The Rest Is History - 277: Japan: Samurai and Shoguns

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

In today's episode, Tom and Dominic discuss the history of Japan through six characters, with leading cultural historian of Japan, Chris Harding, as they cover feuding lords and buddhist monks, both world wars, Japanese medieval poetry, Manga culture, and much, much more. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. What was that? Well, a lot of our listeners will know, Tom, because they're more sophisticated in cosmopolitan than you are. That was Welcome to the Restless History with me, Dominic Sandbrook, and my pitiful servant and slave, Tom Holland. I thought it was probably something along those lines.

So, Dominic, let's get this straight. You've never learnt Japanese. I imagine you've never in your life before spoken it. Tom, you are so wrong. So we've got a Japanese specialist who's shortly to come on who will tell you, they don't call me, Tom, the master of tongues for nothing, do they? We've had Portuguese.

We've had all kinds of languages from me. Yes. Okay. So you have never spoken a word of Japanese in your life. And we have as our special guest, the senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh the author of two hugely acclaimed books on Japan Japan's story in search for nation and the Japanese a history in 20 lives Chris Harding Chris you're still there you haven't run away in horror and shock

nope enjoying myself so far. Thank you. Well, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for braving that. Thank you. So today's subject obviously is Japan. So we're continuing with our sweet. You don't have the courage. You don't have the courage to ask Chris how good that Japanese was. Chris, how good was that Japanese? It was pretty good, actually.

Yes. No. No. Yes. No! No! Tom! I think we should end this podcast right now and start again. The producers should clip that moment and put it on YouTube. Oh my word. Oh no! Unbelievable. That's terrible. Chris, so we've asked you on to do basically the impossible,

which is to sum up the entire sweep of Japanese history. We did a very fleeting episode, didn't we, on Kuber Khan's attempted invasion of Japan. And we did two episodes with Rana Mitter on China in the Second World War, which obviously featured Japan as a kind of offstage bogeyman. But we haven't really looked at Japan itself. And I would say that of all the countries in the world whose history I know nothing about, Japan is the country I would most like to know about. And it kind of, I would guess that most of our listeners probably don't know huge amounts about Japanese history. And yet we all have this kind of sense of it. It has such, its history has such a strong presence in the imagination. Samurai anduki and manga manga and all that kind of stuff um and yet japan itself i mean it's it emerges when kind of sixth seventh century i

think that's right as a unified the beginnings of a nation state yes around the sixth uh sixth century early seventh so the islands have obviously they've they have always been there, but what is it that creates Japan as a sort of unified... Is nation state the right word, actually? Is nation state the right word for a 7th century construct? Well, I suppose it begins, obviously, centuries before that. Even in recorded time, we have evidence from Chinese records of there being this place, Land of the Dwarves or various other unfortunate names that it gets given. But at that point, it's really a series of

small chiefdoms spread across this massive archipelago. I suppose what you could say it moves towards, if not a nation state, then one of the chiefdoms or one of these clans, the Yamato clan, starts to be able to dominate and do business with others, really not far from Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto type area for modern Japan. And they become dominant clan, they start to talk about themselves as the great kings. And this is the beginning of the imperial family that we have in Japan today. So Chris, the actual name Japan, I learned from your book, The Japanese History in 20 Lives. It's Nihon, which means root of the sun. And this is how the Japanese emperor addresses

himself to the Chinese emperor, who is splendidly dismissive, isn't he? He kind of says, do not bring this to my attention again. Presumption has occurred. In your book, The Japanese History in 20 Lives, you've divided, obviously, into 20 lives. Yes. That goes without saying. But you, for us, have chosen six lives. So who is your first life? So let's call it Japan emerges in the 7th century AD. Who is our first? Yeah, I think the first person really worth talking about would be Murasaki Shikibu, who

was around in the late 10th and early 11th century. And she is an aristocratic diarist, a lady-in-waiting to the Empress. I think she's worth talking about because this is the point in Japan's history where after a few centuries of getting a lot of cultural influence from China, particularly on things like constitutional law,

on poetry, on fashion, on good manners and behaviour, Japan is starting to, I suppose you might say, process that and make something distinctively Japanese of it. And she's famous, isn't she, for The Tale of Genji, which is often described as the first kind of great novel from Asia. That's right. The first novel, the world's first psychological novel, you could say. I think she's interesting because she's a brilliant observer of court life in Japan. You know, we were talking moments ago about the Yamato clan who gradually managed to turn themselves into this imperial clan. By the time of Murasaki Shikibu, they've established themselves in what we would call Kyoto now, which is Heian-kyo back in the day. And she's at court observing, I think

what a lot of Japanese would probably say now is one of the high points of Japanese culture and Japanese civilization. So she's there, she's observing the chapter on her I have starting off with her diary, actually observing the birth of a child to the Empress Shoshi. It just gives a sense of, I think from her, we get a sense of the vivid religious life. You've got this teenage girl on this raised dais behind white curtains in labour. It's going very badly. And you've got these Buddhist priests praying. You've got exorcists. You've got diviners.

You've got exorcists, you've got diviners, you've got shamans. You've also got a crowd of people on look as aristocrats gathered round just beyond that curtain to wait for the big moment. So if you didn't have someone like Murasaki at that point, noting this culture for us, remembering it so richly for us, it would just be, you know, an imperial birth that either happened or didn't happen. But thanks to her, and also I think thanks to the art of this period, we remember it, I think both Japanese and people outside Japan, as a real classical high point for Japan. The kind of time when you probably, one of those two or three moments in Japanese history where you might really like to have been alive and be part of that world. Except for the lack of dentistry, I suppose. Yeah. So to put that into context, she's what? She's probably, Tom, you'll correct me if I'm wrong about this, but she's roughly about the same time as Ethelred the Unready.

