658. Dawn of the Samurai: The Shadow of the Sword (Part 1)

19:35Dominic Sandbrook:So that's the Meiji Restoration, isn't it? Which is seen as the transformative moment in the history of modern Japan, because it's the moment that Japan, it doesn't renounce the past, but it renounces maybe to some degree the stultifying cult of the past and throws itself into the pursuit of modernity. Yeah.

19:55Tom Holland:So there's a manifesto pledge is proclaimed in the Imperial Palace in April 1868. And it goes, evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of nature. And actually what this means in practice, it is a kind of headlong rush to modernize. And the faster that Japan starts to westernize, obviously the more anachronistic this kind of hereditary cast of warriors comes to seem. And of course, Japan modernizes incredibly effectively. I mean, more effectively probably than any other country that comes into contact with the industrial West. And by the end of 1876, pretty much everything that had made the samurai distinctive for centuries and centuries and centuries has gone.

20:38Tom Holland:So their elevated kind of position in a formal hierarchy, you know, their standing as the top caste is abolished, the stipends they'd been receiving from the government, that they've gone. Their monopoly on military service, that's gone. Anyone now can join the armed services. The right to wear a sword in public, the katana, that's gone as well. And even their distinctive hairstyle, which anyone who has seen shogun will immediately recognise, kind of the shaved front with a top knot, that's gone as well. So it's not just the Tokugawa shogunate that's been abolished. So too has this entire tradition of military rule in Japan that, as we will find out, stretches way, way, way back into the Middle Ages.

21:22Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, obviously, there are people in Japan who are very sad, I suppose, who mourn the death of tradition that comes with the Meiji Restoration. And oddly, Westerners have a very ambiguous attitude too, because on the one hand, people who like Japanese culture love it as a kind of crucible of modernity. But we are constantly fascinated by the tradition and the reverence for the past and all of that kind of thing, which is why when you go to Japan, as we've both done, the samurai are everywhere. Katanas are everywhere. I have to say Sambra Jr. returned with an excellent sword and all kinds of samurai gear from Japan.

21:59Tom Holland:There are definitely people in the West who mourn the collapse of the samurai, even though, of course, it's the West that has precipitated their downfall. I think what they particularly admire and regret is a kind of aesthetic. It's the look that the samurai have. And so, for instance, you know, these suits of armour that will be familiar in the West that you get in museums, say British Museum or wherever, these are sold by ex-samurai because every samurai had to have a suit of armour. They don't need them anymore. They're a bit short of money. Now they're not getting their stipends. So they flog them off.

22:33Tom Holland:And so they go around the world and they kind of broadcast the look of the samurai across the West. And helmets in particular become kind of icons of what in France is known as a japonisme, It's kind of the craze for Japanese art, Japanese fashion, Japanese vibes that completely sweeps Western Europe in the 19th century. And they remain absolutely iconic to this day. And they're instant signifiers of medieval Japan, even though often, of course, they come from the 16th or 17th centuries. And you talked about a very, very celebrated marker of that influence, which endures into the present day. and it's there in the British Museum show because you begin with this stunning suit of armor, which I described.

23:20Tom Holland:You go around the show and then at the end, you have an outfit that deliberately echoed the suit of armor that you got at the beginning. This is the costume worn by Darth Vader. George Lucas's suggestion to the costume designer when they were prepping for Star Wars, he said, what's some kind of big helmet like a Japanese warrior? It's not a precise instruction, But everyone immediately, you know, you immediately know what that signifies. The designer obviously knew.

23:48Dominic Sandbrook:And that's partly because Star Wars is based on Kurosawa films. The Kurosawa films are the model for Star Wars in some ways. The hidden fortress, I believe.

23:57Tom Holland:Yes, absolutely. Because it's not just the look of the samurai that people feel in the West feel that they know. It's also something more than that. It's this idea of there being a code of the samurai, which in Star Wars becomes the Jedi and all that kind of stuff. And this code, it's given the name of Bushido. Bushi is warrior, so the way of the warrior. And I had always assumed, I would imagine that most people listening to this show would assume that this was a kind of authentic code. going right the way back to the beginnings of the samurai. So it's there in Ghost of Tsushima, for instance.

