Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 613, I am legend, part one.

How does a man become a legend? It's an interesting historical question, of course. Many, many people have made a jump from human to something

more in the eyes of posterity lifted up as examples for us all. We've looked at quite a few of

those people over the course of this

very podcast. But there's one transformation I find particularly fascinating for two reasons.

One, particularly the transformative side is well documented, and that means we have

three sources in particular that describe this person's story, and as we read through

each, we can see the layers of his legend accumulating through the passage of time.

Second, the legend of this person would grow to such a proportion it would, and really still

does, completely overshadow his actual life, such that sorting the reality from the myth has become

a near-impossible challenge.

Who is this legendary figure?

Probably one of the most famous members of Japan's samurai class in its whole history,

Minamoto no Yoshitsune.

We have talked before about the Yoshitsune legend because it figures prominently into one of the

most important political stories in Japanese history, the rise of Japan's first shogunate and

with it the beginnings of warrior rule in Japan. For a quick refresh, since it has been a minute,

900 years ago Japan's government was

very divided. Ostensibly, of course, it was ruled by an emperor in Kyoto who presided

over an elaborate governing bureaucracy, but in practice things were quite a bit more complicated,

first because the emperor himself was a figurehead in a battle for influence between two very different groups.

The first of these groups was the actual imperial family.

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