I'm Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 202, The Old Man Mad About Art.

This week, I'd like to turn our attention to something we haven't talked about all that much on this show,

art, and there's a very simple reason for that. I'm not an art historian, and what I do know about the subject is self-taught and pretty uneven. That said, I think our subject for today

is so incredibly interesting and important that it's worth me getting the hell over it and

trying my hand at something new. But to do that, first we have to talk a little bit about what

art means in the world of pre-modern Japan, specifically the Japan of the late 1700s and

early 1800s. The first thing we need to do is understand the role of art in Japanese elite culture,

and to understand that, we need to look at the same place we've looked to understand so much

else about Japan, China.

Specifically, China of the late Ming Dynasty, which threw off the rule of the Mongol Khans

and led China into one of its glorious high peaks of cultural attainment.

The Ming Dynasty, as with the rest of Imperial China, was nominally the domain of the Son of Heaven, China's Emperor.

In practice, however, like most of Chinese imperial history,

real power lay with a semi-hereditary scholar aristocracy called the Shur,

whose authority was derived from their mastery of the canon of Confucian philosophy

and demonstrated in a series of rigorous exams.

However, sure status didn't just require being able to rattle off quotations from the Doctrine

of the Mean on command, you were also expected to be a person of culture and refinement.

That meant mastery of artistic pursuits.

If you're wondering why a government bureaucrat would be expected to be an artist, it has to do with

the nature of Confucian philosophy itself. An ideal, sagely person in Confucian thought is supposed

to be an example of everything good about civilization,

...