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Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 288, The Right Tool for the Job, Part 1.

This week is our last bit of Sengoku history for a while. I've been doing a lot of episodes on the period,

simply because of preparations for that documentary filming,

but believe me, I'm ready for a break.

So, I promise y'all we're going to move away from the Sengoku, as fascinating as it is,

for a little while after this, but before we get there, I have just one more story I want to tell, a very important one, not of a person or a group of people

or a place or a moment, but of a piece of technology. Arguably, the second most important

piece of tech in the Sengoku era, the gun. Second, you say? Why not the first? Well, because the

first is a fairly easy story to tell in its own right.

The most important piece of weapons technology in the Sengoku era is the spear,

...