Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, where I am truly terrible at estimating how long anything will take.

A long-time listeners will know that I have a terrible habit of saying that a given project

will take X number of episodes and then immediately overshooting that because I'm terrible

at estimating these things.

And astonishingly, I have done this once again, this skill that I'm quite practiced at.

I had figured we could get through the travelogue stuff I wanted to do in two episodes. And

lo and behold, we were at the end of a second episode verging on 40 minutes of recording.

And I still had some stuff I didn't have time to get to.

And so the wonderful and talented Dmitria, in addition to being my excellent travel

companion, has volunteered to do some creative re-editing to make this into three episodes

with this little sort of introductory piece serving to bring us back into our

discussion of Kyoto, where this time I promise we'll be done. Next week is back to one regular

episode, and then the week after that is episode 500. So here we go, folks. We're coming up on the big milestone. And so the last place

that we spent some time when we were there was the great city of Kyoto. What stood out to you

about Kyoto, Demetria? Oh, goodness. Okay, well, you know what I liked best in Kyoto.

Please share with the class.

Which I think was one of the first things we did, which is that we went and we saw a samurai movie being filmed.

We did.

We went to the Toe Kyoto Studios Park, otherwise known as Toe Egamura, which is in the western

part of the city.

And if you really like samurai movies, if perchance you are married to someone where some of

your earliest dates were going to see samurai movies, not to name any, you know, name any specific

...