November 25, 2017 • 28 mins
Today we're revisiting a bit of Japanese history. 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 a diary and essay collection that's thoroughly fascinating.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's classic is one of my personal favorites.
Say shan Agone, who served as a lady in waiting
for the Empress of Japan and wrote a book that
became one of our best sources on what life was
like in the Japanese royal court in the eleventh century.
And her book was also very snarky, so we have
some fun with how judgmental and backhanded some of her
(00:24):
observations are, and also just how much she disliked babies.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcomed the podcast. I'm
(00:53):
Tracy 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 Middle Ages and
they get a very kind of European view. Yes, their
mind conjures those images. Well, especially since that I've been
looking at sort of the numbers of where our listeners
are overwhelmingly United States, and then if you add in
like the UK, Australia and Canada, that's like n of
(01:18):
listeners and I would imagine that giant chunk of listeners
has probably mostly heard about the Middle Ages in the
context of Europe, which did give us some pretty cool
things like the Book of Kells in the Baiou Tapestry,
both of which have episodes in the archive. Also Courtly Love, Bayowulf,
Canterbury Tales, Song of Roland, lots of interesting and cool
(01:38):
literature and art and architecture. But really, other than that,
the Middle Ages have this reputation for being this depressed,
war 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
(01:59):
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 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 hay On
Period in Japan, which spanned from seven ninety four to
(02:20):
eleven eighty five, so kind of a chunk right in
the middle of the Middle Ages. The hand period started
when Japan moved its capital from Nara, which is the
nation's first permanent capital, to hay On q which later
became QO two. During this period, China had a really
heavy influence on Japanese culture, and we have a really
(02:40):
good idea of what that culture was like, especially within
the context of the Imperial Court, thanks to a woman
known as say shann Agone, and she served as a
lady in waiting to the Emphassis court and kept a
book of observations and lists and other assorted snippets that
were about her time there. That's what we're gonna talk
about today. So people who keep asking for more royalty,
(03:06):
here you go. We have some more royalty, but maybe
not the royalty that you were expecting. Well, but we've
also gotten requests for non European royalty indeed 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
(03:27):
to her father's name, So what her actual name that
her family called her at birth was is completely unclear
in the historical record. Yeah, we did know who her
father was. Her father was Kiowara no Moto Suke. He
was a prominent and highly respected poet and a minor
public official. We're not totally sure who her mother was,
(03:48):
though one contemporaneous source suggests it was a woman named
Hagaki who 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
(04:08):
at poetry. Another prominent writer at the time, Murasaki Shikibou,
author of 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 to put
on airs. As a side note of Murasaki Shikiboo also
(04:30):
served in the court of Empress Shoshi, who was Empress
She's rival. And that's a whole story that we're going
to get into, and you're gonna get the the back
story 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,
(04:53):
who we just mentioned. She was also known as Empress Sodoko.
Some accounts say that Shanegone 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
(05:14):
court for about ten years, and she documented a lot
of that time in her pillow book, and in Japanese
this book pillow book 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
(05:35):
really expensive. Shonagon wrote that the minister of the center,
whose name was Corey Chica, who was also Tait's brother,
brought the Empress a gift of paper and asked her
what books 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,
(05:57):
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, t she gave shown a
go in the paper, and showing a goan wrote whatever
she wanted to do on it. And there's been a
fair amount of debate about whether shan Agon ever intended
(06:18):
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 is, you know, a logical conclusion that
what Shanagan wrote was always supposed to be public. The
writing itself also has a tone that kind of hints
(06:39):
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, Shanaghan
also wrote about being extremely embarrassing, uh when somebody took
the book and then passed it around at Court. In
the section called it is getting so dark, which is
(07:02):
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 Shanagans writing is a collection of observations, poems, lists,
and other really interesting snippets of life at court. It's
part diary, it's part commonplace book. To some degree, it's
(07:23):
an essay collection. And one dred 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 of these lists are really just
uncannily evocative. Yeah today, How all of these different things
(07:44):
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 hundred years after on agnes death,
So you can get a really different experience depending on
how the person doing the editing has arranged all these
(08:07):
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, 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
(08:28):
was on Marjorie Kemp and her autobiography, which gave a
lot of insight into middle class life in medieval England.
And similarly, Shanna Goings Pillow book has become a primary
source of information about court life and hay on Japan.
