December 4, 2013 • 35 mins
Thanks to the pillow book of lady-in-waiting Sei Shonagon, we have a first-person account of court life in Heian Japan. It's part diary, part commonplace book, part essay collection, and thoroughly fascinating.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcomed to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and today we're
gonna talk about the Middle Ages, but maybe not as
you expect. Yeah, I think most people think of the
(00:22):
Middle Ages and they get a very kind of European
view because their mind conjures those images. Well, especially since
I've been looking at sort of the numbers of where
our listeners are overwhelmingly United States, and if you add
in like the UK, Australia and Canada, that's NS and
I would imagine that giant chunk of listeners has probably
(00:43):
mostly heard about the Middle Ages in the context of Europe,
which did give us some pretty cool things like the
Book of Kills in the Bayou Tapestry, both of which
have episodes in the archive. Also Courtly Love, Baowulf, Canterbury Tales,
Song of Roland, lots of interesting and cool literal nature
and art and architecture. But really, other than that, the
Middle Ages have this reputation for being this depressed, war
(01:07):
torn disease written, generally filthy part of history that borrowed
most of its advancements from other cultures, and then on
top of that there were the Crusades and the Black Death.
So while interesting things happened, very few people, if they
could time travel would be like Middle Ages or where
it's that for me totally going there. But so number one,
that's that perception is not really true of the entirety
(01:27):
of the Middle Ages. And number two, that really was
the situation in Europe. The same period of time was
really different for other parts of the world. And today
we're going to talk about the Hand Period in Japan,
which spanned from seven ninety four to eleven eighty five,
so kind of a chunk right in the middle of
the Middle Ages. The Hand Period started when Japan moved
(01:47):
its capital from Nara, which is the nation's first permanent capital,
to hay On q which later became Q two. During
this period, China had a really heavy influence on Jack
and his culture, and we have a really good idea
of what that culture was like, especially within the context
of the Imperial court, thanks to a woman known as
(02:09):
say Shonagone, and she served as a lady in waiting
to the Emphassis court and kept a book of observations
and lists and other authorited snippets that were about her
time there. That's what we're going to talk about today.
So people who keep asking for more royalty, here you go.
We have some more royalty, but maybe not the royalty
(02:30):
that you were expecting. Well, but we've also gotten requests
for non European royalty in need covering it. Yes, uh so,
just for backgrounds, say, shonagone was born around nine and
that isn't actually her name. Shonagon is a rank which
means minor counselor, and say is a reference to her
father's name. So what her actual name that her family
(02:52):
called her at birth was is completely unclear in the
historical record. Yeah, we do know who her father was.
Her father was Kiowara Noe Moto Suke. He was a
prominent and highly respected poet and a minor public official.
We're not totally sure who her mother was, though one
contemporaneous source suggests it was a woman named Hagaki who
(03:14):
was a poet and possibly also a prostitute. But in
spite of having one or possibly two poet parents, Shanagan
didn't really have a reputation for being a good poet herself,
and she insisted herself that she was terrible at poetry.
Another prominent writer at the time, Murasaki Shikiboo, author of
(03:36):
The Tale of Genji, which most people have heard of, uh,
seems not to have liked her, writing in her own
diary that Shanagan was gifted but presumptuous and was basically
a frivolous woman who liked put on airs. As a
side note, Murasaki Shikiboo also served in the court of
Empress Shoshi, who was empressa She's rival, and that's a
(03:56):
whole story that we're going to get into, and you're
gonna get the the backstory on that bit of drama
coming up, yes, because there is a lot of dramatic
conflict in this story. In Shanagan went to serve in
the court of Empress Tashi, who we just mentioned. She
was also known as Empress Sodoko. Some accounts say that
(04:20):
Shanagon had been married and divorced before entering service, and
that her only other two options at that point were
either to join a Buddhist convent or to remarry. We
don't really know if that's completely accurate, but regardless of
the reason, she wound up serving in court for about
ten years, and she documented a lot of that time
in her pillow book, and in Japanese this book pillow book,
(04:44):
is known as Makura nososhi or random pillow notes. And
Shonagon started writing hers towards the end of her time
at court. But there's a story to how this actually happened.
Paper was at that time really expensive. Shonagon wrote that
the menace star of the Center, whose name was Corey Chica,
who was also Taci's brother, brought the Empress a gift
(05:06):
of paper and asked her what book she would like
to have copied onto it. Shanagan said that they should
make it a pillow And there's all kinds of academic
discussion about what she actually meant by that, whether it
was a joke or a pun, or whether it referred
to pillar pillow books that people kept as a matter
of course, or whether it referred to the hard pillows
that people in Japan were using at that time. But regardless,
(05:29):
tacI gave shown a go in the paper, and showing
a Goan wrote whatever she wanted to on it. And
there's been a fair amount of debate about whether shan
Agon ever intended for her work to be read by
other people, or if it was just for her. Uh.
Given how expensive paper was, and that this paper was
actually given to the Empress to provide her with a
book for her own library, there's, you know, a logical
(05:52):
conclusion that what Shanagan wrote was always supposed to be public.
The writing itself also has a tone that hints that
there was a reader in mind. It wasn't just personal
inward reflections, uh, in diary form like people would normally
write if they thought no one was going to look
at it. Right. But at the same time, Seanagan also
wrote about being extremely embarrassing, uh when somebody took the
(06:17):
book and then pass it around at court. In the
section called it is getting so dark, which is how
the addition that I have of it concludes. She also
says that she regrets that the book ever came to light.
The end product of this gift of paper and Shana
gons writing is a collection of observations, poems, lists, and
(06:37):
other really interesting snippets of life at court. It's part diary,
it's part commonplace book. To some degree, it's an essay collection,
and one d and sixty four of the things in
the book are just lists, lists of hateful things, depressing things, things,
things that make one's heartbeat faster, regrettable things, and some
(06:59):
of these lists are really just uncannily evocative. Yeah, today,
how all of these different things are arranged in the
edition that you read really varies wildly depending on the
translation and how it's been edited. We don't really know
how they were originally presented, because all of the surviving
editions of this book are copies from at least five
(07:20):
hundred years after Shanaghan's death, So you can get a
really different experience depending on how the person doing the
editing has arranged all these different bits. And in spite
of you know, these outstanding questions of how it originally
was arranged and ordered, uh, the book has survived in
one form or another for more than one thousand years,
(07:41):
and today it's considered both a work of art and
a historical document. One of the first episodes that Holly
and I worked on together was on Marjorie Kemp and
her autobiography, which gave a lot of insight into middle
class life in medieval England, and similarly, shann Aghans Pillow
Book has become a primary source of nation about court
life and hay On Japan. Her book, as we said before,
(08:04):
covers about ten years that she spent in service there,
so the basics on the environment of the book. The
Empress and her ladies in waiting spent a lot of
their time in a salon behind screens, curtains, grates, and
wall hangings that were all meant to keep men and
strangers from seeing them. So they spent a lot of
(08:25):
time within the confines of these portable curtains that kept
them from view, and they wore layers of dresses and
robes with skirts and pants underneath. Yeah. I think if
you look at historical pictures sometimes you'll see the many,
many robes one on top of each other and say,
I always think, who that looks beautiful, while other people go,
I could never live in that. Yeah. Well, it was
also a progression of of fashion, like it had sort
(08:48):
of started as address with comfy pants under and then
gradually the fashion trended toward more and more layers, and
because you had to show more and more beautiful and
expensive of in luxurious fabric. Yes, that was the whole point.
