Deep in Japan

About Deep in Japan

A hodgepodge of guest interviews, personal narratives, recent news, history, and Japan-related memes and cultural phenomena. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/deepinjapan. Deep in Japan is an independent, crowd-funded project - so every yen helps keep it alive and kicking! Got something to say? Catch me deep.in.japan.podcast@gmail.com Thanks for listening!

Publisher

Deep in Japan

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

28 Apr 2025

Latest episode

28 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

47 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Sept 2026

   Scandal in Japan

   In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Igor Prusa, author of Scandal in Japan: Transgression, Performance and Ritual (https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Scandal-Japan-Transgression-Performance-Anthropology/dp/1032472480), to explore why scandals in Japan so often unfold like carefully staged public dramas. We talk about apology press conferences, media spectacle, the role of shūkanshi and kisha clubs, Noriko Sakai’s infamous “22 tears,” the blurred line between watchdog and guard dog journalism, and whether high-profile apologies actually produce change—or simply allow institutions to absorb the shock and move on. If you like the show, consider supporting us (https://www.patreon.com/DeepinJapan76). Every little bit helps keep the lights on. And while you’re at it, join the conversation over on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/deepinjapan) and follow us on X/Twitter at @DogePunk2077 (https://x.com/DogePunk2077). For inquiries, complaints, spiritual confessions, you may be able to reach us at deep.in.japan.podcast@gmail.com (mailto:deep.in.japan.podcast@gmail.com). Then again, you may not. Show supporters, naturally, jump the queue. :) The musical outro (TWENTY-TWO TEARS) can be found here (https://suno.com/s/amESNFwJhQOP8FYL), along with various other Deep in Japan tracks. Thanks for listening!

2. 

   4 Sept 2026

   Japanese Rebels with David McNeil and Stephen McClure

   Japan is often described as a place where the nail that sticks up gets hammered down—but what about the nails that refuse to stay down? In this episode, we speak with scholars and journalists David McNeill and Stephen McClure about their new book, Japanese Rebels: Non-conformists in a Conformist Society (https://www.amazon.co.jp/Japanese-Rebels-Non-conformists-Conformist-Contemporary/dp/1032914513), which profiles a number of figures who challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of Japanese politics, religion, art, entertainment, journalism, and social life. The conversation explores openly gay political pioneer Togo Ken, cannabis activist Takagi Saya, artist Rokudenashiko, journalist Ito Shiori, Yoko Ono, Amakusa Shiro, the massive 1960 AMPO protests, and the battle over Narita Airport. Along the way, David and Stephen consider what makes someone a rebel, why not every rebel is a hero, how Japanese society marginalizes dissent, and why work, prosperity, mortgages, and fading historical memory can gradually drain a movement’s rebellious energy. Enjoying the show? Consider supporting us (https://www.patreon.com/DeepinJapan76). Every little bit helps keep this magnificent shitshow lurching forward. And while you’re at it, join the conversation over on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/deepinjapan), and follow us on X/Twitter at @DogePunk2077 (https://x.com/DogePunk2077). If you liked the outro, you listen along here (https://suno.com/s/NtqFl7J6h4dODOgQ). For inquiries, complaints, spiritual confessions, legal threats, guest pitches, or reasonably coherent messages, you may be able to reach us at deep.in.japan.podcast@gmail.com (mailto:deep.in.japan.podcast@gmail.com). Then again, you may not. Show supporters, naturally, jump the queue—so if you’re one of the blessed few, The Chosen, be sure to mention that at the top of your message for maximal response potential. Thanks for listening!

3. 

