Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about the Meiji restoration and the Meiji Jingoo Shrine today this week. That's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of stuff, and I really wanted to talk about it, in part because I had such a very moving experience there, which is kind of indicative to a lot of stuff you and I have been talking about on the show lately and the times that we're living in. But it hit me so hard while I was there that I just like kind of broke down because we mentioned at the end of the show that one of the things you can do is like write a letter essentially with your hopes and your wishes in it, and you tuck a little money in and you put it in their offering box. And like in my letter, I was trying to convey in a succinct way the troubles of the world were living in and how much I wanted all of us to pass through them and be in a better place. And it broke me, like it was just like I can't to try to parse it in a simple way made it so oddly painful and moving. I'm getting very choked up just talking about it that I literally my best friend was like, are you okay? Brian, who was not doing his letter. He was kind of standing around and enjoying the space. They were both a little like, this is not what we expected. No, no, but it's what happened. It was really really beautiful. But as a remedy to that, I will tell you about the spectacular car ride we had back to our hotel afterwards because we had a driver. I love this man with my whole soul. He does not speak English, but he ran all of his stuff through a translator, and he told great jokes, and he was really funny and really lovely. And one of the things that was really interesting that he talked about was the fact that a lot of Westerners will come to visit as tourists and they'll go to some place like the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and their takeaway is that it's really a shame that Christianity got pushed into this country and you know, somehow adulterated these beautiful religions that were already here and have existed for centuries and he was like, listen, we have gods of everything in this country, so adding Jesus was not a problem. And I was just like, I don't know if this is the perspective of everyone, but it was so hilarious and sweet and funny. He was like, you know, we literally will worship the spirits of like pencils and leave. So like, it's fine, it's not in conflict for us. We can incorporate all of it together. And I was like, Yeah, that is a cool way to consider it, because I have often been that person that's like, why do you have to go shift everybody's culture yas to match your own? But his being like, it's fine, it really doesn't change ours in any way. We've also talked about much earlier periods of Japanese history when like all of the Christian missionaries were either expelled or killed right way earlier on from what we were talking about today. My experience in Japan recently has been playing the video game Assassin's Creen Shadows, which is set in Japan at the end of the sixteenth century. There are shrines all over that game, uh, and there are you do the thing in the game where you clap and you bow. Yeah, you get a little shrine blessing. Sometimes, so you go to a shrine and it's it's full of enemies and you might end up having to kill all of them, and that's it feels disrespectful to me. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not saying that as a criticism of the game designers. I don't know what they're thinking was. I don't know what people in Japan's thinking was. But anytime I get into a fight in a shrine, I'm like, I don't like that. This is why am I supposed to be doing this? I feel this feels a little bit bad to me. Yeah, I have been thinking about doing something related to Japanese history because I've been spending so much time playing this game. But number one, I'm not to the end of the game yet, and I just I sort of I don't want to pick something that then is going to be influential to the end of the game, and there are it Also, the game does overlap with some things that we have talked about on the show before, and so I would not want to repeat those things. So I was glad that you picked something out of a completely different era of Japanese history to talk about Yeah. I mean it was you know, informed by my own curiosity and desire to know more about it. But it really is quite fascinating. There are shrines all over Japan, and I really do find the Shinto belief system very beautiful. And I just love the idea of, you know, there being many things we can appreciate and pay respects to. And I really love that driver who also sang with us. Oh. He told us, Oh, you're gonna laugh, it's much. I mean, they're charming songs, but you're it's not gonna be what you think. He was telling us that, you know, for a long time, a lot of kids in Japan, because everything they got from the West in terms of television was dubbed okay, that there were many kids that he knew growing up that thought that Americans were all bilingual and could speak Japanese. And when American movie stars first started really doing stuff in Japan, you know, like promoting films and like going and doing interviews, they realized they had been so wrong that those people did not speak Japanese. But his point was that what English he knows he learned from nineteen eighties television. And then we sang the theme Tonight Writer Together and the A Team theme together. Okay, I love that man. That was the best forty five minutes of my life. That's fun. He was so charming and so delightful and really really lovely. I mean, we met a lot of wonderful, wonderful people in Japan, but that