Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 599, Ain't it Grand?

One of the things I enjoy about history, one of the reasons I love thinking about it so

much, is that in my experience, it's not that hard to understand people's motivations.

When you take the time to really understand another time and another place, to think about what we know of its systems and structures, it's usually pretty straightforward to figure out why a given person or group of people behaved as they did.

Humans respond to incentives, after all, once you understand the incentives, it's pretty straightforward to understand human choices.

Don't get it twisted, you'll never catch me agreeing with, say, the premise advanced by a lot of economists,

that humans are fundamentally rational creatures, I don't think that's true at all,

but generally we are at least comprehensible, if you take the time to try and think about

things from a perspective that's not yours.

But of course, every so often, something comes along that shakes your nice, simple understanding

of these things and forces you to consider that maybe even comprehensibility might be too generous a bar when it comes to human action.

Anyone who's read a good amount of history has probably come across at least one or two WTF moments, so to speak, in their time.

One of my own first and biggest ones came late in my undergraduate years when I was working on my honors thesis.

Said thesis was focused on the evolution of Japanese martial arts, especially Kendo, during the Meiji period.

Through the assimilation of ideas from Western sporting culture, it was a really good project that forced me to cover a lot of ground

and read pretty widely. And in doing so, I came across a lot of things that kind of surprised me.

And one that really stood out was a discovery that apparently in the final years of feudalism in

Japan during the late 1860s, there'd been some sort of mass movement among

the commoners that just involved singing and dancing and running around in strange outfits,

and generally behavior that, at a minimum, would read as pretty weird to most.

These protests, movements, religious experiences, some mix of all of those, the main unifying

threat across them was that they all began with a report that some sort of divine amulet

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