This week, we’re talking about how Hideyoshi finally tamed Japan’s pirates, and why that makes them so hard to understand…
Welcome to the seedy underbelly of Pittsburgh, where the battle for control over the sex trade turned into an all-out gang war. Caught in the middle: A trans horse riding instructor who turned to a life of crime when he needed money to care for his ailing mother. S.A. Chant joins us today for a conversation about money laundering through paint-your-own ceramics, fighting the cops with birthday cake, and the way respectability politics changes the stories we tell about queer history.
This week, we’re focusing on the height of piracy during the civil wars in Japan, and in particular the powerful…
This week, in the first of a four part series on piracy in Japan, we’re covering the background of piracy…
One of Japan’s most famous murderesses took a very intimate souvenir from the lover she murdered. Was she the sex-crazed nymphomaniac portrayed in the media? Was she the symbol of female empowerment described by her supporters? Or was she an abuse victim who broke down after making one terrible mistake?
This week we’re going deep into the bizarre theories of Japanese Israelism: the conspiracy theory that modern Japanese people are…
We’re trapped in a loop this week as Isaac talks about another Isaac: specifically, Isaac Titsingh, a member of the…
If you want to tackle the crime problem, why not just get rid of all the laws? In this episode, a group of free thinkers take a utopian experiment to the extreme, and discover in the process that some laws exist for a reason. One of those reasons: preventing bears from eating everyone.
For our final episode in the series, we’re taking a look at the demise of public rail in Japan and…
This week, we’re talking about the rebirth of Japan’s rail network in the form of Japan National Railways. Some things…