Jan 20, 2023

This week: the elimination of smallpox is probably one of the greatest medical accomplishments in human history. The vaccine that made it possible, however, was invented during a time of isolation for Japan. So how did the vaccine make it to Japanese shores, and what does that story tell us about public health, the...

Jan 13, 2023

This week, we're looking at the implosion of the Japanese New Left with a focus on the factional conflicts of the Zengakuren. How did a student youth movement end up divided into 20+ factions, the two largest of which engaged in a multi-decade war of assasination and street violence against each other? And how might...

Jan 6, 2023

This week, we're looking at a very different kind of 60s protest movement: an attempt to build a cross-sectarian, non-ideological movement to oppose the American war in Vietnam. How did the anti-Vietnam War movement emerge in its Japan, and how did it simultaneously grow to a massive size and fail to have...

Dec 23, 2022

This week, for the final episode of 2022: the Zenkyoto movement arrives at Japan's largest private school. Plus: how did a movement that grew so big so quickly fall apart just as fast?

Show notes here.

Dec 16, 2022

This week, we're beginning a month on radical activism in the 1960s with a look at the student uprisings of 1968. Today is all about where those uprisings came from, how they're related to the "two Zens" of the 1960s, and the specific example of the University of Tokyo, where a debate about student medical internships...