Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 454, That All My Dreams Might Not Prove Empty.

In 1940, the scholar Yamagishi Tokhue made a rather incredible discovery.

He was mucking about in the archives of the Imperial Household Library in Tokyo, the place

where the rather substantial documentary records of the Imperial Household Library in Tokyo, the place where the rather substantial documentary

records of the Imperial House are preserved, when he came across an unexpected manuscript.

He was in the geography section of the archives and came across a text titled Poazugatari,

roughly unasked for remarks or a tale nobody asked for.

And this was, he noted, a rather odd title for a work on geography, so he decided to take a closer look.

What he discovered was that ancient bane of all archivists and historians, a document that had been horror of horrors mis-shelved.

Tohazugatari was not about geography at all. It was actually a diary, and an utterly fascinating

one at that.

Dr. Yamagishi immediately took it upon himself to copy the text and get it published.

Of course, this was 1940 and Japan's academic world, really its whole world, was about to be disrupted pretty substantially,

so it took until 1950 for his first article on the manuscript to be published, and until 1966,

to publish an annotated version making sense of all the complexities of the original classical Japanese,

which finally made the text accessible to non-specialists.

But it was worth the wait because Toazu Gattari is an absolutely fascinating little text.

It tells the story of Lady Nijol, also sometimes called Gofukakusa-in-no-Nijol, who had written it over 600 years earlier during the late

1200s. And Lady Nijol had a lot to put in that diary. She lived a fascinating life

during a fascinating time.

So today is all about her story and that of the Tuazu Gattari, which was translated into English as the Confessions of Lady Nigel by the tremendous Dr. Karen Brazel.

It's also the start of a sort of independent mini-series of three episodes on historians

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