Hello everyone and thank you very much for listening.
When I started this podcast a couple of months ago I really had no idea who, if anyone, might listen to it, or where they might be, so it is really amazing to see that in just two months the podcast has been downloaded in more than 25 countries around the world, in places as far apart as Australia, Canada, Holland, Mexico, Croatia, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Kazakhstan – and the north of Scotland. So wherever you happen to be listening from, a very warm welcome and thank you again for taking the time to listen to this podcast.
Now this episode of the First Shogun is a bit different to the others, because we’ve reached a half-way point in our story. I’ll be taking a break for a couple of weeks as I’ll be traveling to Japan, so I thought I’d pause and take this opportunity to share a few ideas for books, movies, TV shows, podcasts that you might want to check out if you’re interested in this amazing period of Japanese history.
Now if you’ve listened to the recent episodes, you’ll have seen that we’ve finally got to a point where Yoritomo – the heir to the Genji clan who will eventually become the first shogun– has just met for the first time his younger brother – or rather half-brother – Yoshitsune – who himself will become a legend, probably the most famous samurai warrior and general in Japan’s history. So at this point, we have two huge figures in Japanese history meeting for the first time – it is possible that they met 20 years earlier but at that time, when Yoritomo was sent into exile, Yoshitsune was still just a baby. So really this is their first meeting.
And if you visit Japan, you can still visit the site where they allegedly met – it’s a pair of stones at a shrine called Taimen Seki Hachiman near Izu peninsula. And it’s said to be where these two giants of Japanese history faced each other for the first time, and it’s where they agreed they would fight together to bring down Lord Kiyomori and the Heike. And the remarkable story of how they tried to do that – and what happened to their relationship as a result – is what we’ll look at in the second half of our story.
Now although the story of Yoritomo’s rise is astonishing, it’s actually not that well known, certainly outside of Japan and even within Japan –compared to say the Sengoku era which took place a few centuries later– which is when James Clavell based his book Shogun. So that’s why I wanted to share this story through this podcast.
But in this podcast, I’m really giving a general overview of what happened. So if you are interested to know more about the background to this story, where are some good places to look? So I’ll run through some books, movies, TV shows and podcasts that may be of interest and I’ll list the sources in the description of this episode.
Well, as I mentioned in the first episode of this podcast, for me the first time I became aware of this story is when I watched a film, late night, on TV in England – it was the film Kwaidan directed by Masaki Kobayashi – an anthology of four separate ghost stories from Japan – but the one I remember the most was the tale of Hoichi the earless, and his encounter in a cemetery with the ghosts of the Heike warriors.
So that led me eventually, after I’d spent a few years in Japan, to read the Tale of the Heike – I first read it in a translation by Helen McCullough – which is published by Stanford University Press – and when I visited Japan again I visited some of the places that are mentioned in the tale. And the one that was most memorable for me is a temple called Jakkoin which is in a small town called Oharu in the mountains to the north of Kyoto – and when I visited it in the winter it was snowing, so it was amazingly beautiful, but empty – but there was no one there, no sound except the snow and the cries of the ravens. And it’s a very poignant site because the very last scene of the Take of the Heike takes place at that temple.
So it’s when you visit places like Jakkoin that you realize this story – as fantastical as some parts of it seem - is real, it’s tangible – even though it happened so long ago, over 800 years ago.
So there are a few translations of the Tale so if you’re interested to read it, I’d probably recommend the one that’s translated by Royall Tyler – it’s Penguin Classics edition – and the main reason is that it’s got some great maps and family trees – As it’s a bit like reading Game of Thrones – you really need really the charts and maps to help you make sense of all the places and characters.
So I’ve used the Tale of the Heike as my main source for the podcast, but one thing to bear in mind is that tale of the Heike doesn’t really cover the first parts of the story – the Hogen and the Heiji rebellion which we looked at in the early episodes, so for those I used as a reference a book called before Heike and After, which again is translated by Royall Tyler – and that includes two shorter two shorter tales – The Tale of Hogen and the tale of Heiji – which are like prequels to the main Tale of the Heike.
Now all of these tales are told largely from the perspective of people living in the capital, so what they don’t cover much of is what’s going on in Kamakura, which is where Yoritomo is based after his exile. So for that, luckily there’s another source called the Azuma Kagami- which means Mirror of the East, since Kamakura is to the east of the capital – and it covers most of Yoritomo’s during and after the Gempei war.
Now whereas the Tales – Heike, Hogen, Heiji – are actually very readable, despite their length, and very dramatic – the Azuma Kagami is not – it’s more like a historical chronicle -and can be pretty dry – you know, on this day this meeting took place, Yoritomo attended this event and so on. But it’s but still useful –for example, it’s how we learn of the meeting between Yoritomo and Yoshitsune after the battle of Fuji river. So if you are interested, there is a translation of parts of the chronicle in a book called The Founding of the Kamakura Shogunate by Minoru Shinoda which was published back in 1960 by Columbia University Press.
