Welcome, all, to another newsletter; let's dive into it!
Japan in the News: Japan as Number...Three?
The news out of Tokyo this week is depressing but not unexpected; the International Monetary Fund has announced a forecast that Japan's nominal Gross Domestic Product will be overtaken by that of Germany before the end of the year. Speci...
2023-10-27 16:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostHello, beloved patrons! I have an exciting announcement to share with you all.
For a very long time I've gotten requests to do episode transcripts; unfortunately, because of the way I organize my notes for recording, it's not that easy to do them off the bat. However, thanks to your generous funding, we've finally been able to put aside some money and time for putting them together.
Obviously, with almost 500 (!) episodes, it's going to take a while, and there are a few cave...
2023-06-09 18:52:08 +0000 UTC View PostShow notes here.
This was one of the most challenging scripts I've done in a while, chiefly because keeping it focused was tricky. I'm always weary when dealing with military affairs of the tendency to slip into impenetrable jargon (something I had a LOT of trouble with in terms of my sources for this episode). I wanted to keep things accessible and big-picture focused because I t...
2022-09-09 17:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostThis episode has its genesis in work I did for my dissertation, way back in the day. I'd initially considered doing some research on the SDF, both because it's a very understudied topic in English and because (frankly) the Japanese government hands out most of the funding for Japanese history research and for some reason they have never been too keen on funding work on the prewar military after about 1920. Ultimately, I decided I did want to focus on the prewar era (which in retrospect proved...
2022-09-02 17:17:18 +0000 UTC View Post
This was one of the most challenging scripts I've done in a long time, primarily because Matsuo Taseko's life is actually rather well documented (not to mention all her various and sundry biographies) and so deciding what to include was actually a pretty substantial challenge. Ultimately, I decided to focus primarily on her pre-1862 life and her activities in the Bakumatsu era because I figured that would be the main area of interest for most listeners. However, there's a lot more out there--...
2022-08-26 16:32:41 +0000 UTC View PostPatreon's link support appears to be broken again, so the link to the episode and show notes is here.
Hirata Atsutane is another one of those figures--like Fujiwara no Teika-- I've been meaning to get to for some time now. Obviously, Hirata's approach to kokugaku was pretty influential during the late Edo period, as all the language from that time about revering the emperor m...
2022-08-19 17:03:59 +0000 UTC View Post
So, one fun factoid about this episode: as I was going through books to pick up to do research with my generous patreon funding, I realized that the most comprehensive biography of Fujiwara no Teika was written by Paul Atkins. Which was fun, because I actually know him personally: Atkins was my classical Japanese instructor back in the day. I still have the first lines of Hojoki memorized thanks to him! I never had much of a talent for the subject, but I do remember him well as an instructor,...
2022-08-05 16:21:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Deep down, I did expect that eventually I'd have a reason to talk about Abe Shinzo again on this podcast. But I definitely did not expect it to be in this context.
This was definitely a hard episode to write just because of the number of questions that needed answering: how does an ex-PM maintain influence in the party? Where was the LDP before the recent elections? And of course, why did this happen? I have to admit, though, I found it an interesting challenge--the approach of current ...
2022-07-29 17:05:29 +0000 UTC View Post
So, first things first: as I type this I'm putting the final touches on next week's episode, which will be about the Abe assassination. It's a pretty wide-ranging episode--I don't know about you, but I didn't know much about the Unification Church--but hopefully you all will find it interesting. After next week we'll return to talking poetry with an episode on Fujiwara no Teika, the other great Heian poet who somehow we still haven't covered.
This particular episode was honestly a lot o...
2022-07-22 19:28:30 +0000 UTC View Post
I read snippets of the Tales of Ise back in college in one of my Japanese literature classes, but this is my first time returning to them in well over a decade. So, first, it's nice to come back--and if you're at all interested in the subject I highly recommend the translation cited in the show notes, which is excellent and has a lot of wonderful explanatory notes.