Her book, as we said before, covers about ten years
that she spent in service there. So the basics on
(08:49):
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 to keep men and strangers from seeing them. So
they spent a lot of time within the confines of
these portable curtains that kept them from view. And they
were layers of dresses and robes with skirts and pants underneath. Yeah,
(09:13):
I think if you look at historical pictures sometimes you'll
see the many, many robes, one on top of each other,
and so 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
has sort of started as address with comfy pants under
and then gradually the fashion trend in toward more and
(09:35):
more layers, and because you had to show more and
more beautiful and expensive and luxurious fabric. Yes, that was
the whole point. I get so excited. Yeah, there are
several things in this but that are totally a poly's alley.
In addition to the pretty fabric, their stuff about sewing
and cats. Unsurprisingly, there's also a big focus on manners
(09:55):
and etiquette and gossip. And on that last point, Shona
goes pain in 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 contract you make being
part of a society that people will discuss other people,
and it's not even always in a negative way, and
(10:17):
some people really abhor the concept that other people are
talking about them when they're not present. Yeah, we like
that 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 stuff.
(10:38):
So many of the passages in this book detail the
comings and goings of the Emperor and Empress and the
other officials, uh and whatnot from the court. 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
(11:00):
comes across in the Pillow Book that's also common 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
(11:23):
of the things that she documents in this book 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
(11:45):
had been gray, but by the time of Shonagones writing,
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 theory see why that would be
(12:07):
a parade honoring a high official. There's also the Festival
of 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
(12:28):
tradition that wasn't unique to the Imperial court, and it
continued in more rural parts of Japan for a really
long time. I'm just processing the whack a mole element
of like determining your baby six well, and also of
of that you're concealing a stick and your sleeve or
whatever so that you can whack people with it. And yes, well,
(12:52):
but it's it's really only in some contexts is a
good thing. There's a whole passage about the scandalous nous
of of when a gentle when whacked a lady with
the girls stick that was not okay. It's like um
baby predictor fight club. Yes. Uh. Also noted in this
(13:14):
book are hookups. Speaking of where 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
(13:35):
of everybody thanks to the heat 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 items 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
(13:57):
the name announced by the maid is 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 beast. Really,
(14:20):
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
(14:42):
and everyone knew that they were happening, they were also
meant to be happening discreetly, making the need for silence
and discretion very important. So if you were a guy
and you rattled the screen on your way out, people
would be young and yes. Uh. Overall, the lists of
pressing in hateful Things are quite long, but big chunks
(15:03):
of them are kind of mundane in 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
(15:28):
ridiculous and awesome and 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
(15:50):
his family to wait 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. 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
whining bad. Um. The unsuitable things list, though, is particularly
(16:14):
revealing of aristocratic attitudes 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 in air quotes could
not fully appreciate how lovely all of that was, and
so therefore the moon shining on snow was wasted. Beauty
(16:38):
she is an offensive idea. It is well. It also
sort of auto discredits the writer, like to say that
it was wasted because she's enjoying it, you know, But
it's on 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 goes from the relati heavily prosaic
(17:01):
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, So people
(17:24):
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 also many, many
(17:46):
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 go in delight,
and a lot of these descriptions tie in closely, of course,
to Japanese aesthetics. There's a a which is a sort
(18:09):
of pathos or emotional response that comes from fading beauty,
like scattering cherry blossoms or the fading noise of a
bell and 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 of Genji earlier, that one
(18:32):
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 Genji. Maybe the most say show
Negon East passage in This Whole Thing comes at the
(18:55):
end of a passage about how much she loves the
hotel to Jisu, which is a type of bird. She says,
and I do not love the hototo g suit alone.
Anything that cries out at night delights me, except babies.
(19:16):
We have both the things that delight her 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 Agin, let's take a minute and talk
about our sponsor. Now back to the story of Say
(19:45):
shown Agone. So sadly, the story of Say show Agone
in her pillow book does not have a very happy ending.
