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the podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 252, The Beautiful Island,

Part 1. This week, I want to start a series on an important aspect of Japan's colonial past

that, well, relatively unknown in the West, shed some important light on how the Japanese

empire related to the overseas territories it controlled.

This is an important story in part because it's one I had the opportunity to tell before, but chose not to.

You see, we did our long series on the relationship between Japan and China a few years back. And China, of course,

can be hard to define. I really struggled with how much I wanted to include Taiwan in that

discussion. Leaving aside the political concerns of Beijing and Taipei today, Taiwan certainly

is a part of the greater Chinese cultural sphere, and including it would make sense,

...