One challenge with this particular episode that I hadn't expected was how much poetry to include--I had planned for i...
2022-07-15 16:33:31 +0000 UTC View Post
First: as I stated in this episode, I myself am not really a tea person (I drink it, certainly, and enjoy it, but was raised in a very pro-coffee household). So a) please forgive any tea-related mistakes on my end and b) if this is a subject you are at all interested in, I cannot recommend picking up A Bowl for a Coin enough. It's a very interesting read, and as you might imagine there's a LOT that ended up on the cutting room floor.
This is also an approach I'm considering try...
2022-07-08 17:16:10 +0000 UTC View Post
The 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 initia...
2022-07-01 18:45:59 +0000 UTC View Post
First: sorry for the delay in posting! I've been away on a family trip and didn't have access to a laptop.
This was a very interesting episode for me, chiefly because it reflected a lot of my own personal experiences. As the observant among you have likely already guessed, my own politics are generally (though not always) to the left, and though I identify more with the center left these days I have organized with and used to be a part of organizations farther to the left. And fra...
2022-06-27 15:55:25 +0000 UTC View Post
This 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 ...
2022-06-17 20:33:34 +0000 UTC View Post
First: apologies for the late post! There was a technical issue on the backend I couldn't fix while I was at work.
So, this is an idea that's been percolating for me for a while, but which was finally knocked loose by some reading I've been doing for upcoming episodes. Specifically, I'm planning three semi-related episodes on the aftermath of the 1960 Anpo Protests and how they shaped Japan, grounded in Nick Kapur's excellent book Japan at the Crossroads (they will be on,...
2022-06-10 20:26:27 +0000 UTC View PostPost available here.
The genesis for this particular episode is, of course, Royall Tyler's excellent translation of the Jokyuki. While I was able to utilize bits of Azuma Kagami thanks to the lovely folks at the JHTI, only parts of said text are available--whereas Tyler's translation is very easy to find. It's also qui...
2022-06-03 16:40:04 +0000 UTC View Post
This was a substantially more challenging episode to research than the first part of this series, in large part because there's no singular book on the subject of post-Edo whaling. I had to combine a lot of sources focused on pre- and post-1945, and as a result this is one of the longest bibliographies for a single episode that I've ever put together. If this is a subject that interests you, I highly recommend diving into some of the sources contained here; there's plenty more to read. <...
2022-05-27 16:35:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Honestly, this is a subject I've been curious about for a long time. Back when I lived in Hokkaido, one of the American-style burger chains in the area (Lucky Pierrot) served a whale burger, and I remember being extremely...weirded out by it, I suppose is the best way to put it. The idea of eating whale made me deeply uncomfortable, and seeing it on the menu made me wonder why things were so different in Japan.
That said, I've been hesitant to approach the topic just because of a lack o...
2022-05-20 16:05:51 +0000 UTC View Post
I do have to admit something up front with this episode; I have a student writing a research paper on Gikeiki right now, and so I've been helping them a lot with it and have the text on my mind a great deal. That was part of the impetus for this whole series, as I was dusting off some old books and reading some new ones to help the kid out. I think it worked out fortuitously, though! I'm proud of this two-parter, and glad I had a chance to tackle it.
One thing I wish I'd had more time f...
2022-05-13 15:55:35 +0000 UTC View Post
So, I'll just start by saying that this was one of the most challenging episodes I've done in a long time. Deciding how to organize the material--and how deep to get into some pretty esoteric conflicts between different temples and subsects and the like--took up a LOT of the energy that went into this script.
But I do think it's an important one, and I'm glad I persevered with it. As I alluded to in the opening part of the show, the image of the 'sohei' is extremely pervasive in media a...
