Dan Snow's History Hit - Japan's Tokugawa Shogunate

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

The Warring States period brought Japan to its knees. It was a time of turbulence and treachery, with rival warlords fighting bitterly for control of the land. But by the dawn of the 17th century, one of Japan's 'Great Unifiers' had emerged victorious - Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first ruler of the Tokugawa Shogunate.On this episode Dan is joined by Christopher Harding, a cultural historian of India and Japan and author of The Light of Asia. Chris explains how this military government worked to restore order and stability to Japan, and why it eventually came to an end.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Ella Blaxill.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the military government that controlled Japan for around two and a half centuries today, from 1603-ish to the middle of the 19th century. It was the Tokugawa Shogunate. In Japanese history, it's remembered as a time of relative peace and stability and economic growth, in stark contrast to what had gone before. The Sengoku, the warring states period. The Sengoku saw tumultuous civil wars between powerful regional daimyos, local lords, basically kings of their own domains. The Sengoku period can best be summed up by this poem that I stumbled across. A bird with one body, but two beaks, pecking itself to death. Cheerful bit of late medieval

Japanese poetry for you there. But under the shogunate, the bird reverted to only having one beak. I'm not sure if the metaphor works, but unity and order was restored. There was a boom in the production of things like silk and cotton and porcelain, paper and sake. Culture thrived as well, but there was a general suspicion of outside influence. Foreign observers were restricted, or really rarely allowed into the Japanese hinterland at all. The idea was that anything that could threaten

Japan's newfound political stability was to be excluded. To help me understand the Tokugawa period and how Japan emerged from it to become one of the great regional, if not world powers, I've got Christopher Harding on the podcast. He's a cultural historian of Japan and India. He's based at the University of Edinburgh. He's got a wonderful new book called The Light of Asia Out,

which explores the influence of Asia over Europe and North America. So let's hear from Christopher all about the shogunate. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity until there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Christopher, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Paint me a picture of Japan at the dawn of the 17th century. Where are we? What's going on? Who's in charge? So they've just come through a period of, what, 50 years or so of awfully intense warfare. We talk about the period before as the Sengoku Jidai, so the Warring States period. It's kind of a feudal free-for-all in Japan at this point.

You've got more than 100 different feudal lords duking it out with each other, making marriage alliances, slaughtering each other, all sorts of things. And you have three individual leaders who, one after the other, these three great unifiers they're called, have managed bit by bit to bring Japan together. And at the dawn of the 17th century, they finally managed to do it. And Tokugawa Ieyasu creates this new shogunate, which lasts for about 250 years. So it's a really big moment. And nominally, there's an emperor in charge, is there, during this period of civil war in the 16th century? Yeah, so Japan has had an emperor by this point for more than a thousand years, based in what we now call Kyoto. But really, for the first few centuries, Japan was truly ruled by

the emperor, with regional governors throughout the country. But from the late 1100s, the samurai were in charge. You know, they start out as a group as bodyguards to the emperor, to aristocrats, etc. And then they really become a force in their own right. So for a little while after the late 1100s, the samurai are pretty much in charge. You have a couple of military governments before everything falls apart into this period of civil war that I was talking about. So the emperor never goes away, but their writ doesn't run in Japan. They basically have their palaces in Kyoto and they're fairly poor and powerless. And we've got these regional magnates who are

duking it out, as you say. Yeah, absolutely. So once the emperor's power goes and the power of the military governments that follow the emperor likewise goes, Japan is fairly chaotic. It's basically this patchwork of feudal domains. The aim is always, if you can, as a real up-and-coming feudal lord, to try to take Kyoto as the capital to control the emperor. Because although the emperor has no real power, people across Japan still have enormous regard for the emperor. Because although the emperor has no real power, people across Japan still have enormous regard for the emperor. In Japan's religious tradition, Shinto, the way of the gods, the emperor, the imperial family are descended from the gods. So although they might not have actual power, there's still this enormous reverence for them. So if you can control the

emperor and can control as much of the country's territory as possible, then you're on your way to unifying Japan. Now, Chris, everyone's heard of samurai. Just define who are we talking about? Are these professional warriors? So it comes from the word saburao, to serve. So these guys start off as, yeah, professional warriors. They're bodyguards for nervous aristocrats. They're enforcers in rural Japan.