24:38Tom Holland:This is the way of the samurai. And obviously, it's there in Star Wars. So Yoda is very Bushido, this great teacher passing on the way of the warrior. And George Lucas, when he was picking up on this idea of Bushido as a kind of model for the Jedi in Star Wars, He was part of a continuum which reached back decades. So in 1908, this is what Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, had to say about Bushido. He's writing in Scouting for Boys, the Japanese have their Bushido, or laws of the old samurai warriors, just as we have chivalry, or rules of the knights of the Middle Ages. And Baden-Powell is not wrong to recognise something of chivalry, the medieval code from Latin Christendom in Bushido, because actually that was one of the ingredients of Bushido.

25:31Tom Holland:because actually, far from drawing on a moral code that reached back to the Middle Ages, Bushido was pretty much a modern invention, a post-Meiji restoration invention. It was a fusion of authentic Japanese traditions that was seasoned by admiration, I'm very proud to say, for the model of the English gentleman. There's a little bit of the English gentleman in Bushido and also the chivalric traditions of Europe, because the Japanese looked at these traditions and said, oh, we'll feed them in and try and make something that's simultaneously Japanese and Western.

26:08Dominic Sandbrook:So you're saying the cult of the samurai is to some extent a modern invention informed by English gentlemen of the late 19th century. That would be immensely pleasing if it were true.

26:19Tom Holland:Yes. Obviously, most of it comes from authentic Japanese traditions, but there is a seasoning of the English gentleman and there is definitely a touch of the medieval knight. And it kind of bubbles up in the late 19th century into the 20th century. And then in the 20th century, it becomes one of the great cultural influences, of course, on Japanese culture, but also on global culture. So in the early decades of the 20th century, it's appropriated by the Japanese military and perverted to their own uses. And it takes Japan to some really very dark places because Bushido becomes a kind of ideological justification for what the Japanese army is doing in Korea, in China, in the Second World War.

27:02Tom Holland:And when the Americans occupy Japan, they feel that much of what Japan had done, the war crimes and so on, is to be blamed on this notion of Bushido, which they see as a kind of ancient expression of Japanese militarism. And so they ban it and they come down hard on cultural representations of samurai. And when the American occupation ends, the Japanese are ready to kind of reappropriate this tradition. So the ideal of Bushido, as it turns out, it had been perfect for Japanese military before the war, and it proves perfect for the Japanese entertainment industry after the war. So it helps the samurai to become a great theme in Japanese film, TV, manga.

27:51Tom Holland:And sometimes the samurai are portrayed as role models, models of courage and loyalty and honor. And the code of the samurai is taken seriously. But sometimes they are more morally complex, more ambivalent figures. And this also has become part of what has made the samurai Japan's great cultural export throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. So we've talked about how it's there in Ghost of Tsushima and Star Wars, but it's also the morally ambivalent model of the samurai. It's there in spaghetti westerns. It's there in the films of Quentin Tarantino. He loves the katana. And people who are interested in this, we will be exploring it further.

28:34Tom Holland:We'll be looking at Star Wars, spaghetti westerns and so on in a special bonus with Oleg Benesh, who wrote a fabulous book, Inventing the Way of the Samurai, which very much does what it says on the tin. It's kind of the definitive study of Bushido as an invented tradition.

28:50Dominic Sandbrook:But just because samurai are mythologized, just because they feature in all kinds of popular culture and whatnot, doesn't mean there's not a historical reality behind it. And let's get back to the historical reality. So there definitely are samurai in the distant medieval past, and they do endure for hundreds of years. And they do have amazing armour and swords, and they've got their traditions, and they've got their code and all that, right?