Another source that is much more readable, but less reliable as a source, is called the Gikeiki – or Yoshitsune, and as the name suggests it focuses on Yoshitsune’s life, both before and after the Gempei war. And a lot of the heroic stories and legends that we now associate with Yoshitsune, like many of his adventures with Benkei, come from this book. But because it was written many years after Yoshitsune’ life, it’s really impossible to know much of it true. But if you’re interested, there’s a translation of the book again by Helen McCullough, again published by Stanford University Press
Now all of these are pretty long books, but if you just want a brief overview of the Gempei War and the rise of the Genji then probably your best bet is a book called The Gempei War 1180-1185 which is by the writer Stephen Turnbull who has probably written more books about the samurai than anyone else – he’s also authored The samurai a Military History, the Samurai Sourcebook and so on. The book about the Gempei war is published by Osprey Books and it’s got a lot of great maps and diagrams that explain how the battles took place. So if you’re looking for a starting point, then that’s probably the best book to get.
OK, if we’re talking about books from the period then probably the most of all is the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, which is often referred to as the world’s first novel. But the Tale of Genji was written in the early 11th century, so that’s more than a hundred years before the time of the Gempei war and Yoritomo’s life. There are numerous translations available, including one by Royall Tyler, and note that some of them are abridged versions of the story as the full novel is over a thousand pages long.
And if you’re interested to know more about that period when the novel was written a good source is a book called The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan, by Ivan Morris – there’s a paperback edition published by Vintage.
OK, now if you’re interested in movies or TV shows that cover this period of early medieval Japanese history, then what are some options?
So a good starting point would be two films by Akira Kurosawa that take place in the Heian era. The first is one of his most famous films – Rashomon – which is adapted from two different novels by the writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa. The framing story – the start and end of the film is based on Akutagawa’s short novel Rashomon but the main story is based on a short story called In a Grove. If you haven’t seen that film, it’s definitely worth watching, and the short stories that it’s based on are very good as well.
And the second Kurasawa film is called the Men who tread on the tiger’s tail, which was made in 1945 and is based on an event that takes place quite late in Yoshitsune’s life, after the end of the Gempei War.
Another classic movie from about the same time is Shin Heike Monogatari – or Taira Clan Saga – by another great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi. It’s based on a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa which is called The Heike Story, and it focuses on Taira no Kiyomori’s life – or at least the early part of it. So it doesn’t actually cover the Gempei war or his clash with the Genji, just the events that lead up to it. Still the movie and the book are worth checking out
One other classic movie made about the same time is called Gate of Hell, about a love affair between a samurai and lady-in-waiting during the Heiji Rebellion, which we looked at in the episode The Red and the White. That film came out in 1953 and won that year’s Oscar for Best Foreign language Film as well as the top award at the Cannes film festival.
You may be able to find these movies online – a good place to check is the Internet Archive which has various classic old movies.
If you’re interested to see something more recent, there are actually very few movies about this period, but there have been several TV dramas on the Japanese broadcaster NHK. Every year NHK produces a weekly historical series called a Taiga Drama, or Big River Drama, which lasts for 50 or so weeks from January to December, and you may be able to find some of these online with English translations.
Ones to check out would be the taiga drama from a couple of years ago, which was called The 13 Lords of the Shogun, and it’s mainly about the lives of Yoritomo’s wife Hojo Masako and her brother Hojo Yoshitoki. Also, there was a Taiga drama in 2012 that was about Taira no Kiyomori, and another series, back in 2005, about Yoshitsune.
OK, finally, if you’re interested in other podcasts about Japanese history, you may be familiar with them already but there are two long-running series, one called A History of Japan by Justin Hebert and another called History of Japan by Isaac Meyer. Some of the episodes in those series cover the Heian and Kamakura eras.
Also worth checking out is a podcast series called RJL or Read Japanese Literature by Alison Fincher, there’s also a podcast called Geeks and Gaijins, and another called the Samurai Archives. Again, I’ll list all these in the description to this episode.
And if anyone listening is interested to start your own podcast, then I recommend Buzzsprout – I’m not sponsored or anything, I just found the site really easy to use and they have a lot of articles that help explain the process and what you need. For the sound editing I’ve been using Audacity, which is a free program you can get online And the sound effects are licensed from Pond5 – as is the theme music which you can hear now…
OK, that brings us to the end of this extra episode of the First Shogun! I hope you all enjoy the start of summer wherever you are in the world. And I look forward to rejoining you in a few weeks as we complete the story of the rise to power of Minamoto no Yoritomo in his quest to become the first Shogun of Japan!