And I suppose what happens over time is that they go from being loyal to their clients to being loyal to the chief of the samurai band. And that's where they really start to become an independent force. Without being too Eurocentric about it, we could think of them as not dissimilar maybe to the roving bands of mercenaries you get in Machiavelli's always lamenting in Renaissance Italy, that sort of thing? There's an element of that, yeah. I think perhaps the difference would be that most of these samurai, certainly by the late 1100s, have roots in a particular area. They might have land, they've got family there. So there's that regional identity, I think, which is quite an important part of it. And in these wars that you've told me about, how should we think of them

as different from wars people might be more familiar with in Europe at this time? Are we using gunpowder weapons? Are they large armies manoeuvring? Are they smaller groups of professional soldiers? How have you characterised them? I'd say there's a really big change around the middle of the 1500s because the Portuguese arrive in Japan. They've been expanding their empire for a few decades by this point. They arrive in Japan, they bring with them the arquebus firearms for the very first time. So suddenly Japanese warfare, in the past it would have been samurai on horseback shooting arrows and then later, if necessary, getting off their horse and fighting people with swords. Now you have these much larger armies. You've still got your archers, you've still got your cavalry, but you've also got people wielding firearms,

firing in ranks. And so this is the big change for the second half of the 1500s. And the first person to really use these firearms well is the first of what we call these three unifiers, a warlord by the name of Oda Nobunaga. And he really gets going in the 1560s and the 1570s. And some of the battles he wins are, they're masterpieces of strategy, but he also uses these firearms really well. So in the past, if you were a mere foot soldier in one of his armies, they wouldn't even give you armour to wear because you weren't considered to be that important. But now you put a gun in these person's hands, you can train them on it in no time at all compared to a sword or a bow and arrow, and they become extraordinarily important. So these battlefields get noisier and much bloodier. And are we talking about dislocation across Japan, you know, hunger,

atrocities? There's not just conventional armies clashing on the battlefield. It's just a brutal time, is it? Absolutely. You've got to tax your local peasantry pretty hard to be able to pay for the waging of this kind of warfare. You also might be farming your land in peace for a while and then suddenly a samurai army comes rampaging through, destroying everything on their way to the next battle. So the chaos, I think, is felt by people at every single level. So the achievement of these three unifiers one by one becomes extraordinarily important for Japan. So you've got Oda Nobunaga as the first of these. I think he's really worth talking a little bit about because he starts off, he comes to power in his domain, Owari domain, in the early 1550s. He's just a teenager. His nickname is Idiot and Great Fool. He swaggers around eating melons and

chestnuts. You can imagine the people of that province sort of smacking their foreheads and thinking, our province is doomed, you know, with this guy in charge. But he turns out to have this extraordinary strategic capability. He's also very bloodthirsty. I think an important part of this picture, part of the chaos actually, is alongside these feudal lords, you've also got Buddhist sects, which some of whom are extremely powerful. So Buddhism has been in Japan for about a thousand years by this point. Some of the most powerful of these Buddhist sects own entire mountains. They're fortified. They've got warrior monks who will fight for them. And they're quite an important destabilizing force in Japan at

this point. And Oda Nobunaga's attitude, basically, his motto is rule the realm by force. And so he slaughters tens of thousands of these Buddhists, including men, women, and children who live on these mountains, as a way of making sure that anyone who might stand in his way is basically eliminated. Some people see him as a kind of nihilistic figure. There's a bit more murder than is really necessary, but others might say the only way out of the chaos of this period is a kind of dictator figure like Oda Nobunaga. But he doesn't last too long, does he? He's on the verge of really unifying Japan in the early 1580s. And then in 1582, some of his men turn on him in a temple. They battle it out. Oda Nobunaga