29:13Tom Holland:There isn't a code of the samurai, which is kind of followed for centuries and centuries and centuries. But they do have moral codes. They do have traditions. They do act in obedience to very demanding ideals of shame and honour. And I think above all, and maybe this is the key to understanding why they have been figures of such enduring glamour for so long throughout Japanese history and then more recently into global history, is the fact that right from the very beginning, the samurai were masterly at the art of creating their own myths. And this was a very urgent task for them. And this is because, unlike, say, in the Frankish worlds in medieval Europe or the Viking worlds, warriors in medieval Japan initially did not stand at the apex of society.

30:07Tom Holland:They are outsiders. They're out in the provinces, in the wilds. And the aristocrats who are at the center in the imperial court look down on them. They regard them with contempt. And the word for warrior bushi, it's a bit of a dirty word. And the word samurai is even more so, it's even more low rent, because literally a samurai does not mean a warrior. It means a vassal, a subordinate, a person who is in service to a great lord. And so it's not enough for the samurai. We're talking about the rise of the samurai, they're upwardly mobile. That's not enough because they are parvenus. And like parvenus throughout history, they have to cope with the snobbery of those whom they are displacing.

30:56Tom Holland:And so they can do this partly by kind of affecting the manners of the court, by behaving as courtiers do. But I think it's more satisfying for them in the long run to start establishing their own standards, their own morals, their own myths. And so this, over the course of the Middle Ages, is what they came to do. And it's these myths, which do originate in the Middle Ages, which touch the samurai class with this incredible glamour, which is there to the present day, and which fascinates people in the West as much as in Japan. And so to trace the way in which this myth evolves, we need to go back and look at the reality right at the beginning and ask, who were the first samurai?

31:45Tom Holland:How on earth had the Japanese court managed to survive for so long without having a cast of warriors? I mean, it's very unusual if you think about Europe in the Middle Ages. It's odd for us, I think, to imagine that the ruling class weren't warriors at all, despised warriors. And then what happens to make that change? How is it that the court collapses and this class of warriors emerges?

32:09Dominic Sandbrook:Right. So we should be asking and answering those questions. And we should be heading to Kyoto in the year 940. And we'll be kicking off with the display of a particularly gruesome and implausibly talkative trophy. And we'll be doing all that after the break. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor.

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34:33Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History. We are at the beginning of April 940, and we're in the imperial capital of Japan, Heian-kyo, the city of peace and tranquility known today as Kyoto. And a load of horsemen have just ridden from Kanto, which is the great plain on which Tokyo, modern-day Tokyo, stands. They have crossed the mountains, and they have brought with them a gift for the emperor.

35:00Tom Holland:Tom, what's the gift? Well, the gift is the severed head of the most notorious warlord in Japan. And this warlord is called Taira no Masakado. And he is a remarkable man of whom remarkable things are reported. So first of all, he's an absolute unit. He is seven foot tall and the Japanese are not at all people. So he really stands out. In his left eye, he has two pupils, which again, unusual. That is unusual. Indeed, unheard of. But perhaps the most striking thing about him is he is completely invulnerable to weapons. And this is thanks to his mother, who was a giant snake. And I gather it's the custom for giant snakes to lick their offspring.

35:47Tom Holland:ring. And so his mother, the giant snake, had licked Masakado all over with the exception of his forehead. And her saliva had the magical power of making him invulnerable to weapons. So there's a slight hint there of Achilles. Two pupils. That's weird. Anyway, what happens to the head? What do they do with it? So the head is exhibited in the marketplace of Kyoto. So there's a spike, they put the head on spike and they lift the pole up so that the head is gazing out over the marketplace. And the moment the pole has been levered into position, the eye is open, complete with the left eye with its two pupils, and they glare around angrily.

36:26Tom Holland:And the head demands to know where the rest of the body is. So very annoyed that the body parts have gone missing. It stays there for several months and all this time it doesn't rot in the slightest. It's silent for periods and then it has another massive rant demanding its legs back and its arms and so on. And then after several months, it suddenly starts to glow and then it shoots up off the spike and it goes bombing off across Kyoto in search of its decapitated corpse. And it heads eastwards across this great mountain range, which separates Kyoto from Kanto, which is the Great Plain to the east.

