This week: Japanese Manchuria comes crashing down as a combination of poorly planned colonial policies and a worsening war situation…
This week: some reflections on the hollow nature of Manchurian “independence”, and on what kept the state going if so…
This week on the podcast: the Japanese presence in Manchuria was never particularly large, even at its height. So how…
In the last episode of 2025: a bomb “mysteriously” goes off just outside Mukden during the evening of September 18,…
As Japan enters the 1920s, national policy becomes increasingly liberalized–but Manchuria remains a holdout of extremists who, if anything, begin…
This week, conspiracism takes a new twist in Japan, from paranoid worries about Christianity to paranoid beliefs in “Western encirclement”.…
For our second footnote to the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: a simple question that definitely won’t result in an…
This week on the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: The US Occupation of Japan after World War II represented a…
This week on the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: the descent towards the Second World War. Why did the leadership…
Hatoyama Kazuo was a reluctant politician; you can’t say the same of his son Hatoyama Ichiro, groomed from childhood to take up the family business (and to rise to the height of cabinet minister, something his father never did). This week is all about Ichiro’s prewar career, which culminated in a shot at the top job–that was snapped away at the last moment.