In this episode of pplpod, we explore the life of Sakamoto Ryoma, the renegade samurai whose ideas helped push Japan from feudal isolation into the modern world. Born in 1836 in the Tosa domain, Ryoma came from a wealthy sake-brewing family that had purchased the lowest rank of samurai status, but money could not erase the rigid caste barriers of his world. As a child, he struggled in school and was bullied, but after his sister pulled him out and placed him in a fencing dojo, he discovered the one arena where he excelled. Swordsmanship became his way out, carrying him to Edo, where he trained at the Chiba Dojo, fell in love with Chiba Sana, and watched Japan’s old order begin to crack under the arrival of Commodore Perry’s black ships.

The episode also follows Ryoma’s extraordinary evolution from radical loyalist to pragmatic nation-builde ...