Episode 590 - An Interview with Dr. Mike Freiling

History of Japan

Isaac Meyer

Japan, History, Japanese

4.8 • 744 Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on the podcast, something completely different! I'm getting some help talking about poetry from Mike Freiling, whose new translation of Hyakunin Isshu, entitled One Hundred Poems of Old Japan, will be out just a little over a week from now. We'll talk tanka vs. haiku, how translation works, and share a few favorites from one of Japan's most classic poetic compilations.

Show notes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right.
0:15.0	Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 590.
0:20.0	We're doing something a little bit different today. Those of you
0:23.6	who are longtime listeners of the podcast have heard me do my best to talk about poetry a few
0:29.1	times before on the podcast, but I've said that I don't have much background on it. I didn't
0:34.1	get, unfortunately, the best poetic education coming up in high school or college
0:39.2	English. But fortunately today, I'm lucky enough to be joined by someone who has that background.
0:45.9	And he's here to talk a little bit about his work, Dr. Mike Fraling. Mike, welcome to the History of Japan
0:50.8	podcast. It's great to have you. Thank you for having me.
1:00.3	So we're going to do a little interview today to talk about Mike's new publication,
1:06.2	entitled 100 Poems from Old Japan, a translation of a text. We've talked a little bit about before on the podcast, the Hehakunin issue. But before we get into the text itself, Mike, I wanted to give you a chance to introduce yourself, share a bit about your work, and especially how you got interested in Japanese language and especially poetry, and why you kind of gravitated towards Waka and Ta as opposed to say haiku is a more famous
1:29.6	genre, I think, for most people coming into Japanese poetry. So please tell us a bit about
1:36.6	how you got here. Yeah, that's a great question, Isaac. Let me just give you a quick background.
1:43.2	I was born and raised in San Francisco, and I'll talk about the influence of San Francisco
1:49.0	in a few minutes.
1:50.0	I went to college at the University of San Francisco, then I went to grad school at MIT.
1:55.0	I did a PhD at MIT, and one of the earliest PhDs in artificial intelligence, believe it or not.
2:01.6	I finished that in 1977 and then spent my first year in Japan as a Henry Luce scholar.
2:09.8	And that's when I actually got started with the Hyakunin issue.
2:14.1	And then went on to do a variety of sort of data science and AI-related jobs for most of my career until about two or three years ago when I kind of retired from that work, decided to get back into poetry and back into translations.
2:29.8	And now we're on the second book of our translations.
2:32.9	It's sort of a chronological bookend.
	...

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