Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 604, The Bureaucrats, Part 3.

Longer ago than I care to admit, I walked into my first class of my first day of graduate

school for my master's.

There were five of us in my master's cohort, and I imagine in retrospect we were all pretty

nervous, I know I was,

and of course most of my memory of that day involved desperately trying to impress my colleagues

by sounding like I knew what I was talking about.

Possibly I even succeeded, I suppose you'd have to ask them.

Of course, the other thing I remember very clearly is how surprised I was at the first

piece of reading we were assigned.

I forget the precise name of this class.

It was, in essence, intro to learning about Japan now that you're in grad school, but with

a pithier title.

And I was really excited to find out which book we'd be starting with, some sweeping brilliant vision that would radically transform my understanding of a region

I was hungry to learn more about, doubtless.

So I was a bit surprised when we were told that for our first actual seminar class,

we would be reading a somewhat dry-sounding book about the bureaucracy,

Meaty and the Japanese Miracle. Now, there was a lot I didn't know about this book going into it. Probably in

retrospect, the most important thing I could have known was that the author, Dr. Chalmers Johnson,

was the Ph.D. supervisor for Dr. Marie Marie Antirdogi, who was teaching us in this

intro class.

In a lot of ways, that's academia.

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