37:06Tom Holland:And as it's flying over Kanto, this head is brought down either because it gets shot down by a god, that's according to one account, or because it crash lands for reasons that aren't explained. But whatever, the head crash lands and locals go and pick it up and they wash it and they bury it and they raise a mound over it. And of course, this is regarded as a very sacred place. And people go to Tokyo today, you can still see it. this mound, the tomb of Mascado's head, because it stands right in the middle of Tokyo's business district, among the most valuable real estate in the entire world. So you would think, well, surely this has been cleared.

37:48Tom Holland:Surely they built some skyscraper or something. But they haven't, because every attempt to build on it has resulted in disaster. So they might lift up a crane and the crane comes crashing down, or the head of the company that is trying to develop it gets run over by a car or something. And so the Japanese in Tokyo have drawn the lesson that you shouldn't try and erase the last resting place of Masakado's head. And so his tomb stands there to this day. This is because he's the first samurai, right?

38:17Dominic Sandbrook:So you can't mess with the first samurai. And he's the guy who, he's the founding father of this tradition that we're talking about in this series.

38:24Tom Holland:Correct. So Masakado is essentially, he's kind of fated as the first samurai. And that That is absolutely why he has this kind of resonance, this mythic status. So obviously, there's quite a lot to pick here. So again, because geography is really important in the story, let's just look at how the geography of Japan maps onto the politics of the empire in the mid-10th century. Because this is essentially what the story is illustrating, the political geography of Japan. So Masakado's head has been brought from the plain of Kanto, which literally means east of the mountain range, east of the barrier.

39:03Tom Holland:It's been brought to Kyoto because Kyoto is not just the great center of power, it's the only center of power in the Japanese archipelago in this period. And it's been founded in 794. It's the seat of the Japanese emperor. And the emperor rules as a lineal descendant of the sun goddess, and then a succession of 15 emperors who, between them, were supposed to have ruled for centuries and centuries and centuries. So they're a bit like the biblical prophets. They have improbable lifespans. So that's the story that's told. The reality is rather different. What becomes the Japanese imperial dynasty had originally been just one of a number of competing aristocratic families.

39:48Tom Holland:And it's only at the end of the 7th century that it succeeds in establishing its overall supremacy and with it, its imperial status. And then having established the supremacy, of course, it faces the challenge of maintaining it. How are they going to do that? And initially, they do this in a kind of classic way, by establishing a monopoly of violence. That's what imperial regimes invariably do. So the emperor requires all the other lords to hand over their military equipment, their crossbows and so on. And these are confiscated and put in regional depots that are dotted around the empire so that they can be drawn on in case of emergency.

40:33Tom Holland:This is a period when the Japanese are sedulously imitating China, which is the great model for them. And in China, the army consists of a great mass of conscripted peasants. And so the Japanese emperor does the same. This is going to provide him with his manpower. But it doesn't really work in the Japanese context. And that's partly because there are far fewer peasants in Japan than there are in China. So peasants don't really provide the emperor with the kind of military mass that he needs. It's also because there is a massive fiscal crisis and it becomes too expensive for the emperor to run his own army.

41:13Tom Holland:And also peasants just make terrible soldiers. They're hopeless. They're always kind of running away and stuff. But just what do they need the soldiers for?

41:20Dominic Sandbrook:Because who are they fighting? They're not going to be attacked by external enemies. Are they China, Korea or whoever? So is it internal threats?

41:28Tom Holland:By this point, the southwestern half of Japan has basically been pacified. So that would include Kushu, which is the kind of southwestern island. And then you have the main island, Honshu, up to this kind of great range of mountains east of Kyoto. All of these have been pacified. And so you don't really need an army in that kind of southwestern half of Japan, because effectively, it's fine to have civilian government there. And all the regional aristocracy by now are obsessed by hanging out in Kyoto, in this great capital. And they go there and they kind of write poetry and they practice calligraphy and they mix incense.

