History of Japan Isaac Meyer

Maintains a good story, factual & humorous. At times insightful. Thanks!

This is like a masters level colloquia on the history of Japan. It is well researched and well delivered.

My main problem with this podcast is the author’s complete failure to appreciate any form of literature which requires a human soul to enjoy. I began listening as a kind of brush-up for my MA exams, but by the time I finished them (and had listened enough that the topics about which I pride myself in being knowledgeable could be covered), I realized the flaws and simple carelessness of the author’s research. Though factual historical information is often (but not always) correct, whenever there is any call to interpret, he tends to run with a preconception, singling out one or two other scholars who - at least partially - share his views, or else simply declaim opinions with no academic backing whatsoever.

To give a particularly egregious example, the first episode on Kawabata Yasunari may be more or less factually correct, but his errors do not end with a total misunderstanding of Kawabata’s aesthetic. I have no idea how one could read the term “mono no aware” and decide the closest translation was “impermanence.” (This calls to attention another of the author’s failings: a modest capability with the Japanese language at best.) “Aware” is most often interpreted as “pathos,” so “mono no aware” is most often rendered as “the pathos of things.” It is an aesthetic of wonder and pain, care and loss and terrible but subtle beauty, and yes it would not be meaningful without impermanence, but that does not make them the same thing. The closest translation to the English word “impermanence,” and the Buddhist concept which Myers - for some incomprehensible reason - quotes directly from the Heike is “mujou.”

I have to say, as a PhD student in Classical Japanese literature myself, this is the first time I have ever heard anyone evoke the Heike in a discussion of “mono no aware.” For the very simple reason that the two concepts are essentially chalk and cheese. It was painful to listen to Myers even mention the kokugaku movement - and Genji monogatari itself! - but not Moto’ori Norinaga’s obsession with the Genji, the work from which Norinaga himself coined “mono no aware” as an all-encompassing aesthetic and mood of the work, and of Heian literature more broadly. Norinaga was notably much less interested in literature created AFTER the Heian Period. Such as, for example, the notably un-aesthetically motivated war story, Heike monogatari.

As for why this topic was so particularly painful to me as a human being, I initially started writing my MA thesis on “mono no aware,” and read all three major translations, as well as the original Genji obsessively for the first two years of my degree. I later switched to reading gender politics in Heike, thus I consider myself relatively well-read in both these works. And what, I gather, Myers was attempting to seek out in bizarrely quoting Heike in discussing “aware” was the Buddhist overtones of the text, a later and likely politically-motivated addition to make the whole work - originally a disjointed collection of anecdotes from the Gempei War - more cohesive as a narrative. It is not an aesthetic. And fundamental misinterpretations like this, quite frankly, could only be made by someone with either a poor understanding of the Japanese language - like the high, obscure and lyrical language which Kawabata was known for - or lacking a soul entirely. I would sooner trust Myers’ political episodes, but the blatant ignorance toward not only literary value but the history of Japanese literary scholarship are contemptible enough not to give the show any of your valuable time or attention.