was the best ride we had for sure. He was great and really really interested in like sharing their culture with us and talking about our perceptions of it, and praise technology for translator apps because right you know, he and Brian were making jokes to each other through a translator app, which was the funny thing on the planet to watch because they were both just belly laughing. It was the best. It was the absolute best. And it was nice because I had had my little breakdown at the shrine, so I liked having a big eagle moment. That's fun. And I will always think about him talking about the spirits of pencils and how well we'll worship that just like anything else. And I was like, I love you man. One of the things that we talked about on the show this week was the Triple Nickels parachute Battalion. I do not know the answer to why they went with the spelling n C K L E S, which is not how we would normally spell the nickel coin, and I did not find a conclusive explanation for why that spelling was the one that they wound up with. I did again want to thank Josiah for submitting this topic because number one great topic, very much appreciated number two. Just as the email arrived, I was thinking about wanting to find a similar topic to cover on the show, because while we do have topics that are about combat units or battles or aspects that like that related to the military and warfare, I also really like the ones about units that are doing things that aren't necessarily what a person might initially think of in terms of the military, So things like smoke jumpers and the people sorting the mail, and the people going on test long distance bike ride. Yeah, the women Air Force Service pilots that we've talked about a number of times a long time ago, all of that. So yes, thank you so much for sending It's a super engaging story. I'm really glad you did this one. Thank you me too. I did have to do way more research than usual at the WaybackMachine at archive dot org. If anyone is not familiar with the WaybackMachine, archive dot org maintains an archive of websites. It does not have every single website in the world. It is possible for people to opt their website out of it, but it contained sort of snapshots of prior versions of websites. This is how a very long time ago, when we we had been part of a company called How Stuff Works, and we had a website for the podcast, and eventually after we were acquired by iHeartRadio. Like iHeartRadio did not control that previous website. It did not belong to iHeart it belongs to How Stuff Works, and so we lost access to it. And so for a long time, the wayback machine is how I would find old stuff related to old episodes of the show that had had some kind of something that was on the website that I did not have saved on my machine anymore or whatever. It got used a lot in the research for this, because there were a couple of things that seemed to have been reorganized or removed from government websites some years in the past, but then there were also quite a number of things that they disappeared in January or early February, presumably because they fell afoul of the executive orders relating to DEI, and I did not enjoy that. It made me angry every single time I followed a link from somewhere and it took me to a four h four page, And then I put that same link into archive dot org and I would find the exact same correct thing, but you know, on a page that's no longer actually there via the military, via a government website. It may be mad didn't like it. Yeah, that's some justified anger. I also went down kind of a rabbit hole with this episode. I did read the memoir by Lieutenant Colonel Bradley Biggs for this episode about called the Triple Nickels, America's first all black paratroope unit, and he described the accident that we talked about briefly that happened at Eggln Field. He did not name specific like dates that that had happened in the memoir, so it took me a little bit to figure out exactly when this accident happened and a little bit more detail about what involved. It was clear from his memoir that he did not feel that it had been appropriately investigated or handled by the military. And so as I was looking into it, I was like, do I need to put in some Floyer requests for this? Right, So that's the Freedom of Information Act. Had I done that, I definitely would not have gotten an answer by the time we needed to record the episode. So I don't really know if there is further information from the military about that accident and what happened. It was reported in the local newspapers immediately after it happened. I did not find any follow ups in newspapers about the results of any kind of investigation from later on though, right yeah, Like I mentioned in an aside, I grew up not far from England Air Force Base in Herlbert Field, which is a little ways away, but they often work in conjunction, and I certainly don't recall ever hearing anything about it. I was there, of course, decades later, but there are a lot of you know, historical markers and whatnot about many things that have happened in the area and specifically related to the bases, and I never recall ever see anything about it. Now it's also possible that I a self involved in stupid kid maybe just never noticed it, but right, yeah, yeah, My starting point had been lists of incidents associated with the with the airfield, and I was not finding it on those lists. But also those lists were primarily about things involving an aircraft crashing, right, not what happened in this case, which was bombs being deployed in the wrong place. Yeah, so, yeah, I wish I had more detail about that. I don't know, if maybe as some