Hello, the episode you're about to listen to is part of a multi-part series introducing an overview

of Japanese history.

This is a repeat of one of the original projects the History of Japan podcast was built on,

and is intended to serve as an update and supplement to these original works.

After 10 years, my hope is to return to this approach and to do it a little bit better,

given the skills that I have improved in the intervening years.

If you haven't been doing so already, you should listen to these episodes sequentially,

starting with episode 501.

Without any further ado, enjoy the episode.

Hello, and welcome to the episode.

Hello, and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 525,

A Day in the Life of Tokugawa Japan.

Today I want to take a break from our regularly scheduled onward march of history to talk about something

a bit different. One of the fun things about history, at least in my view, is seeing a bit of

yourself in the past, seeing parts of your life reflected in the lives of those who came before.

And so I want to take an episode to talk a bit about something we all experience, daily life.

What was daily life in Tokugawa Japan like?

Well, a couple of quick notes before we get into this.

First, this is going to focus more, though not entirely, on city life over country life,

which is not representative of the population of Japan at this time.

Most people in Japan during the Tokugawa years were still living in the countryside, and while the urban population did grow, that growth was more like from a single digit to a low double digit percentage than a flipping completely of the urban rural dynamic.

That sort of population shift is more of a 20th century type of thing.

...