Konnichiwa, the rest is history and yokoso, Watashi, Dominico, Santa Bruku, Soshite, Watashi,

no Awarena, Shionin, Condore, Tomohorando, Toyoshoni.

What was that? Well, a lot of our listeners will know Tom, because they're more sophisticated

and cosmopolitan than you are. That was welcome to the rest of history with me, Dominic

Sambrooke, and my pitiful servant to save Tom Holland. I thought it was probably something

a lot of those lines. So Dominic, let's get this straight. You've never learnt Japanese.

I imagine you've never in your life before spoken it. Tom, you are so wrong. So we've got

a Japanese specialist who's shortly to come on the... Who will tell you? They don't call

me Tom, the master of tongues for nothing. Do they? We've had Portuguese, we've had all

kinds of languages from me. Yes, okay. So you have never spoken a word of Japanese

in your life, and we have, as our special guest, the senior lecturer in Asian history at

the University of Edinburgh, the author of two hugely acclaimed books on Japan, Japan's

story and search for nation, and the Japanese, a history in 20 lives, Chris Harding, Chris,

you're still there. You haven't run away in horror and shock. Enjoy myself so far. Thank

you. Well, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for braving that. So today's subject

obviously is Japan. So we're continuing with our... We don't have the courage. You don't

have the courage to ask Chris how good that Japanese was. Chris, how good was that Japanese?

It was pretty good actually. Yes. No. I think we should end this podcast right now and start again.

The producers should do that moment and put on YouTube. Oh my god. Unbelievable. That's

terrible. Chris, so we've asked you on to do basically the impossible, which is to sum

up the entire sweep of Japanese history. We did a very fleeting episode, didn't we, on

Kuba Khan's attempted invasion of Japan? And we did two episodes with Rana Mita on China

...