Yes. Is that about right, Tom? Yes. So that's not her real name, Murasaki Shikibu. We don't know her real name. Is that right? Her real name is just lost or was hidden or was secret? I think it's a testament to the times that women's real names were of not much interest to people, so they didn't tend to be recorded in the way that men's would be. We think probably Shikibu comes from her father's post, Shikibu no Daijo. So he was a senior secretarial post in the government. And Murasaki either is a nickname given to her at court from one of the characters of The Tale of Genji. While she was at court working as a lady in waiting, she was drafting chapters of The Tale of Genji, passing them around for feedback amongst

other courtiers. So some may have given her that name from one of the big characters in the book. The other possibility is, and it's a bit more circuitous, that Murasaki in Japanese means purple. And she was from a very junior branch of the Fujiwara aristocratic family. And Fuji means wisteria, which is, of course, purple. So it's possible that it came via that, as I say, more circuitous route. What would be quite significant there, I think, is that she was part of this dominant family, because although the imperial family by this point have written themselves into a semi-fake history of Japan that they put together, there are still very powerful aristocratic families with these amazing mansions around Heian-kyo who are vying for power. And the

Fujiwara family are easily the most powerful of those, I think. And what she gives us is a sense of incredible psychological sophistication, but also cultural sophistication. And a lot of what she's describing kind of corresponds perhaps to the stereotypes that people have of Japan. So among the pleasures that Ulysses Cortes is doing is blossom viewing. And the blossom in Japan is incredibly famous. And also you describe how women look at this court and white powdered skin with rouge cheeks and red lips alongside painted eyebrows and blackened teeth. And that is very much the kind of the stereotype of the geisha, I guess. Are these continuities or not?

I think they are. One of the remarkable things about Japan's history from this period onwards is probably in Murasaki's day, this is the last era where the emperor in Japan has any real kind of power. So listeners will be aware after that, we move into shoguns and samurai. And then in the modern era, we have something that looks like a Western government. And yet lots of these aspiring leaders in Japan across centuries, in fact, they managed to sideline the emperor or shut them away or whatever they do to them. They always aspire to some kind of imperial legitimacy, some kind of imperial culture. So the culture of Murasaki's era, the aesthetics that you've just talked about, that remains a kind of touchstone for refinement in Japan. I know that can be almost a cliche when we talk about Japan, the idea of refinement, but... We're all about cliches here.

Good. I think for a culture, maybe there's a parallel with us in the UK here. So much of Japanese culture over the centuries comes in from abroad. So China, later on it's Europe, later on it's the US. So the Japanese come to pride themselves on refining what comes in from Chinese poetry to the transistor and doing something special with it. And if you ask, I think your average Japanese man or woman on the street, what would they say epitomizes refinement in Japan? It's probably the world that Murasaki talks about. You made the comparison with England. So the age of Ethelred, the Unready. The idea of a psychological novel coming out of that period is almost unthinkable, unfathomable. How is it that Japan in the 10th century is able to produce a psychological novel? It's a great question. I

think probably a couple of things. One is the importance of Chinese poetry in Japanese culture. So you've got a tradition of reflection, which is aesthetically and emotionally really deep, and I think very well established. The other element is that at court, there's a tradition already by this point of aristocratic women in particular, who don't have much by way of a day job because the men are monopolising government roles, writing these diaries, these miscellanies. So I suppose, say, Sean O'Gon's Pillow Book, people may have heard of that. Wasn't it Ewan McGregor was in that film, if I remember right? He was, yeah.

Is that right? Oh, good. So I think there's that tradition, and it's particularly in women's writing, of observing people at court and their attempts to be refined and their attempts at one-upmanship in everything from poetry to cherry blossom viewing to clothing. I think that's where it comes from. That's why Murasaki is so valuable. But, you know, we're going to go on and talk about Oda Nobunaga next. I suppose the remarkable thing is that some of that can be lost. So it's not as though Japan enters what you might call dark ages exactly, but some of that refinement almost completely goes away or it's confined to perhaps the emperor's palace in Kyoto. And it doesn't really, for many centuries, become emblematic of Japan again.

So Murasaki kind of embodies absolutely the stereotype that outsiders have of Japan as a place of delicacy and sophistication, perhaps kind of feminine sense of delicacy and sophistication. But equally, you mentioned this guy, Oda Nobunaga, if I pronounced his name right, who is absolutely the opposite. So he is 16th century and he's an absolute lad, isn't he? I mean, he is going around kicking sand in people's faces and he's the embodiment of that. Is he a samurai? He's a shogun, I guess. He's a samurai. He doesn't become shogun, but he becomes in effect ruler of this realm that he's trying to stitch together.

That's right. I suppose since Murasaki's time in those intervening centuries, what's happened is that the imperial power in Kyoto is on the wane and instead you get these feudal lords and we start talking about samurai at that point who were vying amongst themselves for real power in Japan.

You have a series of military governments with a shogun at the head. And Oda Nobunaga is born into this era of real complete chaos in Japan, civil war between these different feudal lords. And he more or less comes out on top. He's one of three great warrior leaders in a row. He's the first of three. And the final one manages more or less to pacify the whole of Japan. 250 years of peace until the West turn up in the middle of the 19th century. So Oda Nobunaga, he's a really important, really important figure. But as you say, he accomplishes most of what he does by being

extraordinarily bloodthirsty, a mixture of very bloodthirsty and a really good strategist i think you'd probably say and how typical is he of samurai so for those people who don't know maybe give us a tiny sense of you know i mean everybody knows what a samurai looks like but what are they and what's their sort of function originally they were they operated as bodyguards and that the word comes from um the verb to serve so they would serve um some of these uh characters in the imperial capital heian kya who got into all sorts of trouble with each other you know you might in the end have a samurai standing outside your door at night if you're a slightly anxious aristocrat um but over the intervening time, it's much more