is injured and he ends up taking his own life. Seppuku, you know, this famous samurai suicide. But he has a general who starts off as a farmer's son carrying Oda Nobunaga's sandals into battle, who turns out to have quite a lot of talent. He rises up the ranks, becomes known as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and he becomes the second of these three great unifying figures. So he really picks up where Oda Nobunaga has been forced to leave off. And if you think about the geography of Japan, you've got this main island of Honshu, which has got places like modern day Tokyo and Osaka on it. To the south, you've got another quite large island called Kyushu, which Toyotomi Hideyoshi manages to take. He then sends troops in the early 1590s,

he's an extraordinarily ambitious person, sends troops across to the Korean peninsula because his aim is not just to unify Japan, he wants to take over India and he wants to take over China as well. Crikey. So he wants to use Korea. He's come to take over China as well. Crikey. So he wants to use Korea. He's come a long way since his sandal carrying days, hasn't he? Absolutely.

Maybe he's got that kind of ambition and self-belief that you can only really get if you've come from nothing and gone on to something extraordinary. So he sends troops across to the Korean Peninsula in the early 1590s, essentially using it as China's driveway. And they get all the way to the north of the Korean Peninsula before finally Chinese forces push them back. So he achieves an extraordinary amount as well. But again, death comes for him. He dies in 1598. And that's when we get to this third and final unifying figure, Tokugawa Ieyasu. And he manages to vanquish his enemies at a battle in 1600. And at that point, he controls all the parts of Japan that are really worth controlling.

And where does he come from? Is he from this sort of faction or is he from a completely different one? So his castle town, as it were, is in Edo, which is modern day Tokyo. And after Toyotomi Hideyoshi dies in 1598, all the feudal lords in Japan essentially split into two massive factions. You've got a western faction, which is loyal to Toyotomi Hideyoshi's son, Hideyori, and you've got an eastern faction, which is loyal to Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu had also served under Oda Nobunaga for a while. And it's the fact that Tokugawa Ieyasu's faction is able to win out in 1600, which means he's pretty much uncontested in Japan. Maybe it's worth nuancing that a bit and saying that although officially, you know, he wins that battle,

the lords who are on the other side are all forced to bow down to him, as it were. There's always the risk that something might kick off. And so in these early years of the Tokugawa shogunate, there are a series of new edicts which are really designed to guarantee that no one can challenge the new shogunate. You mentioned he wins a battle. Is this a campaign with a decisive battle? It's not him having to go around the whole of the archipelago, slowly reducing one little daimyo after another. Is there a sort of culminatory moment? Yeah, I think there is. I suppose in that sense, it's quite neat and tidy. So these two great factions, their armies meet at a place called

Sekigahara in 1600, in October of that year, and they fight it out there. And that's where it essentially all comes to an end. The problem that he's got, Tokugawa Ieyasu, after he wins this battle, is that everyone in the Western faction officially signs up to the new shogunate, but unofficially, if they have even the slightest chance of taking him out again, then they'll do it. So he has to move quite quickly. He sends troops to Kyoto because there's always a chance that the emperor could become the figurehead for some kind of rebellion. Notably, he throws out a lot of European missionaries who've been in Japan in the second half of the 1500s because they might also be part of a plot against him. The first few decades, really, in the early 1600s are all about making sure that absolutely no one

can challenge the new shogunate. What does he do? Is it just pure maintains a sort of monopoly on military force? Are there clever things he can do to bind members of the aristocracy more closely to his regime? He does all sorts of things. I think the monopoly on military force is really important. So under Toyotomi Hideyoshi, there'd been a move to start taking weapons away from the peasantry. So the only people who can hold any kind of weaponry in Japan are members of your army, samurai, etc. So he keeps that up. So the peasantry now cannot hold arms. In fact, the peasantry really, for the most part, aren't even allowed to move around the country without a really good reason and permission. So

something like pilgrimage becomes really popular in Japan because that's quite a good reason and permission. So something like pilgrimage becomes really popular in Japan, because that's quite a good reason to basically go somewhere else and have a holiday. So really powerful control of the peasantry, I think is important. He shuffles around people's domains. So people who have opposed him lose lots of their land. Some of his allies gain lots of land. He also does something called sankinkotai, which means something like alternate attendance. It's, have to be resident in Edo, where the Tokugawa forces can keep an eye on them, you know, kind of ensuring good behavior. So a hostage system to make sure that none of the domains have a chance to rise up against him. But also this system, if you think about it, people have got to make these really expensive, lavish journeys across Japan so that they can participate in this hostage system.

