Episode 137: On Friendship, with Professor Joshua Fogel

For more detailed shownotes, go to our website at historian.live This episode is a co-production with the Journal of History of Ideas Blog’s podcast, In Theory. If you like this show’s format, you’ll love In Theory. Also be sure to check out the JHI Blog itself, which consistently produces some of the best academic writing for a general audience out there. If you dig through the archives, you might even find some of my essays! This episode I’m joined by Joshua Fogel, Professor at York University in Canada to talk about his new book, A Friend In Deed. A Friend In Deed talks about the unlikely friendship between on of 20th Century China’s most important writers, Lu Xun, and a Japanese bookstore maven in Shanghai during the interwar period, Uchiyama Kanzo. It’s a fantastic book that does what few history books can do—it really shows you a rich human relationship. In talking about the book, we discuss Chinese-Japanese relations in the interwar period, the cosmopolitain city of Shanghai, and the nature of friendship itself. It’s a really fantastic interview with a truly generous scholar.