I get so excited. Yeah, there are several things in
this book that are totally a poly's alley. In addition
(09:10):
to the pretty fabric their stuff about sewing and cats. Unsurprisingly,
there's also a big focus on manners and etiquette and gossip.
And on that last point, Shanaghan's opinion was that people
should not be angry when they are gossiped about, because
they also gossip about other people. So basically, don't dish
it out if you cannot take it. That's kind of
my stance, but also just that that's part of the
(09:32):
contract you make being part of a society that people
will discuss other people. And it's not even always in
a negative way, because some people really abhor the concept
that other people are talking about them when they're not present. Yeah,
we had that's going to happen. That's just part of
the deal living with other people. We had a whole
episode on the culture of gossip in our prior podcast.
So many of the passages in this book detail the
(09:55):
comings and goings of the Emperor and Empress and the
other officials uh and whatnot from the courts. There are
also religious observances noted in it, the primary religious influences
being Buddhism and Shinto. Days of abstinence are noted and
all kinds of just everyday happenings. One of the themes
that comes across in the Pillow Book that's also common
(10:17):
in writing about royal and aristocratic life in the West
is that it can be deeply painfully boring. There's a
lot of coming up with something to do just to
have something to do, and ladies would sometimes do things
like go on religious pilgrimage more for the sake of
having an outing than for their own spiritual development. So
some of the things that she documents in this book
(10:40):
lots and lots of festivals and rituals. For example, the
first month after the new year at all kinds of
festivals and celebrations. One of these was the Festival of
Blue Horses, which was a tradition that they borrowed from China.
Uh and that is a parade of twenty one horses
for the emperor, which sounds sort of beautiful. Originally these
horses had been gray, but by the time of Shanagones writing,
(11:02):
white horses were actually used, and white is the color
of purity in the Shinto religion, and the gray horses
were also too rare for that to really be a
doable thing to herd up twenty one of them to
parade along. Yeah, the idea of twenty one incredibly rare
horses is nice and fury why that would be a
parade honoring a high official. There's also the Festival of
(11:25):
Full Moon Gruel, and that is when people of the
court would conceal gruel sticks about their persons to hit
one another with. This came from a belief that being
hit in the thighs with the stick that was used
to stir the gruel would lead a woman to give
birth to a baby boy. And this is a tradition
that wasn't unique to the Imperial Court, and it continued
in more rural parts of Japan for a really long time.
(11:50):
I'm just processing the whack a mole element of like
determining your baby's sex well, and also of that you're
concealing a stick and your sleeve or whatever so that
you can whack people with it, And yes, the good
thing to do well, but it's it's really only in
some contexts is a good thing. There's a whole passage
(12:10):
about the scandalous nous of of when a gentleman whacked
a lady with the girls stick. That was not okay,
It's like um baby predict or fight club. Yes. Uh.
Also noted in this book are hookups speaking of where
(12:30):
babies come from, there were many, many hookups. Uh. There
is a passage which is entitled it is so stifling
lee Hot, and it starts out being about how hot
it is, which prompts everyone to leave their blinds and
sliding doors open, and then it quickly she has to
talking about a number of lovers sneaking away in the
morning in full view of everybody thanks to the heat
(12:51):
causing all of those doors to be open. Yeah, that's
not the only place that that comes up in the book.
From her list of depressing things, one of the ms
is it is quite late at night and a woman
has been expecting a visitor. Hearing finally a stealthy tapping,
She sends her maid to open the gate and lies
waiting excitedly. But the name announced by the maid is
(13:13):
that of someone with whom she has absolutely no connection.
Of all the depressing things, this is by far the worst,
and from her list of hateful things, an admirer has
come on a clandestine visit, but a dog catches sight
of him and starts barking. One feels like killing the beasts. Really,
(13:34):
A lot of the hateful things are about male visitors
making noise or otherwise drawing attention to themselves, or acting
in a way that was coarse or unseemly. None of
this is really surprising considering that a lot of the
interior walls in the palaces were basically paper partitions in
bamboo screens. So while all of these hookups were happening
(13:56):
and everyone knew that they were happening, they were also
meant to be happening discreet, making the need for silence
and discretion very important. So if you were a guy
and you rattle the screen on your way out, people
would be yes. Overall, the lists of depressing and hateful
things are quite long, but big chunks of them are
(14:18):
kind of mundane and a little bit petulant, and they
sum out to Tracy describes it as they are out
of salted caramel at Starbucks that today is the worst
day ever. Like they're really just complaints about pretty mundane happenings. Yeah,
one of the hateful things is one is just about
to be told some interesting piece of news when a
baby starts crying. They're kind of ridiculous and awesome and
(14:43):
also ridiculous petulant, but there are also other much less
awful uh things in them. One of the depressing things
is a lying in room when the baby has died,
so obviously that has a much greater emotional depth than
just complaining about things like noise. Another is a lengthier
description of someone who has gathered his family to wait
(15:05):
with him on the day when the official appointments are made,
but he does not get one, and they all gradually
leave in ones and twos until he's all alone. So
they were expecting good news and did not get it. Yeah,
there are things on on the lists that are legitimately
bad and not just kind of finding bad um. The
unsuitable Things list, though, is particularly revealing of aristocratic attitudes
(15:30):
about the lower classes. One of the unsuitable things is
snow on the houses of common people. This is especially
regrettable when moonlight shines down on it. This is because
those common people and air quotes could not fully appreciate
how lovely all of that was, and so therefore the
moon shining on snow was wasted beauty, which is an
(15:52):
offensive idea. It is well, it also sort of auto
discredits writer like to say that it was wasted because
she's enjoying it, you know. But it's not a poor
person's house, Holly, It's still pretty. There's also love mentioned
in this book, and things that cannot be compared. It
(16:13):
goes from the relatively prosaic summer and winter, night and day,
rain and sunshine too. When one has stopped loving somebody,
one feels that he has become someone else, even though
he is still the same person. The book also shows
a lot of communicating with people through poetry. In many situations,
direct communication was socially unacceptable, but exchanging poems was totally allowed,
(16:37):
so people would veil what they wanted to say in
poetry and send their thoughts that way. One of the
lists in the book is also just a list of
poetic subjects. Also, games and other amusements are mentioned, like
backgammon or the Chinese board game Go or building a
giant mountain of snow as high as they possibly could
in winter, so kind of joyous fun activities. There are
(16:58):
also many many descriptions of plants and flowers, so what's
in bloom, what's growing? What the foliage looks like. Similarly,
there are descriptions of beautiful fabrics, art, and clothing. There's
really a huge focus on what is beautiful and what
brings shown and gown delight, and a lot of these
descriptions tie in closely, of course, to Japanese aesthetics. There's
(17:21):
a a which is a sort of pathos or emotional
response that comes from fading beauty, like scattering cherry blossoms
or the fading noise of a bell, things of that nature.
