similar to this, because I think they provide a very strong narrative throughline for a story. Enjoy!
