Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 415, Whispers in the Dark.

Being a historian, I of course love a good discussion about sources, and so this week I want to tell a story about a book.

Not just any book, mind you, this is a somewhat singular text with a fascinating history regarding how it came about.

It's a story with a good deal of import for our thinking about Japanese history, but like any good sweeping tale, it has fascinating intimate moments as well.

It is also a story about the lives of two very specific people and how their stories came

to intersect.

One as prisoner and the other as interrogator.

Today I want to tell you a story about a book called Seyo Kibun, or Reports from the West,

which was first created in 1715, and I want to tell you about the two men who made the book

possible, Arai Haxeki and Giovanni

Batista Sidoti.

So let's start with Arai.

And while his name might not be one that you hear bandied about much anymore, if you have

any interest in Japan's Edo period, you may well have heard it before.

Arai was one of the intellectual titans of this time

period after all. And by the way, as is often the case during this period, Ardai Hockseki is a scholarly

name chosen later in life, but not the man's given name. However, to avoid confusion, I'm just

going to stick to calling him Hockseki the whole way through.

Arai Huxeki was born in the city of Edo in 1657, the son of a samurai family serving Kuduri domain in what's now Chiba Prefecture.

As the son of a samurai family, Arai was able to get an education through his domain's academy,

which educated the children of samurai families to serve in the domain's bureaucracy.

Now, a lot of the tales about Arai's childhood do have to be read somewhat carefully in light of

...