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Go to audibletrial.com slash Japan to claim your offer. This week I'm going to recommend

I Am a Cat by Natsume Soaseki.

I will admit to having a somewhat troubled relationship with this text because I had to teach

it so many times in intro to Japanese history courses.

But even I, in my shrivel bitterness, can admit it is honestly pretty fun.

It's an intriguing satire of early Meiji society, told from the perspective, of course,

of a cat. And if that sounds interesting to you, you can go to audible trial.com slash Japan

to claim your copy. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 325, The Rising Sun will come to us from heaven, part four.

As I mentioned, towards the end of the last episode, the early Meiji period was really the

heyday of Japanese Christianity, or at least the second one, after the original heyday of

conversions in the 1500s. Christianity, despite its long-standing label as the evil religion, was also the religion of

modernity and westernization, and those two things were very much cool in the 1870s and 1880s.

Yet the resurgent nationalism of the 1890s put Christianity on the defensive.

Suddenly Christians were once again under scrutiny

as potentially unpatriotic, potentially divided in their loyalties, both from the state and

from other Japanese citizens. At the same time, the radical nature of Christianity as an ideology

in Japan had been displaced by other more radical ideas that came from the West.

Christianity couldn't even be properly called counter-cultural in the spirit of the era.

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