   23 Aug 2026

   Happy Hour #94: BLACK MIST

   This is Happy Hour #94: BLACK MIST The episode opens with Jeff accusing Trevor/Trey of being twelve minutes late, Trevor insisting it was two, and both immediately blaming suspicious waveforms and future audio problems on the other (American punctuality, sanding-induced camera refusal, and early concern about 音質); Jeff congratulates Trey on intermittently reaching ketosis, then reframes keto failure as experimentation rather than shame—recover from a bad meal, identify the breaking point, and resume immediately (graceful failure beats the “fuck it” spiral); Trey recounts a prolonged crash-out involving weight regain, a stubborn plateau, heart-health concerns, quitting hockey, social isolation, and the difficulty of losing weight while training, while Jeff argues that metabolic adaptation may take months and reports that six months of keto helped him lose roughly twelve kilograms, regain pull-ups, carry kettlebells, dead-hang for two minutes, and buy a weighted vest (Piccolo’s weighted cape and boots remain the superior training system); they audit Trey’s meals—four eggs, sausage patties, Costco rotisserie chicken, ground turkey, broccoli, green beans, salsa water, almonds, and macadamias—while Jeff treats eggs as a religion, distrusts every processed ingredient, and proposes increasingly terrible podcast names including Two Guys Zero Carbs, Keto Bros, Steak and Eggs, Deep in Ketosis, and Ketone Maxing (white rice becomes “white weiss,” “two or three” becomes “two tree,” and every meal earns claps); Trey’s real obstacles are sugary caffeine, late-night cravings, inconsistent hydration, and the ten percent of extra bullshit that destroys an otherwise keto-compatible day, but a sleep study reveals apnea and a new CPAP lets him sleep eleven and a half hours, feel awake, work productively, accept the podcast invitation, and publish three articles in three days (the apparent God Mode was sleep, not ketones); this produces the episode’s central philosophy, the Keto Shield: sleep, meditation, fasting, hydration, keto, and exercise arranged as six mutually reinforcing points inside a hexagonal shield (Jeff imagines intersecting divine triangles; Trey insists that hexagons are the bestagons), with sleep as the foundation because poor sleep disrupts hunger, judgment, mood, and every other habit; Trey scores himself 12/30—sleep 4, exercise 5, keto 1, hydration 2, meditation 0, fasting 0—while Jeff lands near 22/30 and challenges him to reach 20 by the next episode (points measure consistency, not mystical meditation quality); they argue that keto makes fasting easier, distinguish strategic social carb meals from total cheat days, joke about Ozempic “stolen valor,” and envision 30/30 as an almost unattainable state of creative, physical, and philosophical superpower; Jeff, newly fifty, says his goal is not merely looking good in a Speedo but thinking clearly, moving without pain, living long enough to play with grandchildren, and avoiding the inflammation, brain fog, intestinal trouble, irritability, and physical decline he felt before recommitting to keto (Trey still considers the Speedo aspirational); a proposed book evolves from The Deep in Japan Diet: How Two Fat Middle-Aged Podcasters Found the Secret to Six-Pack Abs Deep in Japan toward The Keto Shield, complete with an AI-generated cover and a possible steak-dinner six-pack wager; Trey then uncovers a 2014 email showing Jeff beginning keto before their friendship properly started, meaning keto evangelism predates their first mountain climb, Trevor’s lost apartment key, and nearly everything else in their relationship (Jeff says keto relieved years of debilitating allergies, though the discussion remains personal testimony rather than medical proof); good sleep leads into Trevor’s new Deep in Japan articles: Uni, the Japanese Cat presents a satirical interview with an internet-famous cat whose nationalist translator turns meows, blinks, box-sitting, and Roomba hissing into opinions about immigration, globalization, education, national confidence, and Saitama (Uni may simply be a cat); Obachan’s Going to Jail explores elderly Japanese women allegedly committing petty theft to obtain food, healthcare, companionship, work, supervision, and purpose in prison (an eight-dollar onigiri theoretically unlocks tens of thousands of dollars in state support), prompting discussion of aging, poverty, loneliness, prison incentives, paywalls, sourcing “the sauce,” and Japan’s weak yen; with the dollar around ¥163, they discuss the widening divide between people paid in dollars and yen, Jeff’s taxes, Miho’s repaired Vellfire and overlooked alignment, Japan’s gold driving licenses, elderly-driver marks, and locals’ horror when Jeff jokingly displayed one at forty; bumper stickers open a tangent on Japanese political signaling—outdoor-brand stickers, black-and-gold chrysanthemums, uyoku trucks, nationalist four-character slogans, anti-foreigner signage, yak-styled houses as burglary deterrents, and the idea of disguising Jeff’s vehicle as an intimidating right-wing machine (foreigners could theoretically be “erased,” one truck driver at a time); the next article follows a teenage girl who catches a fifty-eight-year-old taking upskirt photos and escorts him to police, leading to debate over whether she physically dragged him, whether train perverts are weak-willed “beta-cuck pajama boys,” and how girls should respond (judo grips, alarms, pointing and shouting “chikan,” direct eye contact, emergency plans, visible hands, or school-issued sasumata); Jeff then recounts witnessing a man violently assault a woman on a station platform during his early Japan years, intervening with limited Japanese—essentially “stop” and “please be gentle”—standing between them while everyone else looked away, then boarding his train only to see the attack resume as the doors closed (fear of violence, deportation, bystander paralysis, lasting regret, and the limits of imperfect intervention); the conversation moves to a ¥1.5-million “human refrigerator,” a wheeled one-person cooling booth inspired by vending machines and designed for construction sites, farms, commutes, concerts, and sports days (ideally paired with fan vests, a cooling hood, fried chicken, and two Gundam buckets of Strong Zero); Jeff mourns the end of his children’s undōkai era and learns that older sports days once had food stalls and drinking, while both imagine privately installing a refrigerator box at the field and watching everyone else roast; the joke turns serious as they discuss Japan’s increasingly dangerous heat, children and elderly people collapsing, air-conditioning in schools, and figures they pull for 2026 showing tens of thousands of ambulance transports and a majority of patients over sixty-five (the missing statistic is heat-stroke deaths among bears); Trey recalls climbing Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari area during a 41°C day in 2019 without enough water, barely reaching his hotel, collapsing in front of the air conditioner, and abandoning the rest of his Kyoto plans (heat plus humidity defeats gaman); a technology tangent covers Claude’s opaque premium-token billing and default model selection, OpenAI’s unnervingly lifelike Japanese voice “Sol,” conversational fillers so natural that it feels like a real woman reminiscing about Oregon, and the possibility that AI will first join and then entirely replace the podcast hosts; they next examine an article about a famous baseball coach whose eighteen-year-old daughter asked ChatGPT what to do after he pushed her down during a family argument, followed ChatGPT’s suggestion to contact a human support service, and was shocked when the service automatically contacted police, leading to his arrest and resignation (ChatGPT connected her to people rather than directly adjudicating the crisis); Japanese media, in their telling, focused less on the father’s behavior or the reporting service and more on AI dependency,...

Who has been a guest on Deep in Japan

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Jon Hesse
• John Rucynski
• Professor Steve McCarty
• Steve McCarty
• John Rucynski Jr

Podcast Authority Score: 26 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

51

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.