Hello and welcome to this very special throwback episode of Our Fake History.

This week I am throwing you back to episode 55, Who was Japan's Greatest Swordsman, Part 1?

This is the first part of a two-part series that first aired back in season three.

Now, there's a few reasons why I thought it would be good to return to this series now.

First and foremost, this is a fun series. We're on our short summer hiatus right now, and I thought that the Miyamoto

Musashi series would make for an excellent summer road trip listen.

A lot of you tell me that you take our fake history with you when you're out exploring whatever country you happen to live in.

I love getting messages with people telling me that they took the podcast with them to

Italy or that they were hiking through Australia and the podcast helped them get to the final

leg of their hike. Or perhaps you are making a trek across Canada right now and you need

something to listen to. Allow me to suggest this wild episode about a disheveled Japanese

swordsman carving his way through the countryside.

I also wanted to return to this series because since I originally released it,

I have learned so much more about Japanese history.

What I realized is that when I originally made this series, I was playing pretty fast and loose with my Japanese terminology, specifically the term samurai.

Now, if you've been keeping up with our fake history, then you might know that I've since unpacked what it means to be a samurai when the term samurai came

into existence and whether or not warriors from before the Tokugawa era, that's around the

year 1600, can even be called samurai. This issue was particularly relevant when we explored the life of Yaske,

the East African man, who eventually became a warrior retainer in the service of

Oda Nobunaga, one of the most famous Japanese war leaders.

Many have argued that Yaske was the first African samurai, but others have argued that the term

samurai was inappropriate for Yaske.

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