We talked about how say shan Agon was in service
to the Empress Tsi and Uh the Empress had become
consort to Emperor Ichijo when she was fourteen and he
was ten, and during this period, the Fujiwara clan was
(20:10):
heavily influential in Japanese politics. Women 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 Ti,
She's father, Fujiwara no Michi Taka, died during an epidemic
(20:30):
in and with his death he she's 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 whiles to ease the
reins away from Korachika. Then uh Koachika wound up being
(20:52):
exiled from the capital after an escalating misunderstanding with an
ex emperor who Korachika had thought was making move is
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 Michi Naga to position
his own daughter, Fujiwara no Akiko also known as Shoshi
(21:16):
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 though it was
unheard of for one emperor to have two empresses, Mitchi
(21:39):
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 in and
was named second Empress in the year one thousand. Say
Shanaghan's own loyalty during time was called into question because
(22:02):
she had been fond of meet Naga 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
she was clearly being pushed aside at court, and on
(22:22):
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
she was only twenty four at the time. Most of
(22:44):
Shanaghan'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 know that part of
the story and are looking for it. So while a
lot of the Pillow Book gives us a window into
the life of imperial during t She's glory days, it's
not so much an actual reflection of the real political
(23:05):
situation that was going on while Shaunagan was physically writing it.
And say Shawnagon died around ten twenty 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 and uh kind of petulant at court. In the
(23:28):
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. The Genji then established the first Showgun government,
(23:49):
and the Showgun military rule over Japan lasted until eighteen
sixty seven today. Uh. To sort of liken it to
modern life, sometimes people like to say that shown ago
in Israelly the first blogger. Uh. And they also sometimes
like to say that the Pillow Book is the first tumbler,
which makes a bit of sense, Yeah, considering how much
(24:11):
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 I the day that I started doing the
research for this podcast, and you know, I typed, say,
(24:32):
shown a going 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 that didn't say b uh. That has
since been edited out of the Wikipedia article, so it
(24:54):
doesn't say that anymore. So this was probably because she
was opinionated and she teased people who got their etiquet
uh 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, definitely speaking from a position of
(25:18):
privilege 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 forgotten how many of the lists of
(25:38):
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, it becomes very very witty
in its own well. And one of the trans lations
(26:00):
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 of Babies. UM. If you are interested
(26:22):
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, like UH.
Mine that I have is edited by Ivan Morris, and
it is almost the same length of text versus notes. UM.
(26:44):
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 or of say, shown aging in a little glimpse
of what aristocratic imperial court life was like uh in Japan.
(27:09):
While as my medieval literature professor said, everyone when I
was in college while Europe was having fleas and wearing skins.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
(27:32):
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(27:55):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
Happy Saturday. Today's classic is one of my personal favorites.
Say shan Agone, who served as a lady in waiting
for the Empress of Japan and wrote a book that
became one of our best sources on what life was
like in the Japanese royal court in the eleventh century.
And her book was also very snarky, so we have
some fun with how judgmental and backhanded some of her
(00:24):
observations are, and also just how much she disliked babies.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcomed the podcast. I'm
(00:53):
Tracy 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 Middle Ages and
they get a very kind of European view. Yes, their
mind conjures those images. Well, especially since that I've been
looking at sort of the numbers of where our listeners
are overwhelmingly United States, and then if you add in
like the UK, Australia and Canada, that's like n of
(01:18):
listeners and I would imagine that giant chunk of listeners
has probably mostly heard about the Middle Ages in the
context of Europe, which did give us some pretty cool
things like the Book of Kells in the Baiou Tapestry,
both of which have episodes in the archive. Also Courtly Love, Bayowulf,
Canterbury Tales, Song of Roland, lots of interesting and cool
(01:38):
literature and art and architecture. But really, other than that,
the Middle Ages have this reputation for being this depressed,
war 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
(01:59):
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 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 hay On
Period in Japan, which spanned from seven ninety four to
(02:20):
eleven eighty five, so kind of a chunk right in
the middle of the Middle Ages. The hand period started
when Japan moved its capital from Nara, which is the
nation's first permanent capital, to hay On q which later
became QO two. During this period, China had a really
heavy influence on Japanese culture, and we have a really
(02:40):
good idea of what that culture was like, especially within
the context of the Imperial Court, thanks to a woman
known as say shann Agone, and she served as a
lady in waiting to the Emphassis court and kept a
book of observations and lists and other assorted snippets that
were about her time there. That's what we're gonna talk
about today. So people who keep asking for more royalty,
(03:06):
here you go. We have some more royalty, but maybe
not the royalty that you were expecting. Well, but we've
also gotten requests for non European royalty indeed 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
(03:27):
to her father's name, So what her actual name that
her family called her at birth was is completely unclear
in the historical record. Yeah, we did know who her
father was. Her father was Kiowara no Moto Suke. He
was a prominent and highly respected poet and a minor
public official. We're not totally sure who her mother was,
(03:48):
though one contemporaneous source suggests it was a woman named
Hagaki who 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
(04:08):
at poetry. Another prominent writer at the time, Murasaki Shikibou,
author of 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 to put
on airs. As a side note of Murasaki Shikiboo also
(04:30):
served in the court of Empress Shoshi, who was Empress
She's rival. And that's a whole story that we're going
to get into, and you're gonna get the the back
story 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,
(04:53):
who we just mentioned. She was also known as Empress Sodoko.
