Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 239, All in the Family, Part 1.

This week, I want to start a short series using a framework that a few of you have suggested.

You see, very often on this show, we take looks at what you could call a horizontal slice of

history. We discuss what's going on in a fairly broad geographic area

over a certain span of time. This week, I want to focus on a vertical slice and try to look at a

single place in Japan and its long and tumultuous history. There are, of course, a few places that could be interesting to do this with, great cities

like the port town of Osaka, or the fishing village turned global metropolis of Tokyo.

But in terms of both fan interest and quality of available documentation, I think one place

really jumps out above the others. So we're going to focus on the history of one of the territories of medieval Japan,

Satuma, and its ruling family, the Shimazu.

Now it's important to do two things before we dive in.

First, I want to be clear that this will not be an exhaustive political history,

or really any kind of exhaustive political history, or really

any kind of exhaustive history, of Satsuma, or the Shimazu.

Both have a history stretching back nearly 1,000 years, which would make this the most ambitious

series in the history of the show, and I don't think the vertical slice model is really

tenable in this format, because it would

involve reminding ourselves of details related to some of the most complex periods we've

covered.

Instead, my goal is to think about how this one place and this one family have had such

a lasting impact on Japanese history.

This series will be an overview of Satsuma history to that effect.

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