Personal Landscapes

When Tom Feiling lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s, Japan was a vision of the future. A place where science fiction existed next to centuries old Shinto shrines.
He returned to the country nearly twenty-five years later to find some of the shine had worn off.
Its population is aging and shrinking. Inflation is finally setting in after decades of economic stagnation. People are choosing solitude over companionship. And countryside villages are being abandoned as their last residents die off.
Japan still looks like the future, but it is a troubling future, and a warning for us all.
Tom is the author of Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future.
We spoke about Japan’s culture of overwork, extreme forms of solitude, sex doll showrooms, and attempts to save village life and big city prosperity.
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The little town of Weimar was the crucible of German high culture, democracy, and dictatorship.
It was home to Goethe and Schiller, Nietzsche and Liszt. It gave its name to the Weimar Republic. And it was an early stronghold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.
It’s easy to look back this period and diagnose how it all went wrong. Why did so many people sleepwalk into disaster?
Hindsight is always deceptively clear. But life looks very different when you’re living it.
Historian Katja Hoyer tells the story of Weimar — and by extension, Germany’s descent into chaos — through the lives of ordinary people, giving us a vivid sense of what it must have been like, year by year, as they tried to put food on the table, build businesses, and feed their families.
Katja is the author of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.
We spoke about Weimar as the centre of German culture, how Elizabeth Nietzsche tarnished her brother’s legacy, and how democratic hope turned to Nazi terror.
Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 
You’ll be supporting an independent ad-free podcast that publishes carefully curated conversations like this one, backed by decades of reading. Go to https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here
Follow my travels — and buy my books — on https://ryanmurdock.com/



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.personallandscapespodcast.com/subscribe

Landscapes contain hidden histories that shaped the development of the world we live in. How we moved through those landscapes also tells us something about ourselves.
The Paths More Traveled explores the web that has stretched across Britain for over 11,000 years, as prehistoric routeways evolved to Roman roads and pilgrim paths.
Nicholas Crane is the author of ten books, including The Path More Travelled, The Making of the British Landscape, Latitude, and one of my favourite travel classics, Clear Waters Rising. He’s also known for his television work as lead presenter on the series Coast. And he was was president of the Royal Geographical Society between 2015 and 2018.
We spoke about navigating Mesolithic routeways, the legacy of Britain’s Roman roads, and how 7th century pilgrimage reshaped the urban landscape.
Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 
You’ll be supporting an independent ad-free podcast that publishes carefully curated conversations like this one, backed by decades of reading. Go to https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here
Follow my travels — and buy my books — on https://ryanmurdock.com/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.personallandscapespodcast.com/subscribe

The foreign affairs and travel writer Robert Kaplan sees today’s world as a larger version of Germany’s Weimar Republic, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.”
In his latest book, Waste Land, he uses history, literature, politics and philosophy to draw parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar period to give us a bracing glimpse of a dangerous world that we’ve already entered into.
We spoke about the immediacy of every crisis, how faltering institutions enable fanatics and ideologues, and why the roots of our permanent twenty-first century crisis continues to lie in what went wrong in the twentieth.
Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 
You’ll be supporting an independent ad-free podcast that publishes carefully curated conversations like this one, backed by decades of reading. Go to https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here
Follow my travels — and buy my books — on https://ryanmurdock.com/
Your support is greatly appreciated.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.personallandscapespodcast.com/subscribe

In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, a young girl chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths watches over this broad valley and protects the country and its people.
She’s the embodiment of Devi, the universal goddess, and Hindu kings have sought her blessings for centuries to legitimate their rule.
Isabella Tree uncovered the secrets of this strange tradition over many years and many visits to Nepal. She peeled away the layers of myth, religious belief and modern history, and she slowly overcame the reluctance of priests and caretakers to meet Kathmandu’s living goddess herself.
Isabella is the author of The Living Goddess, Islands in the Clouds, The Book of Wilding, and other books. Her work has appeared in Granta, National Geographic, The Sunday Times and other publications. She’s an award winning conservationist, and lives West Sussex, in the middle of the Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England.
We spoke about the powers of the living goddess, how she is chosen, the connection to tantric ritual, and how the goddess foreshadowed the massacre of Nepal’s royal family.
Personal Landscapes relies on the support of listeners like you to keep going. Please consider joining my Member's Club on Substack, where you'll find show notes for each episode, book reviews, reading-related videos, and more. 
You’ll be supporting an independent ad-free podcast that publishes carefully curated conversations like this one, backed by decades of reading. Go to https://www.personallandscapespodcast.com/p/start-here
Follow my travels — and buy my books — on https://ryanmurdock.com/


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.personallandscapespodcast.com/subscribe