Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 416, The Forgotten Past, Part 1.

I think it's fair to say that every country has parts of its history, which are not commonly known or discussed.

I certainly can't think of any place in the world that doesn't have some part of its past considered not worth remembering, or just

as often, possibly more often, too unpleasant to remember.

Japanese history is certainly replete with such topics. The ones people tend to be familiar with,

of course, are related to the 20th century and Japan's imperialist past. We've talked plenty before about

those topics on this very podcast. But our topic for today and next week as well is something

that, I'll be honest, I didn't even really hear about when I was in graduate school and only

really became aware of through indirect allusions to the topic

in other bits of research. I've been meaning to do an episode on the subject, but it's not

very well studied outside of a couple of academic articles. The only longer academic text on

this subject that I've ever seen came out in 2019, so pretty recently, and thanks to the magic

of academic pricing, took a while for me to afford. It was almost $90, so thank you very

much to our Patreon subscribers, and consider this another reminder of just how ridiculous and

exclusionary academic press pricing is for those outside of the academic system.

So with all that said, today I want to talk about the history of slavery in Japan.

And I imagine that when folks hear that, they jump immediately to, oh, you mean the 20th century

during the war years when the Japanese

government enslaved people from other countries, or perhaps, oh, you mean the systems of

indentured servitude that were common in Japan during the late 1800s and early 1900s, or possibly

even the ongoing human trafficking in conditions of functional slavery, which does remain

an issue in Japan and in plenty of other places around the world to this very day.

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