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Feb 28, 2025

This week: Miyazaki Manabu completes his transformation from son of a yakuza boss to a committed member of the Communist party. After all, it turns out those two groups have a surprising amount in common...

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Feb 21, 2025

This week: the start of a multi-part "modernized biography" intended to help us explore postwar Japan through the lens of a single, fascinating life. This episode is mostly focused on introducing our subject--Miyazaki Manabu--and his unique and fascinating circumstances as the scion of a small yakuza family.

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Feb 14, 2025

This week: what do we know about women and the wrong end of the law during the Tokugawa Period? Given the male-dominated nature of the feudal social order and the historical written record, what can we figure out? And what are the limits of that knowledge?

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Feb 7, 2025

This week: outside of big urban riots, how did violence figure into the daily life of the Edo period? To answer this question, we'll take a look at one particularly well-documented example: youth gangs in the area surrounding Sensoji in the shogun's capital of Edo.

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