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

Shinto and Japanese New Religions by Byron Earhart.

I'm reasonably certain I've recommended this before, but even if I have, I still think

it's worth listening to. This is a fascinating history of both Shinto and the religions that

began cropping up in relation to it in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

Plus, it's narrated by Ben Kingsley, which is honestly pretty cool.

Go to audible trial.com slash Japan to claim your copy.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 358, A Nation in a Nation, Part 2.

Eight months after the death of Makiguchi's Nisabro, a weakened, starved, but very much unbroken

Toda Josei was released from Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.

In July of 1945, the imperial government began releasing some of those held in its prisons.

With the imperial system collapsing, the police bureaucracy began to release low-level prisoners

like Toda, keeping them was simply more trouble than it was worth.

Which, by the way, gets us to a rather complex, nuanced, and frankly very difficult aspect

of Soka Gakai, which I only sort of touched on last episode in my haste to recover the basic

aspects of Nietzschean Buddhism, the precise relationship between Sokakai before the war

...