Some accounts say that Shanegone 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
(05:14):
court for about ten years, and she documented a lot
of that time in her pillow book, and in Japanese
this book pillow book 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
(05:35):
really expensive. Shonagon wrote that the minister of the center,
whose name was Corey Chica, who was also Tait's brother,
brought the Empress a gift of paper and asked her
what books 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,
(05:57):
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, t she gave shown a
go in the paper, and showing a goan wrote whatever
she wanted to do on it. And there's been a
fair amount of debate about whether shan Agon ever intended
(06:18):
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 is, you know, a logical conclusion that
what Shanagan wrote was always supposed to be public. The
writing itself also has a tone that kind of hints
(06:39):
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, Shanaghan
also wrote about being extremely embarrassing, uh when somebody took
the book and then passed it around at Court. In
the section called it is getting so dark, which is
(07:02):
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 Shanagans writing is a collection of observations, poems, lists,
and other really interesting snippets of life at court. It's
part diary, it's part commonplace book. To some degree, it's
(07:23):
an essay collection. And one dred 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 of these lists are really just
uncannily evocative. Yeah today, How all of these different things
(07:44):
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 hundred years after on agnes death,
So you can get a really different experience depending on
how the person doing the editing has arranged all these
(08:07):
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, 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
(08:28):
was on Marjorie Kemp and her autobiography, which gave a
lot of insight into middle class life in medieval England.
And similarly, Shanna Goings Pillow book has become a primary
source of information about court life and hay on Japan.
Her book, as we said before, covers about ten years
that she spent in service there. So the basics on
(08:49):
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 to keep men and strangers from seeing them. So
they spent a lot of time within the confines of
these portable curtains that kept them from view. And they
were layers of dresses and robes with skirts and pants underneath. Yeah,
(09:13):
I think if you look at historical pictures sometimes you'll
see the many, many robes, one on top of each other,
and so 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
has sort of started as address with comfy pants under
and then gradually the fashion trend in toward more and
(09:35):
more layers, and because you had to show more and
more beautiful and expensive and luxurious fabric. Yes, that was
the whole point. I get so excited. Yeah, there are
several things in this but that are totally a poly's alley.
In addition to the pretty fabric, their stuff about sewing
and cats. Unsurprisingly, there's also a big focus on manners
(09:55):
and etiquette and gossip. And on that last point, Shona
goes pain in 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 contract you make being
part of a society that people will discuss other people,
and it's not even always in a negative way, and
(10:17):
some people really abhor the concept that other people are
talking about them when they're not present. Yeah, we like
that 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 stuff.