And there's also okashi, which relates to a more fleeting
delight or pleasure. And the Pillow Book overall is more
about okashi than aware. Yeah, if we've mentioned the Tale
(17:43):
of Genji earlier, that one is more about the sad part,
especially by the end um, and so as the comparison goes,
this is sort of the happy elements of court life,
mostly as opposed to the tragically sad, despairing ones that
are more present in the Tale of Kenji. Maybe the
(18:04):
most say show Negon East passage in This Whole Thing
comes at the end of a passage about how much
she loves the hototo gisu, which is a type of bird.
She says, and I do not love the hot to
gi suit alone. Anything that cries out at night delights me.
Except babies. We have both the things that delight her
(18:33):
and the fact that she could be kind of petty
and the things that annoyed her. She seemed to not
be big on the baby. And before we talk about
the sort of circumstances that led to the end of
this court life for showing a going, let's take a
minute and talk about our sponsor. Now back to the
story of Say shown agone. So sadly the story of
(18:56):
Say shown a goon in her pillow book does not
have a very happy ending. We talked about how Say
Shanagon was in service to the Empress Taishi and Uh.
The Empress had become consort to Emperor Ichiju when she
was fourteen and he was ten, and during this period
the Fujiwara clan was heavily influential in Japanese politics. Women
(19:20):
from the Fujiwara clan would marry the emperor and then
their fathers would rule as regents and chancellors. The emperor
was still the emperor, but the Fujiwaras were really running
the show. Yeah. Tihi's father, Fujiwara no Michi Taka, died
during an epidemic in and with his death, he She's
(19:40):
only real protection was her brother Koori Chika, but her
father's brother, Michi Naga, wanted his own children in power
and not his brother's children, and Michi Naga used his
political while to ease the reins away from Korachika. Then Uh,
Korachika wound up being exiled from the capital after an
(20:01):
escalating misunderstanding with an ex emperor who Korachika had thought
was making moves on his lady. So it was a
big romantic misunderstanding uh and this left Hashi with no
real backing at court, and it opened the door for
Mitchi Naga to position his own daughter, Fujiwara no Akiko
(20:21):
also known as Shoshi, as a new favorite to Emperor Ichijo.
So with the Fujiwara clan lined up against him, even
the Emperor could not really do much to help Taishi,
especially since the Empress Dowager his own mother, also joined
in encouraging him to favor show She instead. And even
(20:41):
though it was unheard of for one emperor to have
two empresses, Mitchi Naga successfully argued that Taishi and show
She could have two different titles and two different roles
in court. And that Emperor Ichijo was totally justified in
having them both so show. She came to the Imperial
Palace and was named second Empress in the year one thousand.
(21:04):
Say Shaunaghan's own loyalty during this time was called into
question because she had been fond of Meetingnaga before this
whole business started. And that year Tay she moved to
another palace because she was pregnant uh and this was tradition,
and Tay she had spent large parts of her two
other pregnancies elsewhere, but this time this all transpired while
(21:25):
she was clearly being pushed aside at court. And on
top of that, the other palace where she would normally
have gone during a pregnancy had burned down, and instead
she had to stay in the home of a senior steward,
which obviously paled in comparison to a second palace that
she could visit. Her ladies in waiting started to leave
her service, and she ended up dying in childbirth, and
(21:48):
she was only twenty four at the time. Most of
Shanagan's actual writing of the Pillow Book happened during this
period of instability, although it's hard to see that in
the text, even if you already knew that part of
story and are looking for it. So while a lot
of the Pillow Book gives us a window into the
life of Imperial Court during t She's glory days, it's
(22:08):
not so much an actual reflection of the real political
situation that was going on while Shaunagan was physically writing it.
And say Shawnagon died around ten five, basically nothing is
known about the time between when she left the court
and when she died, although the lore is that she
was lonely and miserable because she had been so catty
(22:31):
and uh kind of petulant at court. In the rest
of Japan, the Fujiwara clan's influence started to wane in
the middle eleven hundreds. Then in eleven eighty five, one
of the most powerful warrior clans called the Genji, defeated
another powerful clan and also their main rivals, that hey k.
(22:52):
The Genji then established the first Showgun government, and the
Showgun military rule over Japan lasted until eighteen sixty seven.
In today, UH to sort of liken it to modern life,
sometimes people like to say that shown Aging is really
the first blogger UH. And they also sometimes like to
say that the Pillow Book is the first tumbler, which
(23:15):
makes a bit of sense. Yeah, considering how much trying
to identify ancient concepts with modern yeah happening, considering how
much of it is sort of random stuff put together
and in no real order as she saw it, uh together. Um,
and and kind of an amusing side note when when
I the day that I started doing the research for
(23:36):
this podcast, and you know, I typed, say, showing aging
into my search bar, you know how like a Wikipedia
result will come up to the right of your search results. Um,
it was, you know, blah blah, say shown ago and
blah blah. I wrote the Pillow Book. And then it
said she was also kind of a b except it
didn't say b h. That has since been edited out
(23:58):
of the Wikipedia are too well, so it doesn't say
that anymore. So this was probably because she was opinionated,
and she teased people who got their etiquettes and ceremony wrong.
She was really pretty scornful of the lower classes. And
you know, her book is full of these lists of
hateful and depressing and annoying things that a lot of
people on Twitter would probably hashtag first world problems. Yeah,
(24:22):
definitely speaking from a position of privilege yet being annoyed
by things that are really not real issues. I had
forgotten how how really a lot of the things that
are in her list to like me, Like, it had
been fifteen or so years since I read the whole book,
and when I reread it, I I really I had
(24:43):
forgotten how many of the lists of things are extremely
funny to me. Yeah, they're one, they're hilarious viewed through
a modern lens. But also it's just I can't help
but picturing this woman just sitting there in the salon
kind of recording these random things like, man, my gossip
got interrupted. Yeah, and it becomes very very witty in
(25:04):
its own And one of the translations about the uh,
what you know, you're getting ready to hear something interesting
is and then the baby starts crying. One of the
other translations of it is that specifically, you were talking
to the mother of the baby and she is about
to tell you something interesting and her baby starts crying,
which is even more like pointed in the whole Hatred
(25:24):
of Babies. Um. If you are interested in reading this book,
I highly recommend unless you are already really well steeped
in Japanese culture and particularly Japanese culture during this period.
I recommend getting one that has roughly as many notes
as the book is long. Yeah, like UH. Mine that
I have is edited by Ivan Morris, and it is
(25:47):
almost the same length of text versus notes. Um. And
it is that one also excludes some of the more
really really mundane lists that are like lists of nouns.
