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 507, The Culture of Classical Japan, Part 1.

Up until now, we've been focusing primarily on the complex political culture of early Japan, and with good reason. If you've been listening for a while now, you know I'm very much a politics-oriented person. Political power

shapes so much of the world we live in and the world our ancestors lived in, and spending

time discussing it is, at least in my view, important for understanding the world as it is today.

But I have been doing you all something of a disservice with that emphasis, because there are some

very important developments in the realm of culture during this time period that we do need to

talk about because they are going to matter a lot going forward. So that's what the next two weeks

are all about. Today is going to be all about language, poetry, and religion, especially Buddhism.

Next week is going to be a bit more about poetry and more broadly literature during the Hain period.

And we're going to start off with what's probably the most important subject of them all,

language and writing, since without them, the others wouldn't exist. So, the origins of the Japanese

language are a bit unclear. Officially Japanese and related languages like Ryukyuan belong to what is

called the Japanese-lang language family, which is not

...