Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 433, The Wrong Kind of Hero, Part 1.

Those of you who have been with the show for a while now probably have some memories of what

remains our single most titanic series, the 17-part account of the Meiji Restoration, that begins

with episode 117.

That series, which was a product of reading I was doing for my PhD oral exams,

where I knew many of the questions would focus on the Meiji Restoration,

remains something I'm very proud of, but also something I don't want to do again anytime soon,

because holy hell trying to juggle 17

script outlines was quite something. I have some ideas for future projects that will be long,

but God, I never hope to break 10 episodes on a single topic ever again. Anyway, even with 17 episodes representing, by my count, about nine plus hours of uninterrupted

content, there's still a lot we didn't cover about the Meiji Restoration, and today I want

to start the process of going back to that by looking at the life of one of the Restoration's

singular figures.

The man I want to focus on is named Sakamoto Yoma, and while you may have heard of him

if you're familiar with the time period, for a long time he was treated as more of a bit

player in the drama of the Restoration, not one of its central figures.

But as Dr. Marius Jansen points out in what remains the seminal English language work on Sakamoto's life,

the very things that make Sakamoto less central to earlier accounts of the restoration

also make him fascinating to think about when we try to expand our understanding

of how 200 years of Tokugawa government

crumbled so quickly. Plus, looking at him gives us a chance to return to somewhere we've

spent some time before and to a place I have a lot of fondness for, what is now Colchie

...