42:06Tom Holland:And this is how you prove your status, not by going out and fighting. And actually, it's quite like Versailles in the 18th century. Lords do not want to stay in the provinces. They want to go to the court. They want to show off there. They want to adopt the arts of peace. And so warriors, as the centuries pass, come to seem to the court. They're uncouth. They're murderous. Basically, they're scum. They're kind of literally described as dogs. War has become something that is vulgar. It's become something de classe. say. It's something that no one with any standing or status would dream of doing.

42:43Dominic Sandbrook:And yet you might say that any regime that has a contempt or disregard for military muscle is living on borrowed time, because that's what power is all about. So presumably they don't ignore military muscle completely.

42:55Tom Holland:Well, no, because we've said the northeastern reaches of Honshu, this main island of Japan, that remains un-pacified. And so the provinces beyond the mountains east of Kyoto have this kind of real marcher feel. They are kind of frontier zone. And here, the imperial government has no option but to reverse its previous policy and to encourage the governors, the lords who live in these northeastern provinces to levy their own troops because they need them to keep order there. And so who are these troops? Well, these lords are still kind of emulating the Chinese model and recruiting peasants who serve them as infantry.

43:36Tom Holland:But there's the same problem. The peasants are rubbish. They're always running away and throwing away their weapons and things. And so the key figures, the key players, as in medieval Europe, are horsemen. And these are called suamono. And these are warriors who are trained from childhood to shoot arrows from the saddle. So in that sense, they are like the classical horsemen of the steppes, the Mongols included. And the great obsession of these horsemen in northeastern Japan is honor, and the great fear is disgrace, which isn't to say that they're not also very, very obsessed by financial rewards and other rewards as well, because they are.

44:20Tom Holland:And it's this kind of fusion of obsessional interest in their own honour and an obsessional interest in getting on in life that makes them, if you want a samurai code, that is the samurai code. They are called samurai because they are the retainers who are recruited by the local lords to serve him as his muscle, as his kind of backup.

44:40Dominic Sandbrook:You might say, so as a layman, I might say that's very risky because basically if local magnates are recruiting their own troops to fight off the barbarians or whatever, then the lesson of late Roman history is when there are, you know, it won't be long before one of them declares himself emperor and marches on the capital.

45:02Tom Holland:No? In the long run, as we will see, you are not wrong. And this is obviously going to be a problem, but not immediately. And this is for various reasons. And the first is that these provincial governors to the northeast of the great mountain range that separates Kyoto from the northeast of Honshu, they all hate each other. So it's very, very unlikely that they're going to gang up and kind of march on Kyoto. And if there is a rebellion, then it's very easy for the imperial government to find someone on the scene who's going to crush it, because Kyoto is the source of all patronage. And so all you have to do is say, well, you know, I'll send you a nice calligraphy kit, go and beat up this guy and the guy will do it.

45:44Tom Holland:And again, there's this whole Versailles thing, because even provincial governors out in the sticks, you know, they buy into the notion of what is fashionable, of what gives them status, which is the kind of the ideals of a centralized court running everything. and Kyoto provides the only standard by which even people out in the northeast of Honshu want to be judged and it's the only source of the lifestyle that ultimately matters, the lifestyle that gives you status. And Carl Friday, great scholar of early medieval Japan, he compares these governors, these warlords in the northeast of Honshu with CEOs today, and so to quote Friday, who tend to identify more closely with CEOs in other lines of business than with the workers, engineers, or middle managers in their own.

46:35Tom Holland:So it's like tech CEOs, industrial CEOs, financial CEOs going to Davos. They have more in common with each other than they do with the kind of the minions far below them in their kind of various corporate structures. So in other words, in the Japanese context, just because you employ mercenaries doesn't mean that you want to be mercenary yourself. You want to keep them at a distance.

46:58Dominic Sandbrook:And they are related to the emperors by and large, aren't they? They're from the imperial family, most of these governors?

