Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 63, An Unnatural Intimacy, Part 1.

Hello, everyone, it's good to be back. I'm safe and sound back in Fabulous Seattle,

and we're ready to resume normal service. First, though, we have two bits of bookkeeping.

Before anything else, I want to thank the two people who helped me get out my guest episodes,

Sam Taminsky, and Demetria Spinrad.

Sam, as he mentioned himself, is an old friend of mine back from my days as a master's student,

and in addition to being a brilliant scholar in his own right, is a very dear friend.

So, thank you to Sam for stepping in and helping out.

The person who deserves more thanks than any other, though, is definitely Demetria.

She stepped in to help me get episodes out, including recording one when it looked like one of our guest episodes couldn't make it,

and she went so far as to arrange for me to get files in China when I brought the wrong set of masters with me to that

country. Without her help, it's likely I would have gotten three episodes out over the past eight

weeks rather than seven. So a tremendous thanks to both Dmitria and Sam.

Second, I want to talk a bit about the background for this episode and the ones that are going to follow.

You see, originally I had planned, after getting back, to start a series on the history of the relationship between Japan and its closest ally, the United States.

I'd also planned for this December a two or three part episode on the road in 1940 to 1941,

leading from tension over China to Pearl Harbor.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that splitting these into two series did not really make sense.

A lot of the same characters and tendencies appear in both episodes, so I figured why not just

combine them.

As a result, this week, we're going to be starting our longest multi-parter to date.

It's looking like it's going to be at least seven or eight episodes, but I'm not sure

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