Dan Snow

Is it external?

Or is it a mixture of both?

Right, of course, along the coast, places like Hong Kong, but many more ports along the coast, right?

Yeah.

And that's the world turned upside down.

I mean, that's just unimaginable, right?

Through Japan's thousands of years of history, the idea that people come from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, vast distances, and yet here they are in 18 days.

That's crazy.

And it's the guns on those ships as well.

You've got, you know, Tokyo, this beautiful, incredible, wonderful city, totally exposed to these weapons.

I mean, I think this is that classic UFO film where the UFO just lands on top of Washington DC and you're like, okay, wow, that's just short-circuited everything we understand about security.

That's what's happening here, right?

These ships could lay waste to the imperial capital and there is not one thing you can do about it.

In other cultures where there's been that first contact with these, particularly maritime technology, there's suddenly this gaping, you are dragged into the modern world in seconds when you see these ships.

That led to catastrophic internal divisions, dividing groups who collaborated with outsiders, who saw advantage, who wanted to double down on fighting them.

whether it's in Mexico and Cortez or all these other cultures and exchanges.

What happens in Japan?

Because Japan goes on a different journey.

Japan actually seems to, well, it evolves quite rapidly.

It sort of ingests some of these ideas and ends up becoming a great power that can go toe-to-toe with these European and North American powers.