Episode 455 - In the Shelter of the Pine

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8 • 744 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, the tale of Ogimachi Machiko--the aristocrat whose literary descriptions of her life in a samurai family became one of the most popular works of women's literature during Japan's Edo period.

Show notes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 455 in the shelter of the pine. Last week, we told the history of Japan podcast, episode 455, in the Shelter of the Pine.
0:23.9	Last week, we told the story of a tale that had been forgotten and rediscovered, coming to
0:28.8	prominence only recently. This week is about a story with, in a certain sense, the precise
0:34.6	opposite trajectory. Once upon a time it was considered to be the
0:39.1	foremost piece of contemporary literature written by a woman in Japan, only to fall into comparative
0:45.2	obscurity. Only recently has it returned to the spotlight. But in its day, the Matsukagi
0:52.1	was a true literary juggernaut.
0:56.1	One of the many interesting things about this particular text is its author.
1:00.8	Like many of her contemporaries, we do not know that much about her life.
1:05.9	But what we do know about her and what of her personality shines through her writing is fascinating.
1:13.0	Matsukagi Niki was written by Ogimachi Machiko, the descendant of an ancient and aristocratic
1:19.2	family of Kuge, the old aristocracy of Japan. These were families who had risen to prominence
1:26.0	almost a thousand years earlier by attaching themselves to the imperial family before the rise of Japan's warrior class.
1:34.0	The Ogimachi in particular were an offshoot of the northern Fujiwara clan, another very prominent family of Kugee aristocrats who had during the 900s and 1,000's CE dominated
1:47.0	Japan's political landscape. However, like all of Kyoto's aristocrats and its imperial family,
1:53.8	the Ogimachi had fallen on hard times over the subsequent centuries. The rise of Japan's
1:59.8	warrior clans, the samurai, in other words, began to
2:03.3	politically marginalize the Kyoto aristocracy. That particular trend culminated in the
2:09.7	1400s and 1500s when the samurai clans divided the country into civil war, while the Kyoto
2:16.2	aristocracy were forced onto the sidelines,
2:19.4	watching their city burn in conflicts as the warrior clans seized old aristocratic estates to fund their
2:25.5	battles. Things had gotten better, to be sure, one of those clans led by the Wiley Tokugawa
	...

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