History of Japan

This week: Go-Daigo's regime collapses, and a second samurai government, the Muromachi bakufu, emerges. How did Ashikaga Takauji successfully establish Japan's second shogunate--and perhaps set it up ...

20 Jan 202437min

This week: the dramatic career of Emperor Go-Daigo, who brought down the Kamakura shogunate and ended Hojo rule in Japan. This despite the fact that just a few months before victory, his forces were o...

12 Jan 202437min

This week, we're taking a look at some of the economic and social structures of Kamakura period Japan in order to answer the question: just what makes medieval Japan so...medieval? Also, I'll be takin...

29 Dec 202335min

This week: why did the Mongols invade Japan? How did a seemingly invincible military machine falter in its assaults on the island of Kyushu? And why, in the long term, did the Mongol invasions begin t...

22 Dec 202338min

This week: the advent of the medieval era brings with it new strands of Buddhism that will radically remake the image of the religion from an aristocratic faith to a distinctly Japanese one. So, how d...

15 Dec 202336min

This week: the rise of the Minamoto clan, the destruction of the Taira clan, and the birth of a new kind of political arrangement in the form of Japan's first shogunate. Show notes here.

8 Dec 202337min

This week, we're covering the beginnings of the rise of the samurai class by looking at the wars of the 1000s, as well as the Hogen and Heiji conflicts which secured the role of the military class in ...

1 Dec 202340min

This week, we turn our attention to two of the defining institutions of the Heian period, both of which will be very important for us going forward. First are the shoen, or private estates, the growth...

17 Nov 202335min