History of Japan

In the last episode of 2025: a bomb "mysteriously" goes off just outside Mukden during the evening of September 18, 1931. Less than six months later, Manchuria becomes an "independent country." Japan's government loses complete control over the army, all over the issue of its new "Manchurian Lifeline." And suddenly, for some reason, the last emperor of China is back! Show notes here.    

As Japan enters the 1920s, national policy becomes increasingly liberalized--but Manchuria remains a holdout of extremists who, if anything, begin to take a more aggressive position on the "China Problem." How did that happen--and how did that aggressive position, seemingly overnight, become normalized back in Japan proper? Show notes here. 

This week: Japan's military and civilian leaders find themselves at a crossroads in Manchuria in the 1910s, as views begin to split around what the point of Japan's presence there even is. As Russia and China collapse into civil war, the new liberal post-WWI order will see the beginnings of a very different vision of what Japan's purpose on the Asian mainland even is.  Show notes here. 

This week: after the Russo-Japanese War, Japan inherited a rather unusual arrangement in Manchuria, which would become the basis of its empire in the region. But how, exactly, would that new empire function? And why, precisely, did it come attached to a corporation, of all things? Show notes here.

This week, we're turning our attention to possibly the most unique of Japan's colonial ventures during the imperial era: Manchuria. Most know about Manchuria because of its role in the turbulent politics of the 1930s, but Japanese involvement in the region goes back quite a bit further. But first, what even is Manchuria in the first place? Show notes here.