side project later on, I might be FOIA time, I don't know, but yeah, it was. It was clear from his memoir that he did not feel that it had been handled appropriately. Do you need comedic relief from the sort of sadness of that? And oh sure, the general racism that's part of this episode. Yeah, listen, this is a big confession because, as everybody knows, I'm a military kid. Yeah, I do not understand military division names. I either honestly never grasped them, like when we were doing the third Battalion, five oh fifth Airborne Infantry, eighty second Airborne what. And I know my dad has tried to explain this stuff to me before, but I'm like, this is so needlessly complicated and convoluted. Nobody needs this many names. I'm sure they do in some way. I'm sure there's justification in some I never understand them. And like when I meet people or I have friends who are really big fans of military history and they could just rattle these things off and they look at me like I am Princess ding Dong that I don't grasp what all of these mean. I'm like, shrug, I don't know what to tell you, dude, Yeah, do you want me to tell you a lot of Star Wars details that you probably don't understand? Like I don't. It's just not something that has ever clicked for me. Yeah. I got kind of in the weeds about exactly exactly what's the platoon and how big is the platoon? But the word test platoon was used so consistently in the description of this that I was like, Okay, test platoon has to be correct. There was also there were multiple different dates that came up in the creation of it, like there were We did not mention a lot of these dates in the in the episode because I found them a little bit confusing and they would not have added to the overall understanding of this. But there was a date for when the President ordered it, a date for when it was created, a date for when it was activated, which was another separate thing. There were just lots of different dates, and I had some similar some similar confusion about exactly what each of the different dates signified. Graduating from training that I understood, It makes total sense. Departing for Pendleton, that makes sense. Also, various dates associated with the creation of the unit. I found a little bit more confusing. Yeah uh so, yeah, yeah, confusing. I do my best, but I finally very confusing. So whatever's coming up on your weekend? Boy do? I hope it's as good as it can possibly possibly be. I took a little time off for myself recently and was able to recharge a little bit do some things that I enjoy, which is important to all of us in these times to be able to keep ourselves going. So whatever's coming up for you, I hope you have a little bit of that. Also, we will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with something brand new on Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about the Meiji restoration and the Meiji Jingoo Shrine today this week. That's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of stuff, and I really wanted to talk about it, in part because I had such a very moving experience there, which is kind of indicative to a lot of stuff you and I have been talking about on the show lately and the times that we're living in. But it hit me so hard while I was there that I just like kind of broke down because we mentioned at the end of the show that one of the things you can do is like write a letter essentially with your hopes and your wishes in it, and you tuck a little money in and you put it in their offering box. And like in my letter, I was trying to convey in a succinct way the troubles of the world were living in and how much I wanted all of us to pass through them and be in a better place. And it broke me, like it was just like I can't to try to parse it in a simple way made it so oddly painful and moving. I'm getting very choked up just talking about it that I literally my best friend was like, are you okay? Brian, who was not doing his letter. He was kind of standing around and enjoying the space. They were both a little like, this is not what we expected. No, no, but it's what happened. It was really really beautiful. But as a remedy to that, I will tell you about the spectacular car ride we had back to our hotel afterwards because we had a driver. I love this man with my whole soul. He does not speak English, but he ran all of his stuff through a translator, and he told great jokes, and he was really funny and really lovely. And one of the things that was really interesting that he talked about was the fact that a lot of Westerners will come to visit as tourists and they'll go to some place like the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and their takeaway is that it's really a shame that Christianity got pushed into this country and you know, somehow adulterated these beautiful religions that were already here and have existed for centuries and he was like, listen, we have gods of everything in this country, so adding Jesus was not a problem. And I was just like, I don't know if this is the perspective of everyone, but it was so hilarious and sweet and funny. He was like, you know, we literally will worship the spirits of like pencils and leave. So like, it's fine, it's not in conflict for us. We can incorporate all of it together. And I was like, Yeah, that is a cool way to consider it, because I have often been that person that's like, why do you have to go shift everybody's culture yas to match your own? But his being like, it's fine, it really doesn't change ours in any way. We've also talked about much earlier periods of Japanese history when like all of the Christian missionaries were either expelled or killed right way earlier on from what we were talking about today. My experience in Japan recently has been playing the video game Assassin's Creen Shadows, which is set in Japan at the end of the sixteenth century. There are shrines all over that game, uh, and there are you do the thing in the game where you clap and you bow. Yeah, you get a little shrine blessing. Sometimes, so you go to a shrine and it's it's full of enemies and you might end up having to kill all of them, and that's it feels disrespectful to me. