Episode 426 - The City on the Edge of Forever, Part 5
Added 2022-02-18 20:42:00 +0000 UTCThis episode was a challenging one to research because of how much there was to cover; three decades of persecutions and the attendant history is simply a great deal of information to unpack, particularly when trying to do so in a way that respects the sheer human loss involved. Ultimately, I decided to frame the middle of the episode around the story of Antonio Korea as a way to provide some clarity on what these years looked like in Nagasaki, but there's a lot that didn't make it into the final script as a result.
I did find it very interesting to see that actual intensive persecution of Japanese Christians (as opposed to people who hid priests) took a few years to get going. I had assumed, before doing this episode, that no distinction was drawn from the jump. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of clarity around why this was; perhaps it was a strategic decision, or perhaps it was related to Hasegawa Gonroku, the governor for most of these years who appears to have had something of a distaste for violence (given that he seems to have been inclined to avoid killing people where possible).
There'll be one more episode using some interesting material I had to cut (on apostate Christians during this time period), but that's it for this time period for a bit. We're going to range around to some very different eras of Japanese history after this.
