History of Japan

This week, Hideyoshi's death seems to suggest an end to the persecution of Nagasaki's Christians. However, the city quickly finds itself under threat from the new lord of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, as co...

11 Feb 202234min

This week: Hideyoshi's 'friendship' proves less useful than hoped, resulting in a 1587 ban on Christianity and Nagasaki losing its independence. How do the city's Christians and their Jesuit leaders r...

4 Feb 202234min

This week, Christian Nagasaki survives its early trials and tribulations to become a Jesuit fortress-town, and a centerpiece of some cutthroat religious diplomacy. But the same approaches that will ma...

28 Jan 202233min

This week, we're covering the founding of Japan's most unusual city: Nagasaki, unique among major Japanese cities in being founded under the impetus of the Jesuit order. Why did Jesuit missionaries wa...

21 Jan 202234min

Today, we're discussing the evolution of a unique form of modern Japanese art: shin hanga, or new woodblocks, which attempted to combine Western painting techniques with woodblock printing. They're no...

14 Jan 202233min

Sometimes you just have to take advantage of a cheap joke about a silly number to take a look at the history of drug policy in Japan. So today, we'll be exploring the rich history of illegal drugs, ad...

7 Jan 202236min

For our final episode of 2021, we're looking at the origin of one of Japan's most famous pieces of literature: the war epic known as the Heike Monogatari, or Tale of Heike. How did a story about a sin...

31 Dec 202136min

This week, we have a biography of one of the rare women of medieval Japan who was prominent not just because of her relationship to men, but because of her attainments in her own right. It's the tale ...

17 Dec 202133min