Hello everyone. Before we get into this week's episode, just a quick programming note.

For as long as I've been doing the show, people have been asking me for episode transcripts.

My response has always been the same. The time necessary to take notes and transpose them into a useful transcript would simply be prohibitive, given how much work production already is.

Now, however, thanks to our generous patrons, we can finally start working on this at long last.

It's going to take a while, given 500 episodes, and some of my old notes are no longer with us,

thanks to some issues with my old University of Washington

account, but it's still a fantastic undertaking, and it is only possible because of our patrons,

both for history of Japan and for the Facing Backward Network. So, patrons, one more time,

thank you all so much for your support.

Thank you all so much for your support. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 492, The Whipping Boy.

As you have probably noticed, if you've listened to this podcast for any length of time, I find political power very interesting to think about.

After all, if you understand how power is

organized in a society, you can learn a great deal, both about how it operates and the ideology

that is used to justify the existing order, among other things. And this in turn means I find

the Tokugawa Shogunate endlessly fascinating.

Its combination of warrior ethos and Confucianism, of advanced bureaucracy with dense

traditional ritual, is just endlessly interesting to me.

And when we talk about the Tokugawa Shoguns, there are a few names that tend to always come up.

Eayasu, of course, as the dynastic founder, Yoshinobu as the one who oversaw the end

of the Shogunate, they're pretty common.

Then there are guys like Tsunayoshi, the so-called Dog Shogun or Iamochi, who reads,

to me at least, like a sad victim of circumstance being manipulated by basically everyone around him.

...