Hi, all, in lieu of our usual pre-episode reel, I wanted to take a moment to just let you know about something exciting that's coming down the pipe.

You might remember that back in the summer of 2019, I spent some time in New York doing a recording for a documentary that had invited me on as a guest expert.

That documentary then, of course, had the great misfortune to go into its second round of

shoots and post-production in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and hit some pretty

significant delays as a result, but it is finally finished.

Age of Samurai Battle for Japan is coming to Netflix, starting on February 24th in

the United States and the United Kingdom. I'm afraid I don't know about international releases

outside of that. If you're at all interested, I'd encourage you to check it out. I can't speak to

any of the parts I didn't work on, but I was pretty proud of the work I did on it,

and the folks who made it seem really enthusiastic about telling some very interesting history,

the history of the Sengoku period, in an interesting and well-done way.

So again, that's Age of Samurai Battle for Japan, coming to Netflix on February 24th in the U.S. and UK.

I do hope you'll check it out.

Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 377, The Black Mist Scandal.

This week, we're taking on another listener request, at least in a somewhat indirect way,

because this week we're talking about the Black Mist scandal.

Now, before we get too deep, there's some important context we need to cover, because it turns out there are actually two different Black Mist scandals.

The first from the mid-1960s is a sort of catch-all term for a series of scandals that rocked the ruling Liberal Democratic

Party, the name Black Mist or Kuroikidi in Japanese, is a reference to the number of different

scandals that hit the LDP leadership in succession around 1966 to 1967. The scandals involved things like corrupt handling of import licenses for Taiwanese bananas, or Korean dried seaweed,

or accusations that people in the senior LDP leadership were using their offices to engage in illegal land speculation, and before any of you ask, yes, of course, one of the

principal people implicated was the legendarily corrupt Tanaka Kakue.

...