Hello and welcome back to Badgays, a podcast about evil and complicated queer people in history.

I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of

the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin. And I'm Qlemy, a writer and author. Well, today

we're talking about Tokugawa Iemetsu, a shogun in Japan in the 17th century.

Yeah. Let's start, I think, by clearing up exactly what Shoguns were.

Shoguns were essentially sort of military leaders who emerged to the 8th century in Japan

at the start of the Hayan period.

And the Kyoto-based empire of the House of Yamoto was at war with the

Emishi, who were an ethnic group, or perhaps a group of different ethnic tribes in the

Tohoku region. Apologies in advance for my pronunciation in this episode. I have been reading

up a little bit on Japanese pronunciation,

but I'm certain I'll get it wrong.

But Tohoku is a region that's at the very north of Honshu,

which is the largest island of Japan.

And Japan was at a time going through this period of immense change.

So over the previous few centuries under the Asuka and Nara periods, the country had seen a number of sweeping

reforms as the ruling class had moved towards a new form of government that was more influenced

by Confucianism and modelled on the Chinese Tang dynasty's rule, really influenced by

what was happening in Japan at the time, in China, sorry, at the time. And this was like an attempt

to sort of consolidate imperial power through centralisation. And the most major of these reforms

was a land reform where the imperial house essentially

nationalized all the land in Japan and redistributed it, effectively sort of ending the power

...