about honourable war making. There's a blend there, I think, with Zen Buddhism and with the aesthetics of Zen. So by Oda Nobunaga's time, to be a samurai isn't just to go around killing people, it's to have a really good knowledge of Japanese poetry. He likes to dance and sing from Noel plays. So there's a cultured element to him, but you wouldn't say that culture adds up to a conscience in his case. The standard parallels with knights. Is that reasonable? I mean, that's sort of the chivalric ideal of the knight who's killing people and thinking about Jesus. Is that fair? In the modern era, this was really played up because the Japanese wanted to claim the Samurais being as honourable as the European chivalric tradition. But I think there is

something there because honour is an enormous part of it. A hierarchy is extraordinarily important. And there is an element of a religious sense of sending your enemies into the void. So I'd say there's there are parallels there yes to an extent with europe of course what knights don't have the little flag that they that the samurai wore on their back which i think is a great tradition um because yes yes they have it in rand don't they the the great kind of reworking of king lear amazing spectacle of armies with samurai warriors with the flags fluttering over their heads. Absolutely. I suppose it's directors like Kurosawa that we have to thank

for this interest in samurai to some extent anyway. Yeah. So specifically this guy Nobunaga, you said that he's brutal. Yes. So he seems to, he targets his kind of rival warlords and knocks them out of the way and starts to stitch together what will become, I guess, Japan. And he's also very brutal towards Buddhists, isn't he? He doesn't like Buddhists. Yeah. I mean, at this point in Japan, because there's been so much chaos over centuries, some of the big Buddhist sects have armed themselves. You've got basically warrior monks on some of these mountaintop temples. You've also got, if there's a European parallel to bring in here,

you've got one sect of Buddhism, Jodo Shinshu, which is a sort of Japanese equivalent of Protestantism, rooted in the work of this guy, Shinran Shonin, who's a kind of Japanese Martin Luther, who basically says that you don't have to go through all sorts of ascetic practices, etc. You just have one short prayer to say to Amida Buddha and you'll be saved. And this is incredibly useful in a fight because Jodo Shinshu can put lots of relatively ordinary people on the battlefield against Oda Nobunaga if they decide to do so. And some people will carry little pieces of paper into battle with this prayer, the Nimbutsu, written on it. They are fearless. They come

out of nowhere. They're quite well funded by local merchants. And for someone like Oda Nobunaga, it's an absolute disaster to have that marriage of religion with armed power. So he's extraordinarily brutal about trying to wipe these people out. And he't believe in god he doesn't believe in immortality of the soul doesn't believe in life after death no he doesn't seem to have any of that he seems to believe in decent security in this life so he's got about 2 000 bodyguards it's very sandbroke very sandbrokean i approve of him so he um well he's he's virtually dictator isn't he but he doesn't make himself, it never occurs to him, it seems, to make himself emperor, to overthrow the imperial family, kick out the dynasty.

I mean, why not? Why doesn't he get rid? Because, I mean, they are, you describe in your book that they basically, they adopt him because they don't want to be seen to be cowering before a dictator. So why doesn't he just sweep them aside and take power himself? I think because in Japan, the emperors, this Yamato family that we mentioned towards the beginning, they've worked a myth of divine origins into their story. So descended from the sun is the story, is that right?

Yeah, from the sun goddess Amaterasu in their version of events. And whether, you know, the extent to which people in Japan in different periods actually believe that is rather hard to discern. But there's an aura about them that to go in and commit any acts of violence against them would be the ideal basis on which your enemies could then unite and come for you. You have to pay respects to the imperial family. So there's no getting rid of then. Some people think that Oda could have easily taken the title of Shogun, which is kind of barbarian crushing generalissimo, roughly means. I'd love to have that title. Who wouldn't want to be that?

Put that on your business card. Yeah, but then he doesn't really need to do that because he's got enough real power that titles don't mean terribly much.'s a man his entire life he's always on the move he's always looking to see where the next battle uh is to be fought and won he's not terribly interested in in sitting still in kyoto and getting on with the administration there's actually still a fair amount of japan left to be conquered by the time he dies so yeah he still had plenty on his plate and he comes to a fairly sticky end doesn't he I mean he doesn't he doesn't sort of ride off into the sunset to the cheers of the Japanese people does he no and I suppose it's not exactly spoilers if it happened what 500 years ago but he finds himself surrounded by his enemies people who were allies this guy called Akechi Mitsuhide, who, with his troops, turns on him, sets fire to the temple

where Oda Nobunaga, some of his closest allies, are holed up. And the thing completely burns to the ground, and he takes his life inside, crying treason at the last minute. Some would say that he did very similar things to a large number of his enemies, so there's a certain amount of comeuppance in that. But nevertheless, he was still young. He could have done a great deal more if he'd survived, but that's not the way it went.

That, just a very quick point before we move on, that thing of taking your own life. Yes. That happens to a few of the people in your book. So you have 20 lives. Yes. And more than a few of them take their own lives. So the Western stereotype is that the Japanese, you know, can't wait them take their own lives. So the Western stereotype is that the Japanese can't wait to take their own lives.

They're sort of like Roman generals. Disembowel themselves with a sword. Yeah, they're like Roman generals in the sort of first century BC or something. Only one defeat away from a sort of noble end. Is that a fair comparison or is it something that we, is that a sort of orientalizing perspective? Yeah, I don't think it is terribly fair. It's certainly true that there isn't the same kind of philosophical or theological objection to taking your life that you might find in a Christian

culture. There's no idea that it's a sin. There are a range of reasons why you might do it, including taking responsibility for something, taking your life at or after the death of your Lord, as well as, you know, all the way across to real despair. So there are probably a broader range of reasons why you might do it. But I would say that's not the same as being desperately eager to do it. Right. Iris you quote uh what a playground verse about nobunaga and his immediate heir so nobunaga pounded the rice hideyoshi baked the cake and ieyasu ate it so ieyasu basically inherits this emperor of japan that um that these his two predecessors have pounded and baked and ieyasu is the tokug, as in the Tokugawa shogunate.

