History of Japan

There's a bit of a division in the scholarship on medieval Japan regarding whether "feudalism" is a useful scholarly category to study the period. So if we actually look at the history, what are these scholars arguing over? And what can we make of their arguments?

Show notes here.

What is feudalism? It's a surprisingly hard question to answer, and one that raises an interesting follow up. Here on the podcast I've been describing medieval Japan as a "feudal state" for a long time, but should I even be doing that?

Show notes here.

This week: the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front publishes its manifesto, and spreads beyond its original four members. But after a few months of terror bombings (and one completely botched attempt to assassinate Hirohito), the group is brought low and its members--with a few exceptions--end up in prison. That story today, plus a question: in the end, what did all this actually accomplish? Show notes here.

Daidoji Masashi's trajectory from college student to terrorist has a lot to do with the student movement and the New Left in 1960s Tokyo. How did his time at Hōsei University set the idealistic young man on a collision course with the ideologies of "anti-Japanism", and from there to embracing violence as a tool of politics?

Show notes here.

On August 30, 1974, a bomb went off at Mitsubishi corporate HQ in Tokyo's Marunouchi neighborhood. The culprit was a group calling itself the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front - Wolf Cell. This week: how did this radical movement grow out of Japan's 1960s, and what does it have to do with the wider political phenomenon known as the New Left?

Show notes here.

How does a matagi hunt actually work, and how has matagi culture evolved over the course of the 20th century? And finally: why is it that so many today seem to think the matagi will be extinct themselves before too long?

Show notes here.

Not many have heard of the Matagi, the hunters who live in northern Honshu. What do we know of their origins and history, and how do they fit into our knowledge of premodern Japan?

Show notes here.

This week: the Cowra breakout seemed, to those who lived through it, like it came out of nowhere. But nothing does, so what factors led to it? How did the breakout itself play out? And what are its legacies, both in terms of Australia-Japan relations and the wider question of Japanese "fanaticism" in WWII?

Show notes here.

In a wide-ranging episode intended just to be the introduction to the largest mass prisoner breakout of WWII, we first have to tackle...the history of Japan-Australia relations all the way up to 1940 and the role Australia played in Japanese militarist thought. Show notes here.

At long last, the fight over how to reconstruct Tokyo is done. But what did rebuilding the imperial capital actually look like?

Show notes here.