History of Japan

On August 30, 1974, a bomb went off at Mitsubishi corporate HQ in Tokyo's Marunouchi neighborhood. The culprit was a group calling itself the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front - Wolf Cell. This week: how did this radical movement grow out of Japan's 1960s, and what does it have to do with the wider political phenomenon known as the New Left?
Show notes here.

How does a matagi hunt actually work, and how has matagi culture evolved over the course of the 20th century? And finally: why is it that so many today seem to think the matagi will be extinct themselves before too long?
Show notes here.

Not many have heard of the Matagi, the hunters who live in northern Honshu. What do we know of their origins and history, and how do they fit into our knowledge of premodern Japan?
Show notes here.

This week: the Cowra breakout seemed, to those who lived through it, like it came out of nowhere. But nothing does, so what factors led to it? How did the breakout itself play out? And what are its legacies, both in terms of Australia-Japan relations and the wider question of Japanese "fanaticism" in WWII?
Show notes here.

In a wide-ranging episode intended just to be the introduction to the largest mass prisoner breakout of WWII, we first have to tackle...the history of Japan-Australia relations all the way up to 1940 and the role Australia played in Japanese militarist thought. 
Show notes here.