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. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 531, The New Japan.

My plan today is to talk about the era of Japanese history that comes after the fall of feudalism,

which we call the Meiji era, named, of course, for the emperor who presided over the construction of this new post-Togu-Gawa order. And that's a pretty hard thing to do, frankly, because the

Meiji era is one of those moments that looms very large in the narrative

of Japan's history.

Even a superficial overview presents a pretty incredible story.

In the 44 years between the defeat of the Shogunate in 1868 and the death of the Meiji

Emperor in 1912, Japan was transformed from a feudal, pre-industrial,

agricultural society into an industrialized, centralized, major power that was a player

in international politics. That telling of the history of the Meiji period, of course,

skips over quite a bit, but it's also not

wrong, and the idea that that much change can happen in that short of a span of time is, frankly,

pretty wild. So today I'm going to do the best I can to walk you through the political

...