Episode 296 - As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, Part 1

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8 • 744 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2019

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week: the start of a two-part series on women in Heian Japan. What makes the social position of women in the Heian Era so distinct from later points of Japanese history, and from the East Asian cultural sphere more generally? How do we know what we know about the lives of women? And what can we learn from the story of one particularly badass woman: the poet and "femme fatale" Izumi Shikibu?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This week's episode is brought to you by Audible.
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0:13.7	For listeners of the show, Audible is offering a free 30-day trial membership, complete with
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0:28.2	slash Japan to claim your offer. This week I'm going to recommend Aftershocks by Marco Cluce.
0:34.8	I'm a big fan of science fiction in general, and I really love Cluce's writing.
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1:09.9	Thank you.com slash Japan and check it out yourself. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 296, as I crossed a bridge of dreams, part one.
1:19.7	One of the things that tends to come up a lot when you look at pre-modern history pretty much anywhere in East Asia is the issue of sexism.
1:29.7	Simply put, a lot of the canonical works of history and literature tend to be pretty misogynistic in their treatment of
1:34.9	women. One of the great historical epics of the Chinese tradition, the romance of the Three
1:40.3	Kingdoms, contains one of the best examples, the famous story of Dong Jo, his adoptive
1:45.5	son, the brilliant warrior Lu Bu, and the wily and beautiful Daochan, who uses her powers of
1:52.1	seduction to turn both men against each other and destroy them.
1:56.5	Daochan is far from the only example, though.
1:59.4	The archetype of the woman as seductress goes back to
2:02.7	the earliest recorded histories of East Asia. In the first great Chinese history, the records of the
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