47:03Tom Holland:Yeah. So that's a third factor that is kind of reigning in displays of military bracadaccio that are not sanctioned by the court. So regular listeners to the rest of history may recall that this is not the first series that we've done on imperial Japan. Because last year, we did a couple of episodes on the great female writers at the Imperial Japanese Court around the year 1000. And the first of these episodes was on the Tale of Genji, which is an enormous 1100 page novel written around the year 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, Lady Murasaki, and set in the Imperial Court. And the hero of that novel was the son of an emperor by one of his concubines.

47:46Tom Holland:and because he's the son of a concubine he has no prospect of inheriting the throne and so his father the emperor is keen for this boy who he recognizes as being very talented to have a career of public service rather than kind of hanging around in the palace being a drone doing nothing and so he takes this very drastic step he removes the boy from the imperial family by giving him what no emperor ever has, namely a surname. So this young prince, he's not being disgraced. It's not because he's misbehaved. It's actually the opposite. It's because his father recognizes in him great talents and doesn't want them to atrophy, doesn't want them to go to waste.

48:28Tom Holland:He wants this boy to go out and make something of his life. And so, as you said, the surname this boy is given is genji and as a genji he belongs to two realms he belongs to the realm of his father the realm of the you know the imperial family but also the realm of the nobility of the great kind of public figures who serve the palace and lady murasaki when she was writing the tale of genji in the year 1000 was writing it as a historical novel so she is casting genji her hero as the first prince to be de-princed if you like you know to lose his kind of princely standing but as she well knew genji was not the only one because this is a process that carries on throughout the 10th century and this is because emperors in kyoto have multitudes of wives and concubines and as a result they have kind of vast progenies and even by the 9th century there are simply too many princes in the imperial system to handle.

49:34Tom Holland:So even with our own beloved royal family, this is an issue. You accumulate princely clutter and you have to get rid of them. I mean, we've discovered that two is too many, basically. Basically, pretty much. And in Kyoto in the 9th and 10th century, this is even more of a problem. And these princes clutter up the place and they're very expensive, so you've got to get rid of them. And so the solution is to cut them loose from the imperial family by giving them this special surname. And one of these, as in Lady Murasaki's novel, is Genji, or as the clan name is more generally known, Minamoto, which means origin.

50:10Tom Holland:So Genji and Minamoto are basically the same word. The other dynasty is the Heike, or as it's more generally known, the Taira, which means peace. So by the 10th century, these two clans of ex-princes, the Minamoto and the Tyra, have emerged to become two of the greatest dynasties in the empire. And the field of their operations tends to lie in the provinces, and particularly the northeastern provinces in Kanto and beyond Kanto. And here, they are very, very glamorous figures because they come trailing clouds of imperial glamour. And they bring with them all kinds of benefits that people out in the wilds can immediately want.

50:59Tom Holland:So they can offer high-ranking governorships and military commands. They can offer the local aristocracy's marriage into what is a kind of imperial link. And so lots of these regional dynasties are very, very happy to take on the name of Minamoto or Taira because they're much more glamorous than their own. And so the Minamoto and the Taira become larger and larger as kind of dynastic organizations. And they provide people out in the provinces with this sense that they have a real kind of a very glamorous link to what is going on in Kyoto, what is going on in the capital. So all this is looking great.

51:39Tom Holland:It all seems fine. It's all ticking along. But as you implied, Dominic, there is a kind of potential problem here. Because what if a Minamoto or a Tyra out in the provinces should start to feel that his nose is being put out of joint, perhaps by the court in Kyoto, perhaps by another member of his clan, perhaps by both? They have warriors at their back. What is to stop them going a little bit rogue? and this in the 930s is precisely how Tyra no Massacado so he is the first samurai the guy whose head goes flying off after it's been decapitated this is how he comes to feel because he is a Tyra right he's from the Tyra clan yes he is and so he is of imperial descent but he is very bitterly conscious of being kind of downwardly mobile things are not going well for him so he had been born in the northern reaches of Kanto, this kind of great plain beyond the mountains that separate it from Kyoto.

