Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's

bestselling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn.

Today you'll hear another lecture from our 2019 History Weekend in Chester.

In today's lecture, you'll hear from Chris Harding.

Chris is a senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh.

And he's also the author of Japan's Story in Search of a Nation, and more recently, the

Japanese are history in 20 lives.

In this talk, he charts the turbulent history of Japan's relationship with the West.

APPLAUSE

Well, thank you very much for the introduction.

I thought before we got going, I might ask how many people here have been to Japan already?

Gosh, right, okay.

And how many have my dad loves to say this, have a yen to go to Japan?

That's some point.

Okay.

But one of the themes with Japan and the West, what I wanted to address with you today,

is the idea of Westerners as barbarians.

So if you want to understand Japanese history, often tell our students the place to start

is China, because so much of Japan's thinking about the world comes originally from China

many centuries ago, whether it's an emperor, calendar, architecture, religion, food,

laws, all sorts of things.

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