Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 91, The Dragon and the Rising Sun, Part 1.

This week, we're going to begin a series I've been thinking about for a long time.

It's absolutely critical for modern Japanese history, but it's not something that the average

Japanese history lecture course would cover in more than passing detail.

Technically, you see, it's not what you would call Japanese history at all.

This week, we're going to start to cover Japan's tumultuous relationship with China.

Now, this is a huge topic, and I honestly can't do justice to all of it.

It's really a lifetime's worth of study.

First, it covers a huge amount of time.

Even starting with the collapse of China's last imperial dynasty,

we're looking at a span roughly equivalent to what we dealt with

in the episodes on the U.S.-Japan relationship,

and that took seven episodes.

Added to that, we have the extra issue of dealing with China, an incredibly complex and complicated country.

China, as it exists today, is roughly the size of the United States and has a huge diversity of ethnic and cultural minorities.

Each region has its own peculiarities and characteristics, and the struggle between them is as

important as the struggle between China and other nations.

To give you an idea of the level of diversity we're talking about, China has 57 recognized

individual ethnic minorities, and those are just the ones the People's

Republic of China has chosen to recognize. If you go by the number requesting recognition

as ethnic minorities, not just the ones officially recognized, the number skyrockets into the

...