52:45Tom Holland:And he has grown up a very formidable warrior. And as we said, he's an absolute unit, absolutely huge. He's got his two eyeballs in his left eye. And he has made himself a master of what is described by the samurai as the way of the bow and the horse. In other words, he's a great horseman and he can fire a bow sitting in the saddle. It's not enough for Minamoto just to be a warrior, because that would mean that he really has kind of gone down socially. He's kind of lost his status.

53:14Dominic Sandbrook:He wants to be doing his calligraphy and his poetry and stuff as well, doesn't he?

53:17Tom Holland:Kind of. I think by this point, I think he's less interested in that. But he wants the kind of the stamp of authority and glamour that only the imperial court ultimately can provide. And so he applies for a government post, a post that will say to everyone around him, yes, I have imperial favor. And he gets turned down. And then he is snubbed by his own uncle, a guy called Taira Yoshikane. And what Mascado has done is to ask Yoshikane, his uncle, for his daughter, so his cousin, to be his wife. And Yoshikane says, no, I'm not interested in you. You're just a samurai. You don't really rank as a member of my family anymore.

54:01Tom Holland:And Massacardo is incredibly insulted by this and goes absolutely berserk. So one minute he is quarreling with Yoshikane about his wedding plan, saying that he was demanding to marry his cousin. And the next, he's been refused by Yoshikane, goes completely ballistic and starts torching entire villages simply because these villages are dependencies of one of Yoshikane's allies. And we have a near contemporaneous account. So this isn't kind of written up decades later. This is kind of from around the time. That day, the voice of the flames contended with the thunder as it echoed. That hour, the color of the smoke battled with the clouds as it covered the sky.

54:40Tom Holland:People's homes were turned to ashes and scattered before the winds. Provincial officials and peasants alike beheld it all in anguish. And so Yoshikane obviously is infuriated by this, I mean, insulted. He has to have vengeance. And so he raises an enormous army, which Masakado, at the head of only 100 horsemen, spectacularly routes. It's an incredible victory, tribute to Masakado's charisma and to his mastery of the arts of warfare. And so now things really are kicking off. Masakado has taken his cousin, married her yoshikane kidnaps her back according to the the kind of the romantic version of this story massacado then sneaks behind enemy lines to meet her and does so with the connivance of his wife's brothers so his also his cousins so there's a sense there of a kind of you know real kind of dynastic snarl romance and hatreds and rivalries and all of that and this is intensified by the fact that Massacardo's cousin, a very sinister man called Sadamori, has signed up to Massacardo's side and then promptly stabbed him in the back, betrayed him, acted as the agent of Yoshikane.

55:54Tom Holland:And even worse, Sadamori then rushes off to Kyoto, basically to tell tales on Massacardo. And as a reward for this, Sadamori is given the northern command that had been held by Massacardo's father, and which Massacardo himself obviously had been hoping to get. So again, it's an incredible insult to Massacado and makes him even more determined to have his vengeance. And this is a very fateful step because essentially what had begun as a kind of family feud is now starting to embroil the whole of Japan.

56:27Dominic Sandbrook:Massacado goes even further, doesn't he? Doubles down. Because this is the point at which he can basically keep gambling or stop. And he decides to keep gambling. And he makes an extraordinary decision that he is going to declare himself emperor. So this basically takes us to that point I made earlier about, you know, why isn't it like the late Roman Empire where provincial governors are declaring themselves emperor? Well, now it is because this is what he's done.

56:51Tom Holland:I mean, he doesn't declare himself the emperor of Kyoto, so the southwestern half of Japan. He's specifically of Kanto, which is this kind of this great plain. And Massacado is the first, and he will not be the last, to recognize that Kanto is actually a much larger lowland region than Kansai, which is the plain on which Kyoto stands. And just to emphasize, Japan is three quarters mountain. So wherever, you know, the plains are absolutely crucial. If you control a large, fertile plain, then you, you know, you're really motoring. And because Kanto is larger than Kansai, the plane on which Kyoto stands, then it means that potentially Kanto is a much richer and more powerful region.

