In January, 1946, a man came to the headquarters of the American occupation government of Japan and claimed to be…
First thing’s first: I made a numbering error a few weeks back, and so to get us back on the…
This week: the manga industry during World War II. Plus some thoughts on the development of shojo manga, and finally…
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…