(10:38):
So many of the passages in this book detail the
comings and goings of the Emperor and Empress and the
other officials, uh and whatnot from the court. 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
(11:00):
comes across in the Pillow Book that's also common 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
(11:23):
of the things that she documents in this book 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
(11:45):
had been gray, but by the time of Shonagones writing,
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 theory see why that would be
(12:07):
a parade honoring a high official. There's also the Festival
of 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
(12:28):
tradition that wasn't unique to the Imperial court, and it
continued in more rural parts of Japan for a really
long time. I'm just processing the whack a mole element
of like determining your baby six well, and also of
of that you're concealing a stick and your sleeve or
whatever so that you can whack people with it. And yes, well,
(12:52):
but it's it's really only in some contexts is a
good thing. There's a whole passage about the scandalous nous
of of when a gentle when whacked a lady with
the girls stick that was not okay. It's like um
baby predictor fight club. Yes. Uh. Also noted in this
(13:14):
book are hookups. Speaking of where 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
(13:35):
of everybody thanks to the heat 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 items 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
(13:57):
the name announced by the maid is 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 beast. Really,
(14:20):
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
(14:42):
and everyone knew that they were happening, they were also
meant to be happening discreetly, making the need for silence
and discretion very important. So if you were a guy
and you rattled the screen on your way out, people
would be young and yes. Uh. Overall, the lists of
pressing in hateful Things are quite long, but big chunks
(15:03):
of them are kind of mundane in 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
(15:28):
ridiculous and awesome and 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
(15:50):
his family to wait 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. 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
whining bad. Um. The unsuitable things list, though, is particularly
(16:14):
revealing of aristocratic attitudes 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 in air quotes could
not fully appreciate how lovely all of that was, and
so therefore the moon shining on snow was wasted. Beauty
(16:38):
she is an offensive idea. It is well. It also
sort of auto discredits the writer, like to say that
it was wasted because she's enjoying it, you know, But
it's on 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 goes from the relati heavily prosaic
(17:01):
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, So people
(17:24):
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 also many, many
(17:46):
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 go in delight,
and a lot of these descriptions tie in closely, of course,
to Japanese aesthetics. There's a a which is a sort
(18:09):
of pathos or emotional response that comes from fading beauty,
like scattering cherry blossoms or the fading noise of a
bell and 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 of Genji earlier, that one
(18:32):
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 Genji. Maybe the most say show
Negon East passage in This Whole Thing comes at the
(18:55):
end of a passage about how much she loves the
hotel to Jisu, which is a type of bird. She says,
and I do not love the hototo g suit alone.
Anything that cries out at night delights me, except babies.
(19:16):
We have both the things that delight her 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 Agin, let's take a minute and talk
about our sponsor. Now back to the story of Say
(19:45):
shown Agone. So sadly, the story of Say show Agone
in her pillow book does not have a very happy ending.
We talked about how say shan Agon was in service
to the Empress Tsi and Uh the Empress had become
consort to Emperor Ichijo when she was fourteen and he
was ten, and during this period, the Fujiwara clan was
(20:10):
heavily influential in Japanese politics. Women 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 Ti,
She's father, Fujiwara no Michi Taka, died during an epidemic
(20:30):
in and with his death he she's 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 whiles to ease the
reins away from Korachika. Then uh Koachika wound up being
(20:52):
exiled from the capital after an escalating misunderstanding with an
ex emperor who Korachika had thought was making move is
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 Michi Naga to position
his own daughter, Fujiwara no Akiko also known as Shoshi
(21:16):
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 though it was
unheard of for one emperor to have two empresses, Mitchi
(21:39):
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 in and
was named second Empress in the year one thousand. Say
Shanaghan's own loyalty during time was called into question because
(22:02):
she had been fond of meet Naga 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
she was clearly being pushed aside at court, and on
(22:22):
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
she was only twenty four at the time. Most of
(22:44):
Shanaghan'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 know that part of
the story and are looking for it. So while a
lot of the Pillow Book gives us a window into
the life of imperial during t She's glory days, it's
not so much an actual reflection of the real political
(23:05):
situation that was going on while Shaunagan was physically writing it.
And say Shawnagon died around ten twenty 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 and uh kind of petulant at court. In the
(23:28):
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. The Genji then established the first Showgun government,
(23:49):
and the Showgun military rule over Japan lasted until eighteen
sixty seven today. Uh. To sort of liken it to
modern life, sometimes people like to say that shown ago
in Israelly the first blogger. Uh. And they also sometimes
like to say that the Pillow Book is the first tumbler,
which makes a bit of sense, Yeah, considering how much
(24:11):
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 I the day that I started doing the
research for this podcast, and you know, I typed, say,
(24:32):
shown a going 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 that didn't say b uh. That has
since been edited out of the Wikipedia article, so it
(24:54):
doesn't say that anymore. So this was probably because she
was opinionated and she teased people who got their etiquet
uh 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, definitely speaking from a position of
(25:18):
privilege 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 forgotten how many of the lists of
(25:38):
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, it becomes very very witty
in its own well. And one of the trans lations
(26:00):
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 of Babies. UM. If you are interested
(26:22):
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, like UH.
Mine that I have is edited by Ivan Morris, and
it is almost the same length of text versus notes. UM.
(26:44):
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 or of say, shown aging in a little glimpse
of what aristocratic imperial court life was like uh in Japan.
(27:09):
While as my medieval literature professor said, everyone when I
was in college while Europe was having fleas and wearing skins.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
(27:32):
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
(27:55):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com.
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