Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 472, Southward Ho, Part 1.

When we tell the story of Japan's colonial ambitions and overseas expansion, we tend to focus

on places on or near the Asian mainland, Korea, Taiwan, and so on.

And there are good reasons for this.

Those histories remain very current and important for understanding relations between Japan and its neighbors today,

as well as being very central to the narrative of Japanese imperial history.

But that focus can leave behind other important parts of that story,

and so today I want to add a bit

to our history of Japan's overseas expansion. We are going to spend the next few weeks

taking a look at Japan's imperial presence in a rarely discussed region of the empire, the

Nanyol, a broad term just meaning southern seas in Japanese.

The very broadness of the term shows how loosely this region was defined during the imperial period,

but the Nanyo generally covers the region of Micronesia.

The various island groupings of the western Pacific spread across the sea north of Indonesia,

east of the Philippines, and of course,

south of Japan. Specifically, these would be the Marshall, Gilbert, Caroline, Mariana, Volcano,

and Bonin Island chains. And don't worry if your regional geography is a little shaky. I'll put up

some maps in the show notes, and at any rate, my plane is to write this with the assumption that you're not actively looking at a map shaky, I'll put up some maps in the show notes, and at any rate my plan is to

write this with the assumption that you're not actively looking at a map or familiar with

the geography.

Anyway, this was a region of the world that prior to the imperial period was more or less unknown

in Japan.

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