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not saying that as a criticism of the game designers. I don't know what they're thinking was. I don't know what people in Japan's thinking was. But anytime I get into a fight in a shrine, I'm like, I don't like that. This is why am I supposed to be doing this? I feel this feels a little bit bad to me. Yeah, I have been thinking about doing something related to Japanese history because I've been spending so much time playing this game. But number one, I'm not to the end of the game yet, and I just I sort of I don't want to pick something that then is going to be influential to the end of the game, and there are it Also, the game does overlap with some things that we have talked about on the show before, and so I would not want to repeat those things. So I was glad that you picked something out of a completely different era of Japanese history to talk about Yeah. I mean it was you know, informed by my own curiosity and desire to know more about it. But it really is quite fascinating. There are shrines all over Japan, and I really do find the Shinto belief system very beautiful. And I just love the idea of, you know, there being many things we can appreciate and pay respects to. And I really love that driver who also sang with us. Oh. He told us, Oh, you're gonna laugh, it's much. I mean, they're charming songs, but you're it's not gonna be what you think. He was telling us that, you know, for a long time, a lot of kids in Japan, because everything they got from the West in terms of television was dubbed okay, that there were many kids that he knew growing up that thought that Americans were all bilingual and could speak Japanese. And when American movie stars first started really doing stuff in Japan, you know, like promoting films and like going and doing interviews, they realized they had been so wrong that those people did not speak Japanese. But his point was that what English he knows he learned from nineteen eighties television. And then we sang the theme Tonight Writer Together and the A Team theme together. Okay, I love that man. That was the best forty five minutes of my life. That's fun. He was so charming and so delightful and really really lovely. I mean, we met a lot of wonderful, wonderful people in Japan, but that was the best ride we had for sure. He was great and really really interested in like sharing their culture with us and talking about our perceptions of it, and praise technology for translator apps because right you know, he and Brian were making jokes to each other through a translator app, which was the funny thing on the planet to watch because they were both just belly laughing. It was the best. It was the absolute best. And it was nice because I had had my little breakdown at the shrine, so I liked having a big eagle moment. That's fun. And I will always think about him talking about the spirits of pencils and how well we'll worship that just like anything else. And I was like, I love you man. One of the things that we talked about on the show this week was the Triple Nickels parachute Battalion. I do not know the answer to why they went with the spelling n C K L E S, which is not how we would normally spell the nickel coin, and I did not find a conclusive explanation for why that spelling was the one that they wound up with. I did again want to thank Josiah for submitting this topic because number one great topic, very much appreciated number two. Just as the email arrived, I was thinking about wanting to find a similar topic to cover on the show, because while we do have topics that are about combat units or battles or aspects that like that related to the military and warfare, I also really like the ones about units that are doing things that aren't necessarily what a person might initially think of in terms of the military, So things like smoke jumpers and the people sorting the mail, and the people going on test long distance bike ride. Yeah, the women Air Force Service pilots that we've talked about a number of times a long time ago, all of that. So yes, thank you so much for sending It's a super engaging story. I'm really glad you did this one. Thank you me too. I did have to do way more research than usual at the WaybackMachine at archive dot org. If anyone is not familiar with the WaybackMachine, archive dot org maintains an archive of websites. It does not have every single website in the world. It is possible for people to opt their website out of it, but it contained sort of snapshots of prior versions of websites. This is how a very long time ago, when we we had been part of a company called How Stuff Works, and we had a website for the podcast, and eventually after we were acquired by iHeartRadio. Like iHeartRadio did not control that previous website. It did not belong to iHeart it belongs to How Stuff Works, and so we lost access to it. And so for a long time, the wayback machine is how I would find old stuff related to old episodes of the show that had had some kind of something that was on the website that I did not have saved on my machine anymore or whatever. It got used a lot in the research for this, because there