That is extraordinarily burdening for them in terms of their finances, because you have to travel with your retainers, you've got to make it look good, you've got to stop off on the way, spend for accommodation. So in fact, it becomes quite a good way of impoverishing your enemies. So they can't actually afford to rise up against you either. So I think it's fairly smart in that sense. I suppose the last piece of the puzzle is to get rid of all the Westerners, except for the Dutch, funnily enough. They let the Dutch stay in a little artificial island off Nagasaki in Kyushu

because the Dutch say, we're not interested in religion, not interested in politics. We just want to trade. We want to be a means of you gaining intelligence about the outside world, you know, when our ships arrive each year. So they'll deal with the Dutch because the Dutch don't look like being a threat. So I think across all these different parts of policy, they're quite good at ensuring a degree of security. It has to be said, life does sound quite boring for some people under the tohoku, the peasants especially. You can't eat rice, you can't drink tea because that's for the higher-ups, for the samurai. After a whole day in the field, you've got to come back home and make rope

or make sacks. So it isn't a very inspiring life, but you could argue it's a much more secure one compared to having samurai armies trampling your land every five minutes. one compared to having samurai armies trampling your land every five minutes. Listen to Dan Snow's history hits. The best is yet to come. Do with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. Before we come on to the shogunate at its peak, which you've given me a glimpse of there, why do we hear so much about the siege of Osaka Castle? It also seems to be another kind of almost starting point for the shogunate. Was this the last main military challenge? And that's what, 1620-ish, is it? Yeah, I think you have this period probably of about 30 years after 1600, where it's not really clear that the new shogunate is going to last. And one really important part of this is the siege of Osaka Castle, what, 1614, 1615. The focal point of that is the son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. There's always that worry

that he becomes the focal point of a new rebellion. And so the siege of Osaka Castle is basically about destroying that stronghold. Hideyori and his mother, both forced by circumstances, let's say, to commit suicide. And so at that point, the whole castle is burned down. It's very dramatic. It becomes a really popular theme, actually, for kabuki plays in the future in Japan.

So that's one of the last big obstacles to the Tokugawa maintaining their power. You've effectively erased the bloodline of one of your major enemies. And I guess you've also kind of demonstrated that with massive siege warfare, war's an expensive business, right? You need artillery, trains and stuff, and it's going to be pretty hard to take on this powerful, well-funded central shogunate, I guess. Absolutely. So what you have instead is forces, especially in the west of Japan,

instead is forces, especially in the west of Japan, they're limited to having just one castle. They can't fortify it beyond a certain point. If they want to make any marriage alliances with others, they have to ask the permission of the shogun in Edo. So in all these practical ways, there's a block put on them ever accumulating a certain amount of power. That said though, what happens I think instead is right across 1600s,s, into the early 1800s, no one forgets in the West of Japan that they lost that climactic battle in 1600s. So there are stories of children being put to bed in the West of Japan with their feet facing towards Edo as a sign of disrespect. In one other place, every new year, people will gather and they will be asked this formal question, is it time for us to subdue the shogunate yet? And the formal answer

is no, not yet. That answer changes in the middle of the 19th century, but it's amazing. More than 200 years worth of resentment, people do not forget their history, and they're just waiting for the moment when they can finally, as they see it, right the wrongs of history. Okay, this is the bit where I'm in such huge danger of becoming a kind of orientalist and naive about Japanese life. But given that Japan would develop this reputation in the 20th century, Second World War, and even today, we think of it as quite obedient society, perhaps, the kind of wild civil wars and chaos of the 16th century, giving way to this stratified, sort of boring, immobile society that you've described.

