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Go to audiblechild.com slash Japan to claim your copy. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 139, The Soldiers of the Sun.

So we're finally done with the Meiji Restoration.

Thank God, right?

But I figured now that we have all this background,

we should take advantage and talk about something I've been thinking about a lot

that we haven't really explored yet.

Now that we've covered the death of the samurai class,

I want to talk a little bit about what came next.

In 1873, the low-ranking Choshu samurai turned master of the Japanese army, Yamagata

...