What should you do when two different governments claim to have authority over your country? Tell everyone that a third government secretly has the real claim to power! Then, start taking people’s money so you can issue your own license plates and government ID cards. What could go wrong?
This week, we’re covering the rise of the Hirata school of kokugaku, or national studies, during the Edo Period. How…
An attempt to get to the bottom of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball spun out so badly that one of the lawyers involved ended up in prison. But why is punishing people for the misuse of regulated drugs in sports left up to private organizations in the first place? And wouldn’t baseball be so much more fun if everyone was still injecting meth and goat testicle juice?
This week: the career and legacy of the most influential Japanese poet you’ve probably never heard of, Fujiwara no Teika.…
This week, a current events episode on the leadup and immediate aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.…
This week, we’re taking a look at the legacy of one of Japan’s most influential poets: Ki no Tsurayuki. His…
This week, we’re unpacking a rather odd classic of Japanese literature: the Ise Monogatari, a collection of short tales that…
We’re tackling one of our most confusing legal systems yet in a case so complicated no one could even figure out which jurisdiction covered it. Because there was no law covering criminal negligence, the accidental sinking of the warship Chishima was tried in a civil court–but Japan’s bizarre treaty system forced the emperor of Japan to personally take his suit to a British court on Chinese soil.
This week: we tend to think of tea in terms of the tea ceremony and fancy culture, but what about…
This week: how did a spate of right wing violence in the early years of the 1960s help to fundamentally…