Is that important as we look at sort of modern Japan? Or do you think I'm just being, you know, hopelessly ill-informed here? No, I think that's really important. There's a big theme of giri or duty in this period. I think it's the same kind of cultural strand, actually, that also informs the warfare in the period beforehand, because the stratification within the samurai, the extraordinary loyalty to your leader, I think that then transfers to this period that comes afterwards. So I think it's the same sort of thing. And it has roots also, I think, in Confucianism in Japan,

which is this sense of not just stratification, but that if you're lower down, if you're a peasant, for example, obviously you owe something to people higher up. But those people owe a kind of benevolence and protection to you. It's supposed to really go both ways, these sorts of arrangements. And I think it's the same thing, really, it's been around in Japan in centuries. So it takes on a new form in the early 1600s and things do look a bit more stable, even stayed. But that cultural value of duty and responsibility, I think that's very old. Okay, so the shogunate, of course, they're still controlling this poor old emperor.

I can't decide whether I feel sorry for the emperor. Actually, he's got quite a good deal. He's just living in a palace, having a perfectly nice time while everyone else is fighting and doing the hard work of governing and being assassinated and things. The emperor is maintained under strict control and the shogunate proves pretty successful. Do you describe it as a dynasty or a system of government? So it becomes a dynasty. The real marker of success is to be able to pass power down to your children. And the Tokugawa family managed to do that for more than 200 years. So certainly a dynasty, I think that makes sense. And it is quite successful. If you think about the growth

of the economy, the population of Japan rises almost doubles in this period. These basic things, I think, are real signs of success. Also, I suppose the flip side of what occasionally seems like rather dull peasant life is an extraordinary flowering of culture in some of Japan's cities. So Kyoto, Osaka, and of course, the capital Edo, which is modern day Tokyo. I suppose the high point is the late 1600s of what they call the floating world of entertainment. So that expression floating world, it has its origins in Buddhism. It's quite dark. It's the sense of life being fleeting and effervescent and nothing really hanging around. But it takes on a completely different meaning, which is a kind of life of

leisure and fantasy for people who've got enough money to enjoy it, which tends to be for the most part merchants who really thrive in this period. Technically, the merchants are at the bottom of this social hierarchy because they don't produce anything. They're just trading in the produce of others. So goes the idea. But in reality, they're making a lot of money, some of these people. And so you can go into these special districts of some of these big cities. You can enjoy tea ceremony. You can enjoy the company of geisha. You can enjoy kabuki play. You can enjoy puppet theatre. You can really have a wonderful life if you've got the cash to support it. And we have wonderful sources from that period, writers especially, buki play, you can enjoy puppet theatre. You can really have a wonderful life if you've got the cash to support it. And we have wonderful sources from that period, writers especially, who really

give us a flavour of what life was like. I suppose one of my favourite would be the writer Ihara Saekaku, who's working in the late 1600s. He publishes this extraordinarily popular book in 1682 called The Life of an Amorous Man. And it's about a man called Yonosuke, son of a merchant who, as a boy, tries to seduce his maids and then goes on this more than 50-year romantic sexual odyssey across Japan. And as we follow him, we get all these satirical comments on different parts of urban Japanese life. If I give you a quick flavor of this, I think you'll get a sense of Yoharu Saekaku and also the world that he was living in. So here we go. This is one little

part from Yonosuke's adventures. The waitress, taking off her linen robe and dainty underwear, threw them upon the fence and slipped into the tub. She was quite sure that no one was about. If there should be any sound at all, it could be nothing but the sigh of evening breezes among the nearby pines. So thinking at any rate, she started to rub herself vigorously with rice bran soap and a towel. The water was pleasantly hot. Tomorrow would be the Iris Festival, and she needed a thorough cleaning of her plump, warm torso. She took particular relish in removing the dirt from the lower parts of her body. Suddenly, as though by instinct, she looked up, and there on the tiled roof of the Azumaya teahouse next door, she saw the crouching figure of the boy, Yonosuke, levelling a long

spyglass at her. You get a real sense of this guy, apart from the kind of erotic side of it, and he boasts of sleeping with almost 4,000 women across the period of his life, there's also a flattering of the rich merchants who'll be reading this. So that little reference early on there to the wind in the nearby pines, that would make people think of a Japanese noh play from the recent past, which is really high culture in Japan. There's a sense of merchants as kind of social climbers during the Tokugawa piece. And that's what Ihara Saekaku was trying to flatter for his readers. And then we have this, possibly a misconception from looking at your work and learning from you,

