Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 431, The Tale of Nakako, Part 1.

So let's just get this out of the way at the jump. I know I said we're going to leave

the 17th century behind for a bit, but as my stepfather says, sometimes you have to rise

above your principles. And sometimes you come across a source that is just

so good, you have to devote some episodes to it. And this time, that source is an imperial

concubine's tale by Dr. Gay Rowley. I've talked before on the podcast about the challenges of

researching the lives of women in earlier periods of Japanese history.

Women are often sidelined in the written record, a relic of a Confucian worldview which

posited in the words of the liegee, or book of rights, that women have no business outside the home,

therefore their names are not known by outsiders.

So when I saw a source that purported to unpack the life of the kind of woman pretty much always sidelined in traditional narratives, a concubine to the emperor, the sort of person who

might get a footnote in most books, I knew I had to check it out, and oh boy, did I like what I found.

So today I'm going to present Dr. Rowley's fantastic research on one Nakanoin Nakako,

who lived from approximately 1591 until 1671, a woman whose status would be enough to make

her interesting on her own, but whose life was so eventful that I can't wait to share it with you.

And if you're at all interested in this subject or this period, I cannot recommend an imperial concubine's tale enough.

Get a copy. It is worth it.

So the thing is, as Dr. Rowley notes, even in a story from this time period that centers a woman,

we do have to spend a good deal of time talking about men. The legal and social structures of this time

centered men as the arbiters of women's lives. As we discussed, in relation to the Edo period

a few centuries later, to the extent that women had public

lives in broader society, this was because of the support of the men in their families

...