Episode 350 - The Rising Sun Will Come to Us From Heaven, Part 2

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8 • 744 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we're talking about Christianity during the Bakumatsu Period -- the era that saw the forced opening of Japan and the collapse of samurai government. How did debates around Christianity figure in to this turbulent time in Japanese history?

Show notes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This week's episode is brought to you by Audible.
0:03.6	Audible has over 425,000 titles to choose from, all compatible with iPhone, Android, Kindle, or your MP3 player of choice.
0:13.7	For listeners of the show, Audible is offering a free 30-day trial membership, complete with credit, for a free audiobook of your choice. You can cancel any
0:22.6	time and keep the free book or keep going with one of Audible's subscription offers. Go to
0:28.1	audibletrial.com slash Japan to claim your offer. This week, I'm going to recommend Kitchen by
0:35.5	Banana Yoshimoto. If you've never read Yoshimoto before, well, she's a lot of fun.
0:41.2	I read her actually in my undergrad Japanese lit courses.
0:44.6	Really any of her books are a great place to start, but Kitchen was the first one I read,
0:48.9	so it has a special place in my heart.
0:51.3	It's about, well, kitchens, I guess, but also much more than that, but I can't
0:56.1	really explain it without spoiling it, so just go to audible trial.com slash Japan to check it out for
1:01.5	yourself. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.
1:20.0	Episode 350, The Rising Sun will come to us from heaven, part two.
1:26.5	I'm going to start this episode off right by making a historical and intellectual parallel
1:32.5	that is sure to offend everyone involved or implicated in it, between Christianity in Japan
1:38.8	in the 19th century and communism in Japan in the 20th.
1:43.7	You might remember that in the 20th century, communism never really became a major ideological force in Japanese politics.
1:52.0	The Japanese Communist Party was broken up by the police literally within hours of its founding.
1:58.0	One of my old teachers used to joke that the first meeting was probably more
2:01.6	secret police and informers than true believers. Honestly, it was all downhill from there.
2:08.5	Even in the post-war era, the height of the JCP's success came with more or less the ideological
2:15.3	abandonment of traditional Marxism-Leninism.
	...

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