EPISODE 102: The Lone Samurai, Miyamoto Musashi (Part 1)

History on Fire

Daniele Bolelli

Society & Culture

4.7 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2023

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“All warfare is based on deception.” Sun Tzu Ever since I started History on Fire, one topic has been the most consistently requested by listeners. Over the years, I received hundreds of messages asking me to cover the life of Miyamoto Musashi. That time has come. Here we go. Musashi has been the subject of one of the greatest bestsellers ever written, a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa that sold over 120 million copies. And yet, the story of his life is mixed with so many myths and legends that it’s rather difficult to separate fact from fiction. He lived across the late 1500s and early 1600s, during the waning phases of the Warring States period. By that point, after over 100 years of on and off civil war, Japan was a country suffering with PTSD. Soldiers and civilians alike had all been exposed to insane amounts of bloodshed and brutality during the Sengoku Jidai. Musashi was born in the midst of that, so it’s little surprised that his is a tale filled with intensity and violence. In this first of two episodes, I’ll dive in to make sense of the contradictory evidence available: from his childhood marred by a terrible relationship with his father to his possible participation in the uber-famous battle of Sekigahara, from his first duel to the death at the age of 13 to his conflicts with the Yoshioka family and with Sasaki Kojiro, and much more! If you feel generous and enjoy History on Fire, please consider joining my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/historyonfire to access plenty of bonus content. All the links to History on Fire social media can be found at https://linktr.ee/danielebolelli Including the HOF YouTube Channel: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	History is not like something like math, it's something that can have potentially many
0:08.2	right answers and many different perspectives and many different ways to look at things
0:12.2	and what that means is sometimes when you're taking a tour through the past, the guide
0:18.5	that you have at the time is key and you can take the same tour multiple times but if
0:23.6	you have a different guide they'll point out different things, emphasize different things,
0:27.8	how often have you read two different books on the same historical event and gotten
0:32.1	different perspectives. The perspective of the storyteller matters. Whether you like
0:38.4	history or not, if you care about things like bravery and wisdom, and passion, and larger
0:45.9	than life characters, and some of the most emotionally intense moments in the human experience,
0:51.2	you've come to the right place and chance to get a perspective from one different kind
0:56.4	of historical tour guide. Daniela Belelele is a university history professor, a writer,
1:02.1	a martial artist, a philosopher, and it provides a very different sort of tour guide through
1:08.6	the past than you normally encounter. In this tour he'll be your guide in a journey
1:14.8	to the place where history and epic come out.
1:32.8	Let's go say history on fire. Hello and welcome to episode 102 of History on Fire. If you
1:42.2	enjoyed the show, you would be wonderful if you decided to support it. And the best way
1:47.8	to go about it is to go on patreon.com for word slash history on fire. For as little as
1:54.0	five dollars a month, you get a whole bunch of bonus episodes. I forget how many, well
2:00.3	over a dozen by now, so that you have a lot of content being updated every month. Never
2:06.9	mind the fact that you're just helping the shows stay alive, but also you get some goodies
2:11.3	in exchange for that. For most people, you have five dollars a month that's all you need,
2:15.9	some people donate more, and that's very sweet. Specifically, I want to give a shout out to
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