I don't think that's a real one, but um, that
one includes mostly the more evocative lists. So that is
the story of say, shown a goon, and a little
(26:08):
glimpse of what aristocratic imperial court life was like uh
in Japan, while, as my medieval literature professor said, when
I was in college, while Europe was having fleas and
wearing skins. And on that note, do you also have
a bit of listener mail for us? We're gonna do
(26:29):
something a little different with listener mail today. We were
taking a page out of the book of Katie and
Sarah past hosts thing of Patty, similar listener mail encounter.
We're gonna read these without the names on because I'm
not in favor publicly shaming people, unlike say showing a goon.
He would publicly shame you all day. So he wait
(26:53):
a lot of mail about the podcast, and we read
all of it, and we think about whether the criticism
that people is leveling at us is something that we
need to address, and we hear are three that are
on the same subject. The first one is from our
Facebook wall and it says, ken y'all possibly go in
a different direction for a while, then look at this
person who we think is interesting, particularly in his slasher
(27:14):
struggle against oppression. It's getting a bit old, folks. The
answer to that is, now, we really could not. But
I did go back and look of the twenty most
recent episodes when we got this note twelve we're about
individual people, and three of those were two partyers, which
meant that we talked about nine individual people in twenty episodes.
(27:36):
Three of those struggled against adversity, or if you count
Filot Farnsworth who struggled against the corporation. Uh. And really
the bigger set of topics that you take, the smaller
that proportion gets. So my feeling is that people who
struggle against oppression are largely overlooked in history class and
(27:56):
that's one of the reasons that we talked about them
on the podcast. Wow, Because, as we mentioned when you
and I were discussing it, as we know, histories written
by the victors so often, and those are not the
impressed people. Know, the people who have the mouthpiece are
usually the ones that weren't doing struggling not so we
have heard those stories already. There's still valid stories, but
(28:17):
we need to get to the ones that are on
the other side of it. Yeah. The next two are
are more directly tied in terms of what they are
asking about. The first one says, what's with all the
emphasis on gay, bisexual, transgender, etcetera history lately. I've been
listening to these podcasts for years, but it seems like
you have gotten very appreciate on this subject lately. Please
(28:40):
remember that half of the country still holds traditional marriage
as an ideal. That doesn't mean that we are haters,
are homophobes, but we get enough of the love that
dare not speak its name on the news and don't
relish being bombarded with it in our pleasure listening. This
is not our Facebook law. And there was further cindent,
part of which said, I'm not necessarily saying to avoid
all gay topics, but a little more odd activity would
(29:01):
be nice, and then the other one says, I'm a
longtime listener of the podcast that I've been listening since
the beginning and have not missed a single episode. I've
actually gone back and listened to at least a quarter
of the episode the second time. But lately I find
myself resisting the urge to skip a few of the
newer ones. I've never gone out of my way to
send a message that was not positive, but I feel
(29:21):
like I should say something. I respectfully resent the very
numerous podcast episodes lately that are related to gay people.
Sorry if I don't use the politically correct word for this.
I feel like gay people are always allowed to make
their opinion very clear, so why can't a straight person
I have an opinion to you? And that doesn't seem
fair that gay people can always say what they want
and are quick to accuse people, and then everyone else
(29:42):
is expected to just keep quiet. And then she went
on to talk about loving the podcast and sent us
some captures. So I sort of have a few points
on this. Number one is that, like I really did
go back and look to say, are we overwhelmingly representing
only one point of view? Um? And when we got
(30:03):
these the number of episodes that were about gay people,
it was like a tiny minority. We did have some
listener mail. It was specifically related to our Jane Adams episode,
and that happens with every episode that we have. We
generally get listener listener mail about it that we follow
up on at a later time, so that's really not
out of the ordinary. It's also not really out of
the ordinary for the podcast to talk about, um, the
(30:25):
gay community, like that's been part of the podcast since always,
so it is not a new thing talking about gay people,
the gay community, and other marginalized groups. It's really not
a new thing for the podcast. Like I just said,
neither us doing episodes that are about people. Although I
understand if you prefer to hear about historical events rather
(30:47):
than individual people, that could become tiresome. It's kind of
a matter of taste. But I kind of want to
just put this out there. Number one is you can
say anything you want that's allowed, but speech as consequences.
So if we say things that are offensive to other people,
people will call us on that, and that's the consequence
of the speech that we have made. UM. If someone
(31:10):
else says something that someone else finds offensive. That's the
same rule. We also talk about a lot of different
subjects on this podcast. We talk about gay people and
straight people. We talk about religious people and atheists. We
talked about married people and divorced people. We talk about
capitalists who literally bought up tuberculosis santatoriums and tore them
down so that people with tuberculosis could not go there,
(31:33):
uh and impoverished people who died because of their own
governments in action. We also talk about people who were
celibate for religious and spiritual reasons, and people who had
non monogamous relationships. We've talked about everyone from social workers
to teachers and people who made atomic bombs. Frankly, when
I am coming up with a new topic of a podcast,
(31:53):
usually this first question question that I asked myself, is
what have we not talked about lately? And I try
to start there. It is anything, and and that is
how we are trying to be objective, not by excluding
any particular group of people or point of view in
favor of other groups of people in points of view,
but to select broadly from broad people and broad points
(32:14):
of view and broad people in places and times and
all of that. It's sort of like throwing a dart
at the board of we're somewhere we haven't gone lately. Yeah,
move there to that place. Yeah. So I empathize with
people who find it offensive to hear about things that
they don't agree with. I grew up in a very
conservative household, very conservative community. I get that, and I empathize.
(32:37):
But we are not going to discount whole swaths of
the population and whole pieces of history because of the
possibility of causing offense to the people. We're going to
try to select diverse content to talk about in these subjects.
That's basically what I have to say about that, all right,
(32:59):
that is my dieter. Uh yeah, I mean you've said
it all and better than I would. Again, you know,
these are the people that didn't get talked about in
history class because they were marginalized. So some of those
are going to bubble up because those are stories that
have not been told and should everybody's story. Elsa Lanchester
made a great too, I'll loop it back to the podcast.
(33:19):
A great comment once that every single person you meet
probably has a really interesting history and an interesting life story,
but we don't get to hear most of them. Uh
So I'm always preaching it for anybody's and everybody's life
story because there's always a nugget of really fascinating stuff,
so open to all of them. Yes, so sometimes we
will be talking about lots of different people and communities
(33:42):
and times and places, all of that. That is our goal,
and to represent all of those people fairly and compassionately,
if sometimes making fun of their foibles, like when the
fact that they're petulant, the fact that you're complaining about
babies crying when your love is trying sneak out. Uh okay. So,
(34:05):
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other topic, or tell us we are awful
for what we just said. We're on Facebook at facebook
dot com slash history class stuff and on Twitter at
mist in History. Are tumbler is mist in history dot
tumbler dot com, and we are also on Pinterest. Our
email addresses History podcast at Discovery dot com. If you
would like to learn more about another element of Japanese
(34:28):
culture and one that was really getting its start during
the time period we talked about, you can come to
our website and search the word geisha and you will
find how geisha work. You can learn all that and
a whole lot more at our website, which is how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot com.
