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Episode 453 - The Waves are High But the Day is Clear, Part 2
🕑 Added 2022-09-09 17:01:02 +0000 UTCShow notes here.
This was one of the most challenging scripts I've done in a while, chiefly because keeping it focused was tricky. I'm always weary when dealing with military affairs of the tendency to slip into impenetrable jargon (something I had a LOT of trouble with in terms of my sources for this episode). I wanted to keep things accessible and big-picture focused because I think it's the most important takeaway for any civilian. But that can also lead to a lack of narrative "through line" for the episode. That's actually where the idea of focusing on the Maritime SDF came from, to try and keep things a bit more bounded. Hopefully it helped, and you now have a sense of how the SDF evolved into its current form and orientation.
I do really want to do a Sanyu Incident episode at some point, but unfortunately there's just not that much on it because the conspiracy itself fell apart so quickly. As a result--they didn't even get to the Mishima "yelling out the window" stage--there hasn't really been much actual scholarship on the subject, so I'd be working mostly with primary sources. That's always an interesting challenge, but it makes drafting an episode much harder!
I probably won't do other full episodes on the other service branches, meanwhile, simply because I think that could get granular in a way that isn't very accessible. I might do something down the line on some of the specific peacekeeping operations, though (Cambodia comes to mind immediately as one of the most interesting options).