And the Tokugawa shogunate, it keeps the Europeans out, doesn't it? And it establishes this kind of hermit peace. And it's probably the image of Japan, perhaps, that most popularly dominates people's sense of the history of Japan, do you think? I think possibly. It's inevitable, I think, isn't it, that we see Japan's history from a Western perspective. So from a Western perspective, the Japanese in this era, and we're talking about early 1600s through to middle of the 1800s, were not interested in doing business with most European countries. Because what is it? It's just the Dutch go to Nagasaki. Yeah, it's just the Dutch. And I think from the Japanese point of view, it makes an enormous amount of sense. They've just been through a few decades of having

Jesuit missionaries making large amounts of converts meddling in their politics. Some of these feudal lords actually convert to Christianity. And it's not really clear where their loyalties lie when they do that. And so for the Japanese, the money to be made from trade weighed up against the meddling from imperial powers like Portugal and Spain. It's really a no-brainer. It makes much more sense to keep them out. And the Dutch, who are expressly against the idea of being in Japan for any kind of religious reasons, they're purely traders, they would say to the Japanese. It's just the Dutch and they're kept on this tiny artificial island called Dejima, a few feet off the coast of Nagasaki, linked by a guarded bridge. And they're treated kindly, but they're of little interest to the Japanese. So there is a sense from a Western point of view that the Japanese are cutting themselves off.

But actually from the inside of Japan, they're trading with Southeast Asia, they're trading with Korea, with China. And it's probably a second great era on which a lot of Japanese now would look back with pride and happiness. Tom, the Japanese treat the Dutch the same way that I do, kindly, but with little interest. Yes, you are indeed a shogun. As the representative figure of this period, you have chosen another writer. And this is Ihara Saikaku. Have I pronounced that right? Yes, Ihara Saikaku. Yes. So why have you chosen him?

One of the things I wanted to do in the book is try to give people a flavour of some of the literature and the art from this period, rather than just narrate the historical basics. And Ihara is fantastic because he goes early in life, maybe we'll have a brief quote in a minute, from writing very beautiful, very moving poetry to creating this fabulous character in one of his books called Yonosuke, means man of the world. And it's this young man who tours around all the highlights and the lowlights of Japanese urban culture in places like Kyoto and Osaka,

having all sorts of fun, getting into all sorts of trouble along the way. And it's a lovely way to be, as it were, given a tour of Japan in the 17th century. He's kind of Casanova figure, would you say? Yeah, I think absolutely. Yeah. So he, just to give you a little quote from one of his, from part of this book, this is a book called The Life of an Amorous Man, which tells you most of what you slipped into the tub. She was quite sure that no one was about. If there should be any sound at all, it could be nothing but the sigh of evening breezes among the nearby pines. So thinking, at any rate, she started to rub herself vigorously with rice bran soap and a towel. The water was pleasantly hot. She took particular relish in removing the dirt from

the lower parts of her body. Suddenly, as though by instinct, she looked up and there on the tiled roof of the tea house next door, she saw the crouching figure of the boy, Yonosuke, levelling a long spyglass at her. So this is him from very early on in his life, but it gives you a sense of what his interests are. But also I think in you can, if we think back to that really refined period of Murasaki, what Ihara does in his work is he slightly plays on that refinement from this earlier period. You know, the sigh of the evening breeze is among the nearby pines is all very poetical. But then at the same time, he turns it on his head and says, look, Japan in this era, we're having lots of fun. It's a little bit dirty and we're not entirely proud of ourselves, but we're enjoying the benefits of peace, basically, after a very long time of war.

So this is the romance of the kind of floating world, isn't it? The floating world is the idea. So can you explain about what the floating world means? Because some people will be familiar with that because of Ishiguro's novel, which is called The Artist of the Floating World, isn't it? So yeah, that word, floating world, or ukiyo in Japanese, it was originally a Buddhist term. So talking about the fleeting quality of existence and how it was full of sadness and pathos and one shouldn't get attached.

But it comes to mean something completely different in this era, particularly Tokyo, or Edo as it was called then, alongside Osaka and Kyoto. These are worlds where if you're a merchant with a little bit of money, you can get involved in all sorts of pleasures from kabuki to the tea houses to geisha to buying these beautiful woodblock prints, which a lot of us probably, it helps us to visualize, if anyone's seen those prints, which a lot of us probably, it helps us to visualize, if anyone's seen those prints, the era that we're talking about here.

So it's much more fun and it's sort of a golden age for Japan that that word denotes. Kazido, which becomes Tokyo, you said perhaps the largest city in the world in 1700, a million inhabitants. And just obviously teeming with fun things to do. So you mentioned kabuki so kabuki begins what as kind of skits and then it becomes this increasingly sophisticated theatrical tradition that's right so it begins more or less as a as a way of advertising uh prostitutes so they can dance around.

So that's a skit. So Tom Holland, that is just merely a skit. Yes, exactly. I think the comedy element is not to the fore there. It's more whether you might like to take one of these people home. Tom once was just telling me about high art, and it turned out he was talking about those cards that you used to see in phone boxes.

Dominate. That's probably about the level, yes, for early Kabuki. Absolutely, yeah. But, I mean, it ends up without women, doesn't it? Because there's this incredibly famous tradition of men playing the roles of women. Was it onagata? Yes, yeah, exactly, the woman's style.