(35:00):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcomed to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry and today we're
gonna talk about the Middle Ages, but maybe not as
you expect. Yeah, I think most people think of the
(00:22):
Middle Ages and they get a very kind of European
view because their mind conjures those images. Well, especially since
I've been looking at sort of the numbers of where
our listeners are overwhelmingly United States, and if you add
in like the UK, Australia and Canada, that's NS and
I would imagine that giant chunk of listeners has probably
(00:43):
mostly heard about the Middle Ages in the context of Europe,
which did give us some pretty cool things like the
Book of Kills in the Bayou Tapestry, both of which
have episodes in the archive. Also Courtly Love, Baowulf, Canterbury Tales,
Song of Roland, lots of interesting and cool literal nature
and art and architecture. But really, other than that, the
Middle Ages have this reputation for being this depressed, war
(01:07):
torn disease written, generally filthy part of history that borrowed
most of its advancements from other cultures, and then on
top of that there were the Crusades and the Black Death.
So while interesting things happened, very few people, if they
could time travel would be like Middle Ages or where
it's that for me totally going there. But so number one,
that's that perception is not really true of the entirety
(01:27):
of the Middle Ages. And number two, that really was
the situation in Europe. The same period of time was
really different for other parts of the world. And today
we're going to talk about the Hand Period in Japan,
which spanned from seven ninety four to eleven eighty five,
so kind of a chunk right in the middle of
the Middle Ages. The Hand Period started when Japan moved
(01:47):
its capital from Nara, which is the nation's first permanent capital,
to hay On q which later became Q two. During
this period, China had a really heavy influence on Jack
and his culture, and we have a really good idea
of what that culture was like, especially within the context
of the Imperial court, thanks to a woman known as
(02:09):
say Shonagone, and she served as a lady in waiting
to the Emphassis court and kept a book of observations
and lists and other authorited snippets that were about her
time there. That's what we're going to talk about today.
So people who keep asking for more royalty, here you go.
We have some more royalty, but maybe not the royalty
(02:30):
that you were expecting. Well, but we've also gotten requests
for non European royalty in need covering it. Yes, uh so,
just for backgrounds, say, shonagone was born around nine and
that isn't actually her name. Shonagon is a rank which
means minor counselor, and say is a reference to her
father's name. So what her actual name that her family
(02:52):
called her at birth was is completely unclear in the
historical record. Yeah, we do know who her father was.
Her father was Kiowara Noe Moto Suke. He was a
prominent and highly respected poet and a minor public official.
We're not totally sure who her mother was, though one
contemporaneous source suggests it was a woman named Hagaki who
(03:14):
was a poet and possibly also a prostitute. But in
spite of having one or possibly two poet parents, Shanagan
didn't really have a reputation for being a good poet herself,
and she insisted herself that she was terrible at poetry.
Another prominent writer at the time, Murasaki Shikiboo, author of
(03:36):
The Tale of Genji, which most people have heard of, uh,
seems not to have liked her, writing in her own
diary that Shanagan was gifted but presumptuous and was basically
a frivolous woman who liked put on airs. As a
side note, Murasaki Shikiboo also served in the court of
Empress Shoshi, who was empressa She's rival, and that's a
(03:56):
whole story that we're going to get into, and you're
gonna get the the backstory on that bit of drama
coming up, yes, because there is a lot of dramatic
conflict in this story. In Shanagan went to serve in
the court of Empress Tashi, who we just mentioned. She
was also known as Empress Sodoko. Some accounts say that
(04:20):
Shanagon had been married and divorced before entering service, and
that her only other two options at that point were
either to join a Buddhist convent or to remarry. We
don't really know if that's completely accurate, but regardless of
the reason, she wound up serving in court for about
ten years, and she documented a lot of that time
in her pillow book, and in Japanese this book pillow book,
(04:44):
is known as Makura nososhi or random pillow notes. And
Shonagon started writing hers towards the end of her time
at court. But there's a story to how this actually happened.
Paper was at that time really expensive. Shonagon wrote that
the menace star of the Center, whose name was Corey Chica,
who was also Taci's brother, brought the Empress a gift
(05:06):
of paper and asked her what book she would like
to have copied onto it. Shanagan said that they should
make it a pillow And there's all kinds of academic
discussion about what she actually meant by that, whether it
was a joke or a pun, or whether it referred
to pillar pillow books that people kept as a matter
of course, or whether it referred to the hard pillows
that people in Japan were using at that time. But regardless,
(05:29):
tacI gave shown a go in the paper, and showing
a Goan wrote whatever she wanted to on it. And
there's been a fair amount of debate about whether shan
Agon ever intended for her work to be read by
other people, or if it was just for her. Uh.
Given how expensive paper was, and that this paper was
actually given to the Empress to provide her with a
book for her own library, there's, you know, a logical
(05:52):
conclusion that what Shanagan wrote was always supposed to be public.
The writing itself also has a tone that hints that
there was a reader in mind. It wasn't just personal
inward reflections, uh, in diary form like people would normally
write if they thought no one was going to look
at it. Right. But at the same time, Seanagan also
wrote about being extremely embarrassing, uh when somebody took the
(06:17):
book and then pass it around at court. In the
section called it is getting so dark, which is how
the addition that I have of it concludes. She also
says that she regrets that the book ever came to light.
The end product of this gift of paper and Shana
gons writing is a collection of observations, poems, lists, and
(06:37):
other really interesting snippets of life at court. It's part diary,
it's part commonplace book. To some degree, it's an essay collection,
and one d and sixty four of the things in
the book are just lists, lists of hateful things, depressing things, things,
things that make one's heartbeat faster, regrettable things, and some
(06:59):
of these lists are really just uncannily evocative. Yeah, today,
how all of these different things are arranged in the
edition that you read really varies wildly depending on the
translation and how it's been edited. We don't really know
how they were originally presented, because all of the surviving
editions of this book are copies from at least five
(07:20):
hundred years after Shanaghan's death, So you can get a
really different experience depending on how the person doing the
editing has arranged all these different bits. And in spite
of you know, these outstanding questions of how it originally
was arranged and ordered, uh, the book has survived in
one form or another for more than one thousand years,
(07:41):
and today it's considered both a work of art and
a historical document. One of the first episodes that Holly
and I worked on together was on Marjorie Kemp and
her autobiography, which gave a lot of insight into middle
class life in medieval England, and similarly, shann Aghans Pillow
Book has become a primary source of nation about court
life and hay On Japan. Her book, as we said before,
(08:04):
covers about ten years that she spent in service there,
so the basics on the environment of the book. The
Empress and her ladies in waiting spent a lot of
their time in a salon behind screens, curtains, grates, and
wall hangings that were all meant to keep men and
strangers from seeing them. So they spent a lot of
(08:25):
time within the confines of these portable curtains that kept
them from view, and they wore layers of dresses and
robes with skirts and pants underneath. Yeah. I think if
you look at historical pictures sometimes you'll see the many,
many robes one on top of each other and say,
I always think, who that looks beautiful, while other people go,
I could never live in that. Yeah. Well, it was
also a progression of of fashion, like it had sort
(08:48):
of started as address with comfy pants under and then
gradually the fashion trended toward more and more layers, and
because you had to show more and more beautiful and
expensive of in luxurious fabric. Yes, that was the whole point.
