This week, in lieu of an audible advertisement, I have two announcements to make for the show.

First, as you've probably noticed, we're coming up on episode 100, and I figured it would be fun to do another Q&A show like we did for episode 50.

So I'll make a page on the WordPress page.

You can send me your questions or through Facebook or email.

That works fine, too.

And for episode 100, I'll go through an answer as many of them as I can.

Second, some exciting personal news.

This quarter I'll be teaching my own class for the very first time.

This is pretty exciting, but it's also pretty time-consuming, so there may be a couple of weeks

when I'm not able to put an episode out.

I'm going to do my best to avoid that, and I have some guests lined up who will potentially

be able to cover for me for a couple weeks, but I just wanted to let you know that that possibility

is on the table, since I really don't want to mess things up my first time at the gate running things all by myself.

And with that in mind, let's get started. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 95, The Dragon and the Rising Sun, Part 5.

In October of 1935, a battered, beaten force of around 7,000 people entered the city of Yanon in northern China.

It was all that remained of some 100,000 soldiers who had set out from Jiangxi in southern China about one year earlier.

In the past year, that force had covered thousands of miles through hostile territory,

fighting off the forces of the central government and warlords all along the way,

until only the hardest of the hardcore were left.

At the head of this army was a 41-year-old man from Hunan who had started out his life as the

eldest son of a young peasant, named Mao Zedong.

...