2022-05-06 16:29:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Perhaps the most challenging part of this episode was not going on a long tangent about the internal politics of Tosa domain. There's a whole 'sub-plot' to the Sakamoto Ryoma story involving the political rivalry between the domain's elder, Yoshida Toyo, and the Kinnoto loyalists under Takechi Zuisan that's deeply fascinating--but also not directly relevant, given that the 'resolution' for the story takes place after Sakamoto leaves Tosa behind. It's still very interesting, though, and might ...
2022-04-15 16:37:00 +0000 UTC View Post
So, the genesis of this particular episode is a bit of an odd one and I wanted to share it with you all. In part, of course, I do simply love Sakamoto Ryoma; as I mentioned on this episode, I do associate him very much with my first trip to Japan and my time in Shikoku. Any excuse to spend some time on him is worth it to me; and seriously, how can you not love him after that "well, I get the general idea" story?
But the other reason I did these episodes is professional! In my teac...
2022-04-08 23:19:08 +0000 UTC View Post
To start us off, and in keeping with last week, here are a few of the fascinating things I had to cut from Dr. Rowley's account for time. First, there's some tremendous discussion of her interviews with the modern day Kutta-Suzuki family (the same family that housed Nakanoin Nakako during her exile) that really shed light on how the family lineage was preserved. There's also a bit more about her maid O-yasu, who is even less present in the record than Nakako--but frankly, that also makes her ...
2022-04-01 19:19:34 +0000 UTC View Post
This is one of those episodes that happened entirely by serendipity. I wasn't aware of Dr. Rowley's book--it came out when I was in grad school and didn't really focus on anything being published outside my specialty--but happened across a copy at a used book store back in late January. Just the dust jacket pitch was enough to make me think, "oh yeah, this is definitely at least one good episode of material." Turned out, it was two.
For this first episode in particular, there were two t...
2022-03-25 16:43:16 +0000 UTC View PostFor some reason, once again Patreon's link functionality is proving a bit hit-or-miss. The episode and show notes are here, for what it's worth.
A few weeks back I wrote a newsletter about the research and writing process for this episode, and now you get to see the final product. Hopefully between the two this gives you some idea of how these episodes come together. It's not...
2022-03-19 00:10:05 +0000 UTC View Post
First, a confession; I did write this episode primarily as an excuse to re-read one of my very favorite scholars, the always tremendous Dr. Donald Keene. His biography of Yoshimasa is just a brilliant and highly accessible piece of writing (as is everything he wrote) and I recommend it very highly if you're interested in the period or in the arts in Japan more generally. Indeed, while I'm somewhat resistant to doing episodes on foreigners who studied Japan (barring extremely significant excep...
2022-03-11 17:54:11 +0000 UTC View Post
[Edit: looks like during the writing process some of my notes got overwritten by an accidental copy-paste as I was moving things around. Thanks to folks who let me know and sorry for the delay in fixing it.]
The research for this episode was a lot of fun to research for all the reasons I mentioned. A good scandal is always deeply entertaining, and I find the Siemens one particularly interesting because of how much it reveals regarding the politics of the era. I did have to leave some th...
2022-03-04 17:03:45 +0000 UTC View Post
So, this is a bit of a new idea for me and I'm curious to see what people think of it. For every longer miniseries there's always 'cutting room floor' material that I end up having to leave out for time or simple narrative coherence, even if it's really interesting. I'd toyed with the idea of making episodes out of them, and did do that in a few cases, but usually with some delay so that the material wouldn't feel 'tacked on', or alternatively so people wouldn't 'burn out' on a specific time ...
2022-02-25 17:23:06 +0000 UTC View Post
This 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 f...
2022-02-18 20:42:00 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the subjects I always struggle with in episodes like this is how direct to be about the realities of persecution. On the one hand, I am very uncomfortable trying to play down the violence of moments like this; it's not doing anyone a service to pretend this was not a horrendously destructive moment in history. On the other, the goal is not to traumatize people with graphic depictions of executions, or to desensitize people. Striking that balance is always hard, and frankly I'm never su...
2022-02-04 17:09:53 +0000 UTC View Post