That's partly because of the kind of continued worries about prostitution on the side. But then, you know, men want to take men home as well, so it doesn't make a terrible amount of difference, but it does have that effect on Kabuki. It gives it that quality. I remember the first summer I lived in London, there was a big festival of Japan and they had Kabuki. Am I remembering right? That if there are kind of famous dynasties of actors and you shout out their name when they do something particularly amazing so it be like kind of saying red grave or fox costner well he hasn't got a he hasn't got a dynasty i think that's right you've got people like um ichikawa danjuro that they are probably japan's

first celebrities because not only would you go and see them but you might get a woodblock print of their um face or a particular famous scene from a play with them in it and those woodblock prints i mean now if you found an original one be worth a good deal of money in those days it's the price of a snack so yeah it's it's properly uh it's properly celebrity time i think in the 17th century in japan okay we've gone through three of your choices, Chris. We've got three more to do after the break, but as we go into the break, I want to ask Tom a question that is from one of Ihara's books. And Tom, you can have the break to think about your answer. Maybe Chris can give his answer as well. Maybe he won't want to. The question is this, which is to be preferred,

lying rejected next to a courtesan or conversing intimately with a kabuki boy who is suffering from haemorrhoids? Come back after the break and Tom Holland will be telling us his answer. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes,

and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. And probably like me, you're waiting on tenterhooks to find out tom holland's answer would he rather lie rejected next to a courtesan or converse intimately with a kabuki boy who is suffering from hemorrhoids tom your answer please the latter of course because i don't care if he's got hemorrhoids but i don't want to be rejected okay there you go is that the

right answer chris absolutely yes yeah very good Yeah, very good. Well done, Tom. So now we know where you stand. Certainly not Sid. Oh, yes. Okay, so Chris, give us please your fourth person for Japanese history. So I think the fourth one would be the so-called father of Japanese capitalism, Shibusawa Eichi. And he's around for roughly the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. This is the point during his life where Japan is more or less forced actually to reopen to the West treaties slightly along the lines of those

with China after the Opium War, if you've just come out of a China program, which are not at all to Japan's benefit, but forced on them really, kind of gunboat diplomacy by the Americans, British, French, Russians, and others. And he's interesting because he covers this period after these treaties, which are 1850s into the early 1860s, where Japan is acutely aware of its vulnerability in the world. And it's asking, how can it possibly catch up? How can it defend itself? How can it avoid the fate of China, you know, which just next door is being essentially carved up by some of the big world powers. And he also, he lives through probably the key event in Japanese history in the 19th century, which is the Meiji Restoration. That is 1868, and that is when the

Tokugawa shogunate comes to an end, and the restoration is the restoration of the rule of the emperor. Meiji is the name of the emperor who presides over this. Am I right that that's the key pivot, really, for modern Japanese history? I think so, yeah. There are these 10, 15 extraordinary bloody years after the Americans arrived and forced the Japanese to open up in the really, for modern Japanese history? I think so, yeah. There are these sort of 10, 15 extraordinary bloody years after the Americans arrived and forced the Japanese to open up in the mid-1850s, where young samurai in particular, and Shibusawa is probably a good example of that, they are shocked by American technology, the weapons technology, the steamships, and they think that the elder generation of samurai in Japan simply are irresponsible.

They don't really know how to put the country on a strong footing anymore. And it gets to the point 1867-1868 where you have a brief civil war in Japan and the Tokugawa lose and you have this new younger generation of victorious samurai who go on to become almost like the equivalent of the founding fathers in the US, I think. Just on him. So he's called the, what is he called? The John Pierpoint Morgan, is it? Of Japan by the Washington Herald or something. Yeah, they love to compare him. You call him the father of Japanese capitalism. Yes. But I suppose he's a great person to ask. If you take him out of the story, is Japanese history any different? So is he the embodiment of something or is he genuinely a a sort of motor of change if you know what I mean

it's a good question I think he's much more the embodiment because he's one of the first people to to go for a joint stock company to get that idea across to people to generate the trust where complete strangers might give you some cash on the hope that, you know, your factory might make it. Because he's travelled to Europe, hasn't he? He's been to France, he's been to Britain. Yes. He's had tea with Queen Victoria. He goes in the train of a shogun. Yes, absolutely. He's one of a generation who do these amazing tours. Some of them go literally all the way around the world, fact-finding, basically, finding out what makes these great powers tick in terms of industry weapons culture and what japan can do i think if shibasawa hadn't been around then probably someone

else would have come up with the idea of um imitating or adapting the joint stock company idea so he's much more an embodiment of an era um i think than he is a motor i'm not sure there's anyone in the book who could credibly call a motor in that kind of great man tradition. You say he becomes personally involved in 500 companies. He helps to set up a hundred of them. One of them is Sapporo, the beer, which I'm sure people will be familiar with. He helps to form the Tokyo Electric Light Company, which is Japan's first electricity company. He establishes Nippon Railway. So, I mean, he's absolutely Mr. Capitalism. And yet, at the same time, he is a samurai. I mean, as a young man, he studies fencing, he serves a shogun. I mean, he lives to a fabulous age. He dies in 1931. Is he fusing those samurai traditions

with Western capitalism? Are they coexisting? Is he suppressing the samurai within him to become a capitalist? What's the kind of the balance within him, do you think? It's a tricky one. And there's a bigger question there about how Japan tries to adapt to capitalism. So the claim that someone like Shibusawa would make is that, and this is the claim that lots of others are making in Japan in the era, is that we're not just going to simply copy a Western model. We're going to do it our way. And what that means for him is capitalism with an infusion of Confucian principles. So the joint stock company isn't simply about people taking a punt and making some money. It's about the virtue of cooperation. And in his factories as well, he says, look, you know, between workers

and management, again, the ethics should be cooperation. Sometimes man and woman is the metaphor. Sometimes it's, you know, parents and children. Japan has to be built on that basis because if you don't, then you get the slums of London or Liverpool or something like that. So he would claim and others would claim that there is a downside to Western modernity. And because they've been there first, we can learn and do it differently. So it's something obviously that happens in a key moment in his lifetime is the war with Russia. Yes. In the early years of the 20th century.

