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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Free Thinking 2017

The Essay: Free Thinking 2017: Episode 10: Killing Time in Imperial Japan

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Episode 10

Episode 10: Killing Time in Imperial Japan

Free Thinking 2017

Killing Time in Imperial Japan

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Christopher Harding discusses Tokyo in the early 20th century.

Christopher Harding discusses Tokyo in the early 20th century, a bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a growing empire, where the meaning of 'time' was hotly contested.

Christopher Harding explores the Tokyo of a century ago, the bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a growing empire, where the meaning of 'time' was hotly contested. Critics attacked the relentless 'clock time' of new factories and businesses and the 'leisure time' of youngsters who favoured cafes or poetry rather than exerting themselves in empire-building. Buddhist thinkers and folklorists claimed that Japan must rediscover its natural sense of time as seasonal and cyclical, rather than mechanical.

New Generation Thinker Christopher Harding contemplates the way these attempts at escape became useful fodder for Japan's militarist ideologues - working for the Emperor, his palace tucked away amongst the trees in central Tokyo, whose own sense of time stretched back into myth and from there into divinity.

Recorded as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead.
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics who can turn their research into radio. 

Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

New Generation Thinkers give talks in front of an audience at Free Thinking 2017

Talks given in front of an audience at Sage Gateshead by New Generation Thinkers, for the 2017 Free Thinking festival. The theme is 'the speed of life'

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