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

Buddhism from the Great Courses series narrated by Malcolm David Eccle.

Buddhism is, of course, a fascinating subject in its own right, and it's one that has

a deep interrelationship with Japanese history.

I myself have been struggling with the complexities of Buddhist theology recently in preparation

for future episodes, hint, hint,

and resources like this have been a tremendous help.

Go to audible trial.com slash Japan to claim your copy. Thank you. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 357, women in Etto, Japan.

If you ever decide to get into history as a field, to really look at the process by which historians do history, for lack of a better phrasing,

you quickly come to realize that much of what it's about is understanding not some abstract timeline of facts and dates, we have reference texts, we can check those things, but understanding how to work with sources.

When I teach intro, history, or social studies courses, I tell my kids that the job of a historian is very similar to the job of a detective.

We have bits of evidence, our sources, and we need to assemble them to tell a story.

But as we do, we have to be really careful about how we think of our evidence,

just because something is written down does not make it true.

A person who, say, reads a pamphlet from the World War II-era Japanese government

and takes everything contained therein at face value,

...