were a couple of things that seemed to have been reorganized or removed from government websites some years in the past, but then there were also quite a number of things that they disappeared in January or early February, presumably because they fell afoul of the executive orders relating to DEI, and I did not enjoy that. It made me angry every single time I followed a link from somewhere and it took me to a four h four page, And then I put that same link into archive dot org and I would find the exact same correct thing, but you know, on a page that's no longer actually there via the military, via a government website. It may be mad didn't like it. Yeah, that's some justified anger. I also went down kind of a rabbit hole with this episode. I did read the memoir by Lieutenant Colonel Bradley Biggs for this episode about called the Triple Nickels, America's first all black paratroope unit, and he described the accident that we talked about briefly that happened at Eggln Field. He did not name specific like dates that that had happened in the memoir, so it took me a little bit to figure out exactly when this accident happened and a little bit more detail about what involved. It was clear from his memoir that he did not feel that it had been appropriately investigated or handled by the military. And so as I was looking into it, I was like, do I need to put in some Floyer requests for this? Right, So that's the Freedom of Information Act. Had I done that, I definitely would not have gotten an answer by the time we needed to record the episode. So I don't really know if there is further information from the military about that accident and what happened. It was reported in the local newspapers immediately after it happened. I did not find any follow ups in newspapers about the results of any kind of investigation from later on though, right yeah, Like I mentioned in an aside, I grew up not far from England Air Force Base in Herlbert Field, which is a little ways away, but they often work in conjunction, and I certainly don't recall ever hearing anything about it. I was there, of course, decades later, but there are a lot of you know, historical markers and whatnot about many things that have happened in the area and specifically related to the bases, and I never recall ever see anything about it. Now it's also possible that I a self involved in stupid kid maybe just never noticed it, but right, yeah, yeah, My starting point had been lists of incidents associated with the with the airfield, and I was not finding it on those lists. But also those lists were primarily about things involving an aircraft crashing, right, not what happened in this case, which was bombs being deployed in the wrong place. Yeah, so, yeah, I wish I had more detail about that. I don't know, if maybe as some side project later on, I might be FOIA time, I don't know, but yeah, it was. It was clear from his memoir that he did not feel that it had been handled appropriately. Do you need comedic relief from the sort of sadness of that? And oh sure, the general racism that's part of this episode. Yeah, listen, this is a big confession because, as everybody knows, I'm a military kid. Yeah, I do not understand military division names. I either honestly never grasped them, like when we were doing the third Battalion, five oh fifth Airborne Infantry, eighty second Airborne what. And I know my dad has tried to explain this stuff to me before, but I'm like, this is so needlessly complicated and convoluted. Nobody needs this many names. I'm sure they do in some way. I'm sure there's justification in some I never understand them. And like when I meet people or I have friends who are really big fans of military history and they could just rattle these things off and they look at me like I am Princess ding Dong that I don't grasp what all of these mean. I'm like, shrug, I don't know what to tell you, dude, Yeah, do you want me to tell you a lot of Star Wars details that you probably don't understand? Like I don't. It's just not something that has ever clicked for me. Yeah. I got kind of in the weeds about exactly exactly what's the platoon and how big is the platoon? But the word test platoon was used so consistently in the description of this that I was like, Okay, test platoon has to be correct. There was also there were multiple different dates that came up in the creation of it, like there were We did not mention a lot of these dates in the in the episode because I found them a little bit confusing and they would not have added to the overall understanding of this. But there was a date for when the President ordered it, a date for when it was created, a date for when it was activated, which was another separate thing. There were just lots of different dates, and I had some similar some similar confusion about exactly what each of the different dates signified. Graduating from training that I understood, It makes total sense. Departing for Pendleton, that makes sense. Also, various dates associated with the creation of the unit. I found a little bit more confusing. Yeah uh so, yeah, yeah, confusing. I do my best, but I finally very confusing. So whatever's coming up on your weekend? Boy do? I hope it's as good as it can possibly possibly be. I took a little time off for myself recently and was able to recharge a little bit do some things that I enjoy, which is important to all of us in these times to be able to keep ourselves going. So whatever's coming up for you, I hope you have a little bit of that. Also, we will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and with something brand new on Monday. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.