And then by the time he dies, he dies in what, 1931, I think it is? Yes. So by that point, Japan is already becoming ever more entangled on the kind of Asian mainland, isn't it? So to what extent is he implicated, since he is the embodiment of Japanese capitalism? Yeah. To what extent is he, by the time of his death, implicated in what we would now describe, I guess, as Japanese imperialism in East Asia? A little bit, because he makes some money in places like Korea,

after Japan's annexation of Korea in 1909 to 10. So he's certainly happy to make the most of those sorts of opportunities. I think the mentality in Japan in this time is, well, look at what any great power does in the world. It gets itself an empire for its own benefit and for the purpose of spreading so-called civilization. And at the same time, if Japan doesn't do it, especially in its backyard, then it's asking for trouble. I think there's that sense of Japan being a prisoner of geography. If you imagine the archipelago running down just off the coast of China and then Korea, you can't risk the European power or the Americans having effective, or the Russians, having effective control of, for example, the Korean peninsula, because it's a few

short miles off your own coast. So that's the kind of rationale that goes along. And people actually want Japan to be strong, want Japan to be a leader in Asia. And I think they're fairly comfortable with the idea of making some money on the side. It's always sort of puzzled me that Japan is so successful in this period. You know, they've had the Meiji Restoration, They've embraced capitalism. They are the sort of poster boys for Asian modernity, I suppose. And yet at the same time, there is that increasing paranoia too strong, a sense of being embattled and hemmed in and all of that sort of stuff, when in a way you could say they should be luxuriating in their success. Yeah, I think it's often a claim that gets made in Japan, probably from the 1868 moment

onwards all the way through to 1945, is that Japan is in danger. Japan is in some kind of peril from world powers that don't wish it well. There's that claim in the end of being encircled. You can run right the way around the clock, what, anti-clock wise. You've got the Russians, you've got the Chinese, you've got the British and the Dutch, and then you've got the Americans, you know, to the east. So that's often a claim that gets made. And it's hard to differentiate between that being pure ideology and that being a statement of truth, I suppose. But famously, so you mentioned Port Arthur and Japan is the first Asian power to defeat a European power, i.e. Russia. Yes.

In a war. And you have a brilliant chapter kind of illustrating the ambivalences and tensions within Japan during this period. And this is a poet called Yasano Akiko. And she is the youngest brother, isn't it, who's fighting? He's been stationed to Port Arthur. She writes a famous poem that is essentially pacifist. Brother, do not give your life. His majesty, the emperor goes not himself into the battle. Could he with such deeply noble heart think it an honor for men to spill one another's blood and die like beasts? And so this makes her both famous and notorious. Famous for the delicacy

with which she articulates her love for her brother and her anxiety about the war that's going on, and notorious because obviously she is offending monarchists and nationalists. But the parabola of her life is a really remarkable one. So you just tell us a bit about her and where she goes from that kind of early pacifism. Absolutely. So I think she is, in the beginning, what you might call a quintessential cosmopolitan liberal. So she wants to reform women's status in society. Women are very much second class citizens in the early 20th century in Japan. She writes some very, what you might call some rather risque poetry early on, give you a very quick bit of that just to give people a flavour.

It's in the Tanka style, which is a very, these very, very short verses. So one of them would be in my bath, submerged like some graceful lily at the bottom of a spring. How beautiful this body of 20 summers. So she's got a series called Tangled Hair of poems, very much along those lines, and lots of the male critics regard it as sort of verging on pornography, or I think one calls it the precocious prattle of a young girl. So she's not terribly well received in some circles, but she really stakes her claim, as I say, to be a cosmopolitan figure interested in women's rights, interested in education and producing some really cutting edge poetry. And then, as you say, when this war comes up with Russia, she expresses a feeling in

Japan, which I think is quite broad, which is, do we need this war? You know, 10 years before Japan had fought China and there was a case for that war, people would say the case for a war with Russia was a little bit more difficult to make. And although it's very hard in public to object to it, the worst thing you could be was a pacifist, or the worst thing you could be was probably a Christian socialist pacifist. And there were some of those. Dominic would agree with that. Thanks. Well, I'm not going to disagree with you. But she has this extraordinary trajectory, doesn't she? So is she a feminist?

Would it be fair? Or is that imposing a Western label onto her? No, no. I think a lot of the women of her era would be happy to be called that. And they drew a certain amount of inspiration from Western feminism. They're trying to get past, I suppose, what one of them, probably the most famous feminist of the era, Hiratsuka Raicho, talks about women's role in Japan

as being slavery during the daytime and prostitution at night. So their social position, their constitutional position, they're kept out of politics for most of this era. So that's really, I think, how she would define herself. But competing with that part of her, for most of this era. So that's really, I think, how she would define herself. But competing with that part of her as you get into the late 1920s and early 1930s,

so as things start to hot up for Japan in East Asia, she starts to change her view. I suppose in the chapter I write on her, one of the potential turning points is when she goes to um the mainland in 1928 and does this short tour so at this point and this may have come up perhaps in your china conversation um the south manchurian railway which is this uh railway line and a kind of corridor of land um along with it which the japanese have possession of and they're exploiting for you know minerals and whatnot and she goes across there. And like a lot of Japanese intellectuals, I think in the modern era,

to go to China is on the one hand to see Japan's past because lots of that artistic imagery, poetical imagery comes from there. And on the other, it's to reflect on Japan's vulnerability now in the world. So she comes home after this trip. And as Japan becomes steadily, you know, in the early 1930s, something of an international pariah, her poetry takes this extraordinary right-wing turn, which a lot of her biographers don't really know what to do with,

because it's so much against the Yosano Akiko that they'd known before. I'll give you a few lines of that if you like, if we've got time. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. So even the title of one of these poems, rosy-cheeked death, I think gives you a sense of where it might be going. But very briefly, to the west of the river, she writes,

we see something in the trenches. Approaching, we find enemy corpses. Enemy corpses lying one upon the other. And she goes through talking about these beautiful young soldiers who ought to be married at this point, but instead they've been, basically, as she sees it, pushed into service by corrupt Chinese leaders. And yet they blame what she calls their good neighbour, Japan.