57:37Tom Holland:And even though Kyoto will remain the official capital of Japan for another 1 ,000 years, in the long run, it is Massacado who will enjoy the last laugh. because today, it's not Kansai, but Kanto, which boasts Japan's and indeed perhaps the world's larger city. And that is the city that comes to be known as Tokyo, the eastern capital. So Masakado, by declaring himself the emperor of Kanto, he is kind of looking to the future, but it is a very distant future. Yeah, not his own future, unfortunately, for him. No, because by doing this, by declaring himself emperor of Canto. Effectively, he signed his own death warrant, because the imperial authorities are not going to recognize his rule.

58:23Tom Holland:It's just unthinkable. And so what they do is the classic course, they employ rival lords to bring Massacardo down. And these rival lords, who include Sadamori, his cousin, are sponsored to turn on Massacardo, and they're given funds that enable them to fight through the winter. And this is something that Masakado doesn't have. And so he is unable to sustain his own forces through the off season. And he's cornered, he's shot through the forehead, which is the one bit that his mother, the giant snake hadn't been able to lick. So it splits his skull and then he is decapitated. And his head, of course, is then brought to Kyoto, put on the marketplace, and it probably doesn't go flying off.

59:07Tom Holland:His fate does serve the lords of Japan and the samurai class more generally as a salutary warning. And so his career, to that extent, it's the exception that proves the rule. And several decades after the death of Masakado, the year 1000, this is the period when Lady Murasaki is writing the tale of Genji. So it's 1 ,100 pages long, and warfare in it is barely mentioned, and it never intrudes directly.

59:39Dominic Sandbrook:It's the same with the Pillow Book, isn't it, that we also did? shay shonegan's book i mean there's basically no fighting no hint of battles nothing no sense of sort of disorder out there and the you know everything is incredibly ordered and perfect and elegant and all of this kind of thing and the we when we did that series on those two writers we talked about how extraordinary this is in the context of what's going on in western europe in the same period you know it's vikings it's ethel at the unready it's massacres it's people bishops being hit over the head with hammers. It's just completely different.

1:00:13Tom Holland:Yeah. Whereas in the Tale of Genji, it's not just that people aren't talking about war, they're not even talking about warriors. There are no warriors, they just don't feature. For people living in the court, this is a kind of paradisal age of peace and tranquility. and they are so secluded from the violence and the vulgarity of the provinces that they can enjoy the fruits of this brilliant civilization without having to worry about war. It's a world of beauty, of poetry, of love, of exquisite calligraphy, of beautiful perfumes. If you're into that kind of thing, it's tremendous. However, history does not come to an end.

1:00:56Tom Holland:We see that for ourselves. And so it is for the courtiers in Heian Kyo in Kyoto, because beyond the mountains which ring the capital, the samurai are still very much there. And they are still learning the way of the bow and the horse. And they're still being hired by governors of distant provinces as private mercenaries and being enrolled as their own retainers as samurai. and still very much on the scene and in fact more powerful more ambitious more restless than ever are these two great dynasties derived from the imperial house the tyra and the minamoto and it may not have been evident to the to the silken aristocrats cloistered in kyoto but the storm clouds of war were building.

1:01:52And the war that will come, this is a war that is going to end

1:01:58Tom Holland:forever the dominance of the imperial court and establish in its place a dramatically new order. Because the age of the courtier is coming to an end.

1:02:14Dominic Sandbrook:The age of the samurai is dawning. What a cliffhanger. So we'll be returning to this brewing rivalry between the Tyra and the Minamoto in the next episode, in which the age of the samurai dawns in earnest. Now, if you want to hear that next episode literally right now, you can, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, because you've got it already. In fact, you don't just have to listen to that episode. The next two episodes in this series are available to members of the Rest is History Club as well. if you want to join that particular samurai warband and hear those episodes then head to therestishistory.com and you get all kinds of unbelievable benefits as well including our exciting super soro way new newsletter which has all kinds of extra content about the samurai and their age so on that bombshell tom arigatou gozaimasu and sayonara everybody mata ne

1:03:14Thank you.