I get so excited. Yeah, there are several things in
this book that are totally a poly's alley. In addition
(09:10):
to the pretty fabric their stuff about sewing and cats. Unsurprisingly,
there's also a big focus on manners and etiquette and gossip.
And on that last point, Shanaghan's opinion was that people
should not be angry when they are gossiped about, because
they also gossip about other people. So basically, don't dish
it out if you cannot take it. That's kind of
my stance, but also just that that's part of the
(09:32):
contract you make being part of a society that people
will discuss other people. And it's not even always in
a negative way, because some people really abhor the concept
that other people are talking about them when they're not present. Yeah,
we had that's going to happen. That's just part of
the deal living with other people. We had a whole
episode on the culture of gossip in our prior podcast.
So many of the passages in this book detail the
(09:55):
comings and goings of the Emperor and Empress and the
other officials uh and whatnot from the courts. There are
also religious observances noted in it, the primary religious influences
being Buddhism and Shinto. Days of abstinence are noted and
all kinds of just everyday happenings. One of the themes
that comes across in the Pillow Book that's also common
(10:17):
in writing about royal and aristocratic life in the West
is that it can be deeply painfully boring. There's a
lot of coming up with something to do just to
have something to do, and ladies would sometimes do things
like go on religious pilgrimage more for the sake of
having an outing than for their own spiritual development. So
some of the things that she documents in this book
(10:40):
lots and lots of festivals and rituals. For example, the
first month after the new year at all kinds of
festivals and celebrations. One of these was the Festival of
Blue Horses, which was a tradition that they borrowed from China.
Uh and that is a parade of twenty one horses
for the emperor, which sounds sort of beautiful. Originally these
horses had been gray, but by the time of Shanagones writing,
(11:02):
white horses were actually used, and white is the color
of purity in the Shinto religion, and the gray horses
were also too rare for that to really be a
doable thing to herd up twenty one of them to
parade along. Yeah, the idea of twenty one incredibly rare
horses is nice and fury why that would be a
parade honoring a high official. There's also the Festival of
(11:25):
Full Moon Gruel, and that is when people of the
court would conceal gruel sticks about their persons to hit
one another with. This came from a belief that being
hit in the thighs with the stick that was used
to stir the gruel would lead a woman to give
birth to a baby boy. And this is a tradition
that wasn't unique to the Imperial Court, and it continued
in more rural parts of Japan for a really long time.
(11:50):
I'm just processing the whack a mole element of like
determining your baby's sex well, and also of that you're
concealing a stick and your sleeve or whatever so that
you can whack people with it, And yes, the good
thing to do well, but it's it's really only in
some contexts is a good thing. There's a whole passage
(12:10):
about the scandalous nous of of when a gentleman whacked
a lady with the girls stick. That was not okay,
It's like um baby predict or fight club. Yes. Uh.
Also noted in this book are hookups speaking of where
(12:30):
babies come from, there were many, many hookups. Uh. There
is a passage which is entitled it is so stifling
lee Hot, and it starts out being about how hot
it is, which prompts everyone to leave their blinds and
sliding doors open, and then it quickly she has to
talking about a number of lovers sneaking away in the
morning in full view of everybody thanks to the heat
(12:51):
causing all of those doors to be open. Yeah, that's
not the only place that that comes up in the book.
From her list of depressing things, one of the ms
is it is quite late at night and a woman
has been expecting a visitor. Hearing finally a stealthy tapping,
She sends her maid to open the gate and lies
waiting excitedly. But the name announced by the maid is
(13:13):
that of someone with whom she has absolutely no connection.
Of all the depressing things, this is by far the worst,
and from her list of hateful things, an admirer has
come on a clandestine visit, but a dog catches sight
of him and starts barking. One feels like killing the beasts. Really,
(13:34):
A lot of the hateful things are about male visitors
making noise or otherwise drawing attention to themselves, or acting
in a way that was coarse or unseemly. None of
this is really surprising considering that a lot of the
interior walls in the palaces were basically paper partitions in
bamboo screens. So while all of these hookups were happening
(13:56):
and everyone knew that they were happening, they were also
meant to be happening discreet, making the need for silence
and discretion very important. So if you were a guy
and you rattle the screen on your way out, people
would be yes. Overall, the lists of depressing and hateful
things are quite long, but big chunks of them are
(14:18):
kind of mundane and a little bit petulant, and they
sum out to Tracy describes it as they are out
of salted caramel at Starbucks that today is the worst
day ever. Like they're really just complaints about pretty mundane happenings. Yeah,
one of the hateful things is one is just about
to be told some interesting piece of news when a
baby starts crying. They're kind of ridiculous and awesome and
(14:43):
also ridiculous petulant, but there are also other much less
awful uh things in them. One of the depressing things
is a lying in room when the baby has died,
so obviously that has a much greater emotional depth than
just complaining about things like noise. Another is a lengthier
description of someone who has gathered his family to wait
(15:05):
with him on the day when the official appointments are made,
but he does not get one, and they all gradually
leave in ones and twos until he's all alone. So
they were expecting good news and did not get it. Yeah,
there are things on on the lists that are legitimately
bad and not just kind of finding bad um. The
unsuitable Things list, though, is particularly revealing of aristocratic attitudes
(15:30):
about the lower classes. One of the unsuitable things is
snow on the houses of common people. This is especially
regrettable when moonlight shines down on it. This is because
those common people and air quotes could not fully appreciate
how lovely all of that was, and so therefore the
moon shining on snow was wasted beauty, which is an
(15:52):
offensive idea. It is well, it also sort of auto
discredits writer like to say that it was wasted because
she's enjoying it, you know. But it's not a poor
person's house, Holly, It's still pretty. There's also love mentioned
in this book, and things that cannot be compared. It
(16:13):
goes from the relatively prosaic summer and winter, night and day,
rain and sunshine too. When one has stopped loving somebody,
one feels that he has become someone else, even though
he is still the same person. The book also shows
a lot of communicating with people through poetry. In many situations,
direct communication was socially unacceptable, but exchanging poems was totally allowed,
(16:37):
so people would veil what they wanted to say in
poetry and send their thoughts that way. One of the
lists in the book is also just a list of
poetic subjects. Also, games and other amusements are mentioned, like
backgammon or the Chinese board game Go or building a
giant mountain of snow as high as they possibly could
in winter, so kind of joyous fun activities. There are
(16:58):
also many many descriptions of plants and flowers, so what's
in bloom, what's growing? What the foliage looks like. Similarly,
there are descriptions of beautiful fabrics, art, and clothing. There's
really a huge focus on what is beautiful and what
brings shown and gown delight, and a lot of these
descriptions tie in closely, of course, to Japanese aesthetics. There's
(17:21):
a a which is a sort of pathos or emotional
response that comes from fading beauty, like scattering cherry blossoms
or the fading noise of a bell, things of that nature.
