Mar 14, 2025
This week: Miyazaki Manabu goes from the Sodai struggle at Waseda to an active participant in the violent clashes of the late 1960s student movement, as a part of the "action corps" of the Communist Party. We'll take an up close and personal look to see: what was it like to be a radical student in the 1960s?
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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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