Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 628, Flowering Fortunes, Part 3.

When we last left Fujiwara Nomichinaga, he was at the apex of his power, having risen

up to dominate the Sekankhe, the main line of the Fujiwara family, the house of the

Kampaku and Seshaw regents from the position of third son.

His elder brothers were dead, probably just a stroke of luck, though of course such well-timed

accidents always raise questions, and his nephews had been safely packed off to the

provinces where they would not be a threat to him.

Nothing could touch him.

Well, almost nothing. Remember last week I

mentioned there were two methods the Fujiwara family had relied on for their political dominance.

One, of course, was control of the regency, which they had seized back in the mid-800s and

held onto with an iron grip for 150 years until Michignaaga's day.

But the other far older method of control was marriage politics.

Marrying a daughter into the imperial family and then arranging for her sons, your grandsons,

to take the throne, was a surefire way to ensure that whoever did end up as emperor would

be pliable to your interests, aware of the needs of his maternal family raised from a young

age to see nothing wrong with paying attention to the needs of Grandpa Dearest.

This little trick in particular was so well established it actually predated the Fujiwara

clan itself. The family of the Fujiwara clan itself. The family the Fujiwara

had helped overthrow back in the 600s, the Soga clan, had been the first to realize how effective

this whole maneuver was for controlling the imperial family without having to overtly supplant them.

Fujiwara Nomichinaga was now the regent, but he did not have a daughter in the imperial

...