And there's also okashi, which relates to a more fleeting
delight or pleasure. And the Pillow Book overall is more
about okashi than aware. Yeah, if we've mentioned the Tale
(17:43):
of Genji earlier, that one is more about the sad part,
especially by the end um, and so as the comparison goes,
this is sort of the happy elements of court life,
mostly as opposed to the tragically sad, despairing ones that
are more present in the Tale of Kenji. Maybe the
(18:04):
most say show Negon East passage in This Whole Thing
comes at the end of a passage about how much
she loves the hototo gisu, which is a type of bird.
She says, and I do not love the hot to
gi suit alone. Anything that cries out at night delights me.
Except babies. We have both the things that delight her
(18:33):
and the fact that she could be kind of petty
and the things that annoyed her. She seemed to not
be big on the baby. And before we talk about
the sort of circumstances that led to the end of
this court life for showing a going, let's take a
minute and talk about our sponsor. Now back to the
story of Say shown agone. So sadly the story of
(18:56):
Say shown a goon in her pillow book does not
have a very happy ending. We talked about how Say
Shanagon was in service to the Empress Taishi and Uh.
The Empress had become consort to Emperor Ichiju when she
was fourteen and he was ten, and during this period
the Fujiwara clan was heavily influential in Japanese politics. Women
(19:20):
from the Fujiwara clan would marry the emperor and then
their fathers would rule as regents and chancellors. The emperor
was still the emperor, but the Fujiwaras were really running
the show. Yeah. Tihi's father, Fujiwara no Michi Taka, died
during an epidemic in and with his death, he She's
(19:40):
only real protection was her brother Koori Chika, but her
father's brother, Michi Naga, wanted his own children in power
and not his brother's children, and Michi Naga used his
political while to ease the reins away from Korachika. Then Uh,
Korachika wound up being exiled from the capital after an
(20:01):
escalating misunderstanding with an ex emperor who Korachika had thought
was making moves on his lady. So it was a
big romantic misunderstanding uh and this left Hashi with no
real backing at court, and it opened the door for
Mitchi Naga to position his own daughter, Fujiwara no Akiko
(20:21):
also known as Shoshi, as a new favorite to Emperor Ichijo.
So with the Fujiwara clan lined up against him, even
the Emperor could not really do much to help Taishi,
especially since the Empress Dowager his own mother, also joined
in encouraging him to favor show She instead. And even
(20:41):
though it was unheard of for one emperor to have
two empresses, Mitchi Naga successfully argued that Taishi and show
She could have two different titles and two different roles
in court. And that Emperor Ichijo was totally justified in
having them both so show. She came to the Imperial
Palace and was named second Empress in the year one thousand.
(21:04):
Say Shaunaghan's own loyalty during this time was called into
question because she had been fond of Meetingnaga before this
whole business started. And that year Tay she moved to
another palace because she was pregnant uh and this was tradition,
and Tay she had spent large parts of her two
other pregnancies elsewhere, but this time this all transpired while
(21:25):
she was clearly being pushed aside at court. And on
top of that, the other palace where she would normally
have gone during a pregnancy had burned down, and instead
she had to stay in the home of a senior steward,
which obviously paled in comparison to a second palace that
she could visit. Her ladies in waiting started to leave
her service, and she ended up dying in childbirth, and
(21:48):
she was only twenty four at the time. Most of
Shanagan's actual writing of the Pillow Book happened during this
period of instability, although it's hard to see that in
the text, even if you already knew that part of
story and are looking for it. So while a lot
of the Pillow Book gives us a window into the
life of Imperial Court during t She's glory days, it's
(22:08):
not so much an actual reflection of the real political
situation that was going on while Shaunagan was physically writing it.
And say Shawnagon died around ten five, basically nothing is
known about the time between when she left the court
and when she died, although the lore is that she
was lonely and miserable because she had been so catty
(22:31):
and uh kind of petulant at court. In the rest
of Japan, the Fujiwara clan's influence started to wane in
the middle eleven hundreds. Then in eleven eighty five, one
of the most powerful warrior clans called the Genji, defeated
another powerful clan and also their main rivals, that hey k.
(22:52):
The Genji then established the first Showgun government, and the
Showgun military rule over Japan lasted until eighteen sixty seven.
In today, UH to sort of liken it to modern life,
sometimes people like to say that shown Aging is really
the first blogger UH. And they also sometimes like to
say that the Pillow Book is the first tumbler, which
(23:15):
makes a bit of sense. Yeah, considering how much trying
to identify ancient concepts with modern yeah happening, considering how
much of it is sort of random stuff put together
and in no real order as she saw it, uh together. Um,
and and kind of an amusing side note when when
I the day that I started doing the research for
(23:36):
this podcast, and you know, I typed, say, showing aging
into my search bar, you know how like a Wikipedia
result will come up to the right of your search results. Um,
it was, you know, blah blah, say shown ago and
blah blah. I wrote the Pillow Book. And then it
said she was also kind of a b except it
didn't say b h. That has since been edited out
(23:58):
of the Wikipedia are too well, so it doesn't say
that anymore. So this was probably because she was opinionated,
and she teased people who got their etiquettes and ceremony wrong.
She was really pretty scornful of the lower classes. And
you know, her book is full of these lists of
hateful and depressing and annoying things that a lot of
people on Twitter would probably hashtag first world problems. Yeah,
(24:22):
definitely speaking from a position of privilege yet being annoyed
by things that are really not real issues. I had
forgotten how how really a lot of the things that
are in her list to like me, Like, it had
been fifteen or so years since I read the whole book,
and when I reread it, I I really I had
(24:43):
forgotten how many of the lists of things are extremely
funny to me. Yeah, they're one, they're hilarious viewed through
a modern lens. But also it's just I can't help
but picturing this woman just sitting there in the salon
kind of recording these random things like, man, my gossip
got interrupted. Yeah, and it becomes very very witty in
(25:04):
its own And one of the translations about the uh,
what you know, you're getting ready to hear something interesting
is and then the baby starts crying. One of the
other translations of it is that specifically, you were talking
to the mother of the baby and she is about
to tell you something interesting and her baby starts crying,
which is even more like pointed in the whole Hatred
(25:24):
of Babies. Um. If you are interested in reading this book,
I highly recommend unless you are already really well steeped
in Japanese culture and particularly Japanese culture during this period.
I recommend getting one that has roughly as many notes
as the book is long. Yeah, like UH. Mine that
I have is edited by Ivan Morris, and it is
(25:47):
almost the same length of text versus notes. Um. And
it is that one also excludes some of the more
really really mundane lists that are like lists of nouns.
I don't think that's a real one, but um, that
one includes mostly the more evocative lists. So that is
the story of say, shown a goon, and a little
(26:08):
glimpse of what aristocratic imperial court life was like uh
in Japan, while, as my medieval literature professor said, when
I was in college, while Europe was having fleas and
wearing skins. And on that note, do you also have
a bit of listener mail for us? We're gonna do
(26:29):
something a little different with listener mail today. We were
taking a page out of the book of Katie and
Sarah past hosts thing of Patty, similar listener mail encounter.