So it's this incredible turn into really polemical poetry. I have to say that coming from Rana's episode, where we looked at Manchuria and the start of the war and Shanghai and Nanjing and all that kind of thing, absolutely through Chinese eyes, that seeing it through her eyes is really quite shocking. What does she feel? She feels that China is decadent, corrupt, and falling to pieces, that Japan has offered the hand of friendship, and that the Chinese have spurned it.

And therefore, basically, they deserve what they get. Yes, I might slightly quibble with maybe just the last bit. Okay, I'm being harsh on her. But I think her view of China, and that's the view of many people in Japan at this point, that Japan is essentially a good actor in the world, but that it's being pushed around by these extraordinary self-righteous Western powers in particular. I mean, something like the League of Nations is seen in Japan as being a bunch of people who won the First World War, the Great War, and were not prepared to give something like a racial equality clause to the Japanese. And Japanese who go to America in the early 20th century is subject to extraordinary racism there.

So hypocrisy is a big theme for the Japanese when they think about the West. And I think that's part of Yosun Akiko's outlook as well. But she's, I mean, there's something of the way that Russians justify the invasion of Ukraine about some of her poetry. So she writes, this is about the Japanese in Shanghai, knowing their cause to be just, our forces attack through sufferings a hundredfold. So the emphasis is all on Japanese suffering and the justice of the cause. There's nothing about what happens to the Chinese. Absolutely. And there's that attempt

in that bit of the poem that i was quoting to separate out innocent ordinary chinese from their um terrible dishonest and anti-japanese leadership that said for some in japan there is a straightforward racism where the chinese and the koreans are basically lesser beings and so it's more consumable than you might otherwise imagine to do what you need to do to them i suppose uh the so-called rape of nanjing would be the classic example um of that kind of behavior by japanese troops who were brought up on that way of thinking and she dies in 1942 she's had a stroke hasn't she does she by the time that she dies is there an element of doubt um so pearl

harbor has happened america's entered the war although at that point i suppose there's no sense yet of the japanese being pushed back they're still expanding does she have any hint of doubt well she she dies as you say pretty much one of the high points of that conflict for the japanese because they're pushing back the enemy on all sorts of fronts but she has this lovely last line in one of her poems. It is a time for falling tears as we enter the bitter cold

of the 12th lunar month. So some people would read that as her thinking, actually, we've at last bitten off more than we can chew here. And it's very unpredictable from here. Falling tears is putting it mildly. So Japan suffers.

I mean, Japan inflicts terrible suffering, but suffers terribly in the war. Atom bombs, of course, we know, but the firebombing of Tokyo causes even more deaths, is that right, than the atom bombs? So Japan kind of emerges a broken society under American tutelage, and yet emerges in the post-war years, becomes an incredible success story. Richest country in the world by the 90s, is it? Isn't the whole of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo valued at being more than California or something? Ah, right, this famous land bubble.

Is that not true? No, no, it's true. It's a story that's always told. I think that's a fair estimation. It doesn't last very long because there's a horrific crash after that. But it speaks to the power of the Japanese economy. Yes. And so it becomes economically incredibly successful, but it also becomes culturally very, very successful. I guess that perhaps the most famous cultural export is manga. And the man you've chosen as your final, the last of the six Japanese lives, is Tezuka Osamu, the god of manga, who authored 150,000 pages of manga. So tell us about him and why you've chosen him. So I think he's important because he shows the link with the war for Japan's manga and anime.

Now, one of the things that people find distinctive, I think, about Japanese manga and anime is that there's a blending of the world of children with the world of adults. You know, anyone who's seen any of the productions by Studio Ghibli, for example, Grave of the Fireflies, I would recommend Totoro as well, recently on at the Barbican as a stage play. One of the things that really draws people in is that, yeah, the world of children and the world of adults is mixed together. And it's people like Tezuka Osamu who achieve that because they've been through the war, you know, he's watched burned bodies floating down the river in Osaka. And he thinks, how on earth did we get ourselves to that point? And one of the answers is that people were deeply led astray by a corrupt adult world. And so what they want to do when they produce children's entertainment is help children to wise up a little bit, to have some sense of what the adult world is like, even while they're young,

to appreciate it and not be drawn in by it or fooled by it in adult life. So he gives that quality to Japanese manga and anime, which I think has been there ever since. I think that's one of the big reasons why I would choose him. Maybe the other reason I would choose him is that he's one of the first to blend Japan's own style of pictorial art, which goes back centuries, with a modern style from Europe and particularly from America. Disney was a really big influence of his. So he brings those together, I think, quite successfully. And he manages very quickly to start exporting that.

So the great Atom Boy ends up on NBC in America. And it's a proud moment in Japan. This is the first time after the war that Japan has, as it were, spoken back to the West. And so I think it's a really important moment. And his influence is running all the way down to the present day in Japan. I found that element fascinating because he was in, I mean, he, you know, obviously he was a young man, wasn't he? A student during the war in Osaka. So he was, he was, he, you know, obviously he was a young man, wasn't he? A student. Yes, a medical student. In Osaka. So he knew the experience of bombing.

Yes. He wasn't hurt himself, but he knew what Japan had suffered at the hands of the Americans and the Allies, as the Japanese would undoubtedly have perceived it. And yet, Walt Disney is his great hero, and he learns from disney and he basically wants you know he has this dream of being the japanese walt disney and i suppose what i mean that the the great thing about focusing on these individuals is it allows us to sort of to see patterns and themes and actually that relationship between japan and america is a fascinating one because you would think there would be more bad blood, more resentment, you know, sort of festering rage, especially after the atomic bombings and the firebombing of Tokyo.

