Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 147, The Birth of the Samurai, Part 2.

Before we get into things this week, a bit of exciting news.

So I've mentioned a few times now that I'm in the hunt for a job, and I have one lined up now.

I'll be teaching in a local Seattle prep school starting next year. This is very exciting

for me, but what does it mean for all of you? Well, for now, things will continue uninterrupted.

However, when I start actually teaching in September, I might have to scale things back a bit

for at least the first couple months I'm looking at going on to a once

every two weeks schedule. I'm not sure how long I'll be keeping that up, because, frankly, it's a new

job. I'm not sure how much time or energy I'll have for other things. But I did want to let you all

know that that's coming on the horizon.

But that's enough about me. On with the show.

So, last week we left Hayan, Japan, caught in a precarious balancing act. The Imperial Court, in an effort to efficiently organize its military affairs, farmed out warfare and policing, to provincials who acted as its

surrogates on the ground. Today we're going to watch that careful balancing act come apart.

The key to understanding why it fell apart was a simple concept, consolidation. When you study

political science, one of the things that tends to come up is the fact that

cooperation gets harder, the more players there are.

The more people involved in a given decision, the harder it is for everybody to keep an

eye on everybody else, and the easier it is for one person, or multiple people, to cheat, to in some way deceive

others. Put simply, the more people you need to cooperate, the harder it is to watch them and

ensure that they are all in fact cooperating. For our Heon-era proto-samurai, this is reflected in a simple fact.

They had a hard time working together in large groups.

Sometimes particularly important or influential warriors are going to hold together war bands

...