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Sep 9, 2022

This week: how has the JMSDF gone from an afterthought to a central part of Japan's security planning?

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Sep 2, 2022

This week: the start of a two part series on the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Forces. Today: how did Japan's current navy grow out of its old one, and what does that say about the force's relationship with Japan's prewar past?

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Aug 26, 2022

This week, the biography of one of the most unusual figures of Bakumatsu Japan: the peasant Matsuo Taseko, whose career as a member of the imperial loyalist movement defied conventions of gender and defies neat categorization today.

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Aug 19, 2022

This week, we're covering the rise of the Hirata school of kokugaku, or national studies, during the Edo Period. How did an intellectual movement devoted to linguistics become a powerful political, social, and arguably religious force by the end of samurai rule--and why did that movement fall from power after just a few...


Aug 15, 2022

Enjoy this bonus episode from my other show, Criminal Records, as the podcast takes a week off!