Hello, the episode you're about to listen to is part of a multi-part series introducing an overview

of Japanese history.

This is a repeat of one of the original projects the History of Japan podcast was built on,

and is intended to serve as an update and supplement to these original works.

After 10 years, my hope is to return to this approach and to do it a little bit better,

given the skills that I have improved in the intervening years.

If you haven't been doing so already, you should listen to these episodes sequentially,

starting with episode 501.

Without any further ado, enjoy the episode.

Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 503. It Takes a Genius to write it. Right around the year 500, our narrative of Japanese history undergoes a pretty

dramatic shift.

For the first time, we can start to trust a bit more in the written accounts left to us

describing this period, and we start to move out of the complicated world of mytho history

and into something, for lack of a better word, a bit more conventional.

Of course, this shift doesn't happen with a precise line in the sand, so to speak. It takes place over a period of transition.

Even placing it precisely can be a bit challenging. Here we run into trouble because of an unfortunate

twist of fate. As I mentioned last week, the oldest extant histories from Japan are the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki,

which date from 712 and 720 respectively.

Both texts get progressively more reliable as they move closer to the time they were written,

with a shift away from accounts

of gods and heroes toward what we might call more conventional political history.

However, neither one was actually Japan's first written history, both make reference to a pair

...