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This week, I'm going to recommend the Free State of Jones by Victoria Bynum.

This is a fascinating story of an aspect of the Civil War and uprising by a combination of Confederate deserters and slaves that I had never heard about before,

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your copy. Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 306, The Prisoners of Nambu, part one.

There's a lot to find fascinating about the Tokugawa period.

In many ways, it's one of the most formative eras in Japanese history.

That's true for many areas, from the cultural to the political to the economic.

Lord knows, I've said the phrase, it all goes back to the Edo period, enough times that I am

fairly sure it will be on my tombstone at this point. However, in conversation about the

legacies of the Edo period, one of the outliers is always foreign policy. The traditional

narrative of Japanese history is that during the Edo period, Japan was a closed

country, but during the 1850s, the country was forcibly opened by the West and the old Tokugawa foreign policy was cast aside as hopelessly outmoded.

We've already spent some time unpacking the idea of the closed country. Tokugawa

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