So why doesn't he, I mean, why, why doesn't he just think Walt Disney, you know, the representative of this culture that, you know, was our great antagonist and we, we haven't forgiven them and all this stuff. Why does he throw himself so wholeheartedly into this sort of Disney adoration? I think you could probably place someone like Tezuka alongside some of Japan's great scientists and writers from this era, which is they want to create a new order

which is really international and which forges links between different countries to make sure that what they've just been through is completely impossible in the future. So for someone like Tezuka, that's the kind of world that he aspires to. And he sees what he does, his art, as having that sort of universal appeal. So I think that's probably one part of it. I think the other part of it is for a lot of Japanese people, by 1945, it had been obvious for a couple of years already that they'd been sold a lie in terms of the prospectus for war which their government had offered them they'd

been through rationing they'd seen their children taken away and sacrificed on the battlefields and then they'd suffered this cataclysm of the firebombing and the atomic bombs and for a lot of people they just wanted to have the summer of 1945 as a year zero, as start again, pick up after this, you know, what some people call the dark valley. So I think that there's both. There's that sense of Tezuka

wanting to transcend with his art and be truly international. And the other, which is just most Japanese wanted to start again. The flip side of that, of course, has been that from some people's point of view, the Japanese haven't really reflected on that wartime period in the way that, for example, Germany did. That's probably another debate.

But I think that moment of 1945 as being a switch was very powerful in Japan. But that parallel with Germany, just to say, actually, there are an awful lot of Germans going into the 1950s and beyond who, when interviewed by social scientists, would say, Hitler had the right ideas, he just went too far. I was a year zero in a blank slate and suddenly they were all cuddly social democrats is a myth is that true of Japan or is it did people just want to to not talk about it at all or were people genuine and repentant or what was the the mood more broadly would you say I think for the war itself there was a genuine sense of not wanting to speak about it. And it remains an enormous issue in Japanese politics and its relationships, you know, with countries like South Korea now. But I think on the other hand, there's something there that does parallel Germany, which is that although Japan, first country in the world, have a constitution authored by another power, you know, authored by

the Americans, the 1946 constitution, there was an attempt in japanese culture i think you could say after the war across decades to slowly push back against some of the liberal reforms that the americans tried to make as being basically un-japanese one classic example would be don't fool around with the japanese family there's a role for the father there's a role for the mother and the role for the mother doesn't include being out there having a full-time job, neglecting the upbringing of the children, etc, etc. There's a sense that that is a uniquely Japanese institution, however familiar the basics I've just given might sound from elsewhere, and that the Americans should never have fooled around with it. And so there's a big cultural pushback, I think, in Japan against that.

Right, because one of the things about Tezuka that is really striking is that even as you're talking about Japan wanting this year zero, that actually manga, which seems the embodiment of everything that's most cutting edge and futuristic about Japan for foreigners, is absolutely drawing on these very ancient traditions. So the originating traditions of manga I learned from you go right the way back to the time of Murasaki, back to the 11th century. And these picture scrolls that are showing people drinking, what is it, rotten potatoes so that they can have fart battles. Yeah, the fart battles, absolutely. I mean, that's a great detail. You don't get that in Murasaki, do you? It's wonderful.

And you've got the satire of having Buddhist priests or Buddhist robes on the bodies of monkeys and frogs, etc. Yeah, there's a wonderful humorous tradition in Japan, which we maybe don't always associate the Japanese with. So nice to have that in there. And also we talked about the onigata in Kabuki, the men who play women. Yes.

And again, this is this theme of the male and the female being in the same body, the kind of slippage between the sexes, is also there in Tezuka's manga, isn't it? Because he has a princess who is brought up as a boy, but has a man's soul. And that sense of kind of androgyny which is another theme running back through japanese history is there in his his his manga yeah absolutely i think you can as you say you can trace that back at least as far as kabuki via this lovely um takarazuka review um troop in osaka you know which tezuka's mother takes him to regularly um all women and they've got these amazing scenes

from everywhere from ancient China to Egypt to medieval Europe. So there's a mixture of the androgyny and the fantasy that I think goes into his work. I mean, I wonder whether part of the robustness of that tradition in Japan's manga and anime is that it is, to use an awful phrase, a kind of cultural safe space in Japan where things that are going on out there in the country, whether it's conservative values, women struggling in the workplace, etc.

And the difficulty of discussing some things in public in out-and-out political terms, you can process them in this world of fantasy instead, which I think Japan has become very, very good at doing in that Tezuka tradition. And it has an incredible international appeal. Yeah. So it may be very, very Japanese, but it also has this incredible resonance. Absolutely. Although the interesting thing about that,

I often ask my students from places like China and South Korea, and they come in and they love Studio Ghibli, you know, Miyazaki Hayao. I said, well, how does that make you feel about, you know, the 1940s? They said it absolutely doesn't change our minds at all. What we hear from our grandmothers, our great grandmothers, etc., that remains for us central in our image of Japan. And yet at the same time, whether it's cognitive dissonance or not, I don't know, we can perfectly well enjoy a lovely Miyazaki film

and really get into the whole world of feeling and aesthetics that it offers. So, Japan, a land of contrast. Unbelievable. That was brilliant, Chris. And the great thing about that is not only does it make me want to go and watch loads of Japanese films immediately, but it opens up so many avenues for us to pursue in the rest of history. Yeah, it does.

Don't you think? It really does. So many interesting things from samurai to manga. And it's a brilliant book the japanese a history in 20 lives uh it was one of my regular listeners will know that i like to make book recommendations based on my sunday times reviews don't i tom yes and it was one of my books of the year a couple of years ago tom is there is there a finer honor in the literary world skilled ambitious a marvelous study, a marvellous study of edition, I think you said. And it's emblazoned on the front of the paperback copy that I've got here. So highly, highly recommended.

Chris, thanks so much. Thank you for having me. But the great thing about Chris and this episode, Tom, was his lovely endorsement of my Japanese at the beginning. And I think that's what a lot of listeners will take from today. I think that's the one blot on the copybook. Otherwise, an exemplary exemplary performance so chris thanks so much and thank you everyone for listening

and we will be back again tomorrow bye-bye sayonara thanks for listening to the rest is history episodes, early access, ad-free listening and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

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