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slash Japan to claim your offer. This week I'm going to recommend the Anelects of Confucius from

the Great Courses series by Robert Andre Lafleur.

Look, when you're talking about East Asian history, it's hard to get more foundational than

Confucius, and beyond the historical importance, I really do find the intellects fascinating

as a piece of philosophy. If you're looking for something to really shake up your perspective on what it means to be a good person, this is a great place to start People's Rights, Part 1.

So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while now, you know that I love the

Meiji period.

It was my main field of studying graduate school, and of course, the single longest series

we have ever done on this show was on the Meiji Restoration and the birth of the New Japan.

But here's the thing about the Meiji period.

It's very often told as a top-down history, the story of a small group of government leaders who, by hook or by crook,

assemble a Western-style autocratic government as a tool to forcibly

remake Japanese society.

That story, of course, exists for a reason.

It explains so much from the rapidity with which Japan became a modern state, to the later

battles in the 1920s over Japanese democracy, to the government

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