We're gonna read these without the names on because I'm
not in favor publicly shaming people, unlike say showing a goon.
He would publicly shame you all day. So he wait
(26:53):
a lot of mail about the podcast, and we read
all of it, and we think about whether the criticism
that people is leveling at us is something that we
need to address, and we hear are three that are
on the same subject. The first one is from our
Facebook wall and it says, ken y'all possibly go in
a different direction for a while, then look at this
person who we think is interesting, particularly in his slasher
(27:14):
struggle against oppression. It's getting a bit old, folks. The
answer to that is, now, we really could not. But
I did go back and look of the twenty most
recent episodes when we got this note twelve we're about
individual people, and three of those were two partyers, which
meant that we talked about nine individual people in twenty episodes.
(27:36):
Three of those struggled against adversity, or if you count
Filot Farnsworth who struggled against the corporation. Uh. And really
the bigger set of topics that you take, the smaller
that proportion gets. So my feeling is that people who
struggle against oppression are largely overlooked in history class and
(27:56):
that's one of the reasons that we talked about them
on the podcast. Wow, Because, as we mentioned when you
and I were discussing it, as we know, histories written
by the victors so often, and those are not the
impressed people. Know, the people who have the mouthpiece are
usually the ones that weren't doing struggling not so we
have heard those stories already. There's still valid stories, but
(28:17):
we need to get to the ones that are on
the other side of it. Yeah. The next two are
are more directly tied in terms of what they are
asking about. The first one says, what's with all the
emphasis on gay, bisexual, transgender, etcetera history lately. I've been
listening to these podcasts for years, but it seems like
you have gotten very appreciate on this subject lately. Please
(28:40):
remember that half of the country still holds traditional marriage
as an ideal. That doesn't mean that we are haters,
are homophobes, but we get enough of the love that
dare not speak its name on the news and don't
relish being bombarded with it in our pleasure listening. This
is not our Facebook law. And there was further cindent,
part of which said, I'm not necessarily saying to avoid
all gay topics, but a little more odd activity would
(29:01):
be nice, and then the other one says, I'm a
longtime listener of the podcast that I've been listening since
the beginning and have not missed a single episode. I've
actually gone back and listened to at least a quarter
of the episode the second time. But lately I find
myself resisting the urge to skip a few of the
newer ones. I've never gone out of my way to
send a message that was not positive, but I feel
(29:21):
like I should say something. I respectfully resent the very
numerous podcast episodes lately that are related to gay people.
Sorry if I don't use the politically correct word for this.
I feel like gay people are always allowed to make
their opinion very clear, so why can't a straight person
I have an opinion to you? And that doesn't seem
fair that gay people can always say what they want
and are quick to accuse people, and then everyone else
(29:42):
is expected to just keep quiet. And then she went
on to talk about loving the podcast and sent us
some captures. So I sort of have a few points
on this. Number one is that, like I really did
go back and look to say, are we overwhelmingly representing
only one point of view? Um? And when we got
(30:03):
these the number of episodes that were about gay people,
it was like a tiny minority. We did have some
listener mail. It was specifically related to our Jane Adams episode,
and that happens with every episode that we have. We
generally get listener listener mail about it that we follow
up on at a later time, so that's really not
out of the ordinary. It's also not really out of
the ordinary for the podcast to talk about, um, the
(30:25):
gay community, like that's been part of the podcast since always,
so it is not a new thing talking about gay people,
the gay community, and other marginalized groups. It's really not
a new thing for the podcast. Like I just said,
neither us doing episodes that are about people. Although I
understand if you prefer to hear about historical events rather
(30:47):
than individual people, that could become tiresome. It's kind of
a matter of taste. But I kind of want to
just put this out there. Number one is you can
say anything you want that's allowed, but speech as consequences.
So if we say things that are offensive to other people,
people will call us on that, and that's the consequence
of the speech that we have made. UM. If someone
(31:10):
else says something that someone else finds offensive. That's the
same rule. We also talk about a lot of different
subjects on this podcast. We talk about gay people and
straight people. We talk about religious people and atheists. We
talked about married people and divorced people. We talk about
capitalists who literally bought up tuberculosis santatoriums and tore them
down so that people with tuberculosis could not go there,
(31:33):
uh and impoverished people who died because of their own
governments in action. We also talk about people who were
celibate for religious and spiritual reasons, and people who had
non monogamous relationships. We've talked about everyone from social workers
to teachers and people who made atomic bombs. Frankly, when
I am coming up with a new topic of a podcast,
(31:53):
usually this first question question that I asked myself, is
what have we not talked about lately? And I try
to start there. It is anything, and and that is
how we are trying to be objective, not by excluding
any particular group of people or point of view in
favor of other groups of people in points of view,
but to select broadly from broad people and broad points
(32:14):
of view and broad people in places and times and
all of that. It's sort of like throwing a dart
at the board of we're somewhere we haven't gone lately. Yeah,
move there to that place. Yeah. So I empathize with
people who find it offensive to hear about things that
they don't agree with. I grew up in a very
conservative household, very conservative community. I get that, and I empathize.
(32:37):
But we are not going to discount whole swaths of
the population and whole pieces of history because of the
possibility of causing offense to the people. We're going to
try to select diverse content to talk about in these subjects.
That's basically what I have to say about that, all right,
(32:59):
that is my dieter. Uh yeah, I mean you've said
it all and better than I would. Again, you know,
these are the people that didn't get talked about in
history class because they were marginalized. So some of those
are going to bubble up because those are stories that
have not been told and should everybody's story. Elsa Lanchester
made a great too, I'll loop it back to the podcast.
(33:19):
A great comment once that every single person you meet
probably has a really interesting history and an interesting life story,
but we don't get to hear most of them. Uh
So I'm always preaching it for anybody's and everybody's life
story because there's always a nugget of really fascinating stuff,
so open to all of them. Yes, so sometimes we
will be talking about lots of different people and communities
(33:42):
and times and places, all of that. That is our goal,
and to represent all of those people fairly and compassionately,
if sometimes making fun of their foibles, like when the
fact that they're petulant, the fact that you're complaining about
babies crying when your love is trying sneak out. Uh okay. So,
(34:05):
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other topic, or tell us we are awful
for what we just said. We're on Facebook at facebook
dot com slash history class stuff and on Twitter at
mist in History. Are tumbler is mist in history dot
tumbler dot com, and we are also on Pinterest. Our
email addresses History podcast at Discovery dot com. If you
would like to learn more about another element of Japanese
(34:28):
culture and one that was really getting its start during
the time period we talked about, you can come to
our website and search the word geisha and you will
find how geisha work. You can learn all that and
a whole lot more at our website, which is how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot com.
(35:00):
Audible dot com is the leading provider of downloadable digital
audio books and spoken word entertainment. Audible has more than
one hundred thousand titles to choose from to be downloaded
to your iPod or MP three player. Go to audible
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