but a misconception that Japan used to call it closed period, or it remained resistance to outside influences, and therefore sort of missed out on the scientific and industrial revolutions that are going on elsewhere in the world. What does the contemporary scholarship think about that sort of interpretation? I think the old scholarship was flawed, people would now say, because the history telling was so Western centric. So the fact that most European powers were not allowed into Japan was mistaken for this idea that Japan was entirely closed off, so-called Sakoku, closed country. In fact, the Japanese were trading with the Chinese, the Koreans, with people in Southeast Asia. So trade was quite vibrant. Culture was vibrant in

the way that I've said. But I think at the same time, you really can't get away from the idea that because of this closure, especially to the Western world, Japan did fall behind in terms of science, technology, the Industrial Revolution. And so when the Tokugawa period comes to an end, and Japan famously opens up in the 1850s or so, there's a blame game, really, that goes on in Japan saying, well, whose fault was it that we did this? Whose idea was it? Because when the Europeans, the Americans get to Japan in the mid-1800s, some of the weapons that the samurai are holding to potentially fend them off if they need to are in museums in Europe and the United States. These are more than 200 years old. Some

of them, they haven't even got any gunpowder left or the bullets because it's been so long. In a way, that's a testament to a period of wonderful peace. But at the same time, Japan enters this period of furious and sometimes quite angry catch-up as a result in the late 19th century. Well, tell me, why does the shogunate come to an end? Probably, I think, because of the same sort of reasons why it was successful originally, which is this very rigid social and economic structure that we've talked about. That works fantastically well early on. You have this enormous period of peace. People talk about Pax Tokugawa.

But then life changes. The economy grows. It starts to burst those boundaries that have been set for it. I think especially just to give you one idea of what sort of situation Japan's in by the early 19th century, historians have dug up lists created by some of the great feudal laws around Japan, effectively price lists for merchants if they want to buy a bit of samurai armor, if they want to buy a samurai sword, if they want to buy the crest, in some cases, if you want to buy the daughter of a samurai. Because although the samurai are officially still at the top, in reality, there's been no war, there's been no interesting work for them for more than 200 years, and the merchants are making the money, living the high life, etc. So the whole thing is completely broken. And so by the early 19th century, you have younger generations of samurai saying, look, our leaders have completely let us down. We need to do something different. We need to open up the country. And it's that young leadership eventually, once we get to what the 1850s, 1860s, is able to have its way in a brief civil war. Then they take over and they become effectively the leaders, almost the founding

fathers of modern Japan. And so looking back, what is the legacy of this remarkable period of the shogunate? A couple of things. One, I think, is the degree of centralization that goes on across Japan. Having been united in the early 1600s, it's never again been disunited. It's never fallen apart in the way that it was having this terrible warring states period in the late 1500s. So that unity stays. It becomes centralized. Japan has a far higher literacy rate than most European countries in this period. So all those achievements, people say, you know, one of the reasons why Japan modernized so quickly and grew so rapidly in the late 19th century to the point where it could vanquish Russia in 1905 is that it had this incredible foundation on which to build. So I

think that's a big legacy. Probably the other legacy I think is cultural. So this wonderful floating world culture that we've been talking about, you have writers like Ihara Saekaku, great satire, you have great art. That also stays with Japan. Some of the high points of Japanese culture now have their origins in the Tokugawa period. And I think a lot of Japanese now, if you look at TV dramas in Japan, novels, et cetera, so many are set in the Tokugawa period. People love this idea of the time slip fiction so that you can send people back because it was a simpler age. There was no Western interference in Japan yet. There's a real nostalgia, I think, for that period. And you weren't going to get slaughtered by a passing army.

Exactly. Yes. It might be a little bit boring now and again, but you could at least live in peace. Listen, now that we're living in interesting times again, Chris, I hanker for the old boredom. Don't we all? Chris, thank you so much for coming on. How can people buy your books and engage with you?

So The Japanese, A History of 20 Lives is out in paperback. I've got another book coming out beginning of next year. Quite ambitious in scope. It's the history of Western fascination with Asia from the ancient Greeks all the way to the counterculture and onwards. So yeah, feel free to have a look at that in January next year.

Let's get you back on the pod for that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Cheers. you