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May 26, 2023

This week: how did Japan's most popular god develop a following around the country, and why is that god--Inari--associated with everything from farming to fire prevention? How come you see Inari worship in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines alike? And what does all of this have to do with foxes, anyway?

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May 19, 2023

This week: the Pal dissent becomes the Pal myth. How did an obscure document from the Tokyo Trials end up front and center in nationalist discourse in Japan today?

Show notes here.


May 12, 2023

This week, we're starting a look into how an Indian lawyer and judge from a relatively obscure background became a focal point of right-wing Japanese nationalism. Who was Radhabinod Pal, how did he end up a judge in the Tokyo Trials, and what led him to claim that there were no grounds to convict Japan's leaders of any...


May 5, 2023

Oe Kenzaburo is about as different a writer as you can think of from Kawabata Yasunari, and yet he's Japan's second ever Nobel laureate in literature. What sort of concerns defined his work, and what can we learn from looking at him in conjunction with Kawabata?

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May 1, 2023

Apologies for the delay, folks. Something went wrong in the Libsyn backend. Here's our episode on Kawabata Yasunari!