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This week, I'm going to recommend Great Mythologies of the world, part of the Great Courses series.

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this course is all about what makes mythological stories so important, distinctive, and fascinating.

I've just started working through it myself, and I'm really excited to see where it goes from here.

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I'm going to... Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast. Episode 116, One Man Yoshida.

This week, we're going to do another biography.

Our focus is a man often neglected in the history of the 20th century, but whose impact, in retrospect, was pretty tremendous.

His efforts helped salvage Japan's position after the disaster of World War II, and his leadership led to a miracle

totally unexpected by international observers, the re-entry of Japan as a major economic

power on the world stage within 20 years of its crushing defeat. Yet his legacy is not totally

unambiguous, as we'll see. The man I'm talking about is easily the most important Japanese statesman of the 20th century, Yoshida Shigeru.

Yoshida was born in Yokoska to the south of Tokyo, site of the Imperial Navy's primary shipyards, on September 22, 1878.

A few days before his birth, his father, Takeuchi Tsuna, was arrested for plotting against the

Meiji government. Takayuchi was from Tosa domain on Shikoku, which, as we will discuss,

...