For a long time, the bureaucracy–in all its elitist, meritocratic glory–has taken a great deal of the credit for Japan’s…
This week: the Meiji Bureaucracy, in all its glory. How did the system actually work? What sorts of people did…
In America, when we think of bureaucracy, it doesn’t conjure the best associations. In Japan, meanwhile, the bureaucracy has a…
One of the questions I get asked a lot is about grad school: what’s it like, who’s it for, what…
Here we are again, my friends! It’s been two years since our last Q and A, and now it’s time…
This week, we’re talking about one of the oddest moments of the final years of feudalism: a spontaneous outbreak of…
This week, we’re finishing our time with Kawai Koume by looking at how life in Wakayama had changed by the…
This week, the Kawai family has finally made good in the world of feudal Wakayama–just in time for that world…
After a long hiatus, the diary of Kawai Koume picks back up in 1853, a year of absolutely no world-shaking…
This week, we’ll look at the first chunk of Kawai Koume’s diary, which deals with life in the 1830s–or as…