S07E07

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. Currently in this series, we're deep in the heart of an era that has shaped legends. The world premiere trailer for Assassin's Creed Shadows has been released and we can see that the game takes place in feudal Japan, a time renowned for its samurai and ninja, a time rich in history, culture and stories. So over these episodes, we're continuing to explore this fascinating period in history. So far, we've travelled back in time to the Sengoku period, sowed the seeds for the unification of Japan and met some of the key characters that helped define this age. In this episode, our journey takes us back to the heart of Imperial Japan, to the city that was the country's capital for a thousand years, Kyoto. In Assassin's Creed Shadows, as a player, you'll get to visit the Imperial City, wonder through Kyoto's streets or perhaps gain an even better view from the rooftops jumping from one building to another along the city skyline. Today we're joined by author and historian Leslie Downer who specialises in Japanese history, particularly the geisha. Leslie's latest book, The Shortest History of Japan, is out now, so who better to help us peel back the layers of history to reveal how Kyoto came to be the cultural and political centre of Japan and how conflict over who controlled the city laid the foundations for Japan's unification at the end of the 16th century. Hi Leslie, thank you so much for joining us on Echoes of History. Thank you Matt, very pleased to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. So we're talking today about the city of Kyoto, which most people will think of Tokyo as the capital of Japan, but Kyoto was a very important city in the periods that we're talking about. So in terms of geography, whereabouts in Japan is Kyoto? So Kyoto is the absolute heart of Japan, it's exactly in the middle. And geomantically, let's go to geomantics, it's a perfectly placed to be the capital city, which is what it was for a thousand years. It's got mountains behind it on three sides, it's got the sea in front, it's got two rivers running through, it fulfils all the necessary requirements of Feng Shui to be the perfect place for capital. So Tokyo has been the capital for about less than 200 years, and before that Kyoto was the capital for a thousand years. And what is it about that arrangement of mountains and the sea and the rivers? Why does that make it an ideal location? It's in terms of auspiciousness. It's the Chinese rules of geomancy, the Chinese rules of Feng Shui, it's the most auspicious place. It was also central, so therefore you can get down to the south to Kyushu, you can get up to the north, which when the city was founded was where the so-called wild tribesmen of the north were, whom the Japanese of that time wanted to conquer. So it's centrally located, it has roads branching out in every direction. Also it has rivers, which is useful for carrying goods to enforce, but it's not really a practical matter. I suppose also the mountains provide protection from three sides. In terms of climate, it's not so ideal, it's called a bonchi. It's like a basin and it collects the heat and the humidity in that low circle of land that it lies on. So it's quite hot, quite steamy, you can see the mountains, it's very beautiful. Sounds incredible. I can imagine the mist rising from the city up into the mountains. When does Kyoto begin to rise to prominence in Japanese history? When does it emerge as the capital city? It didn't emerge, it was created as capital city. Emperor Kamu, who was the greatest emperor in Japanese history, he was the Charlemagne of Japan. And before his time, the capital had been in Nara, but it was kind of taken over by the Buddhist priests. It was rather like, was it Henry the, I forget which Henry, who said, you know, who will rid me of this turbulent priest, but there were a lot of turbulent priests. Henry the Second. Henry the Second, yes. There were all sorts of scandals to do with these Buddhist clergy. And then he, Emperor Kamu, founded a capital in Nagoka, which is near Nara. And that one, there was an uprising, people got killed, there were ghosts, obviously not going to be any good as the capital. So he then set out on a supposed hunting trip with his geomancers to find the perfect place. People were not particularly concerned with practical considerations, they were concerned with where it would be auspicious. And so he settled on Kyoto as the place to be his capital. And he then had it built, and that was an enormous job to build it. And it was in 794 that he was an enormous entourage of his attendants and his army and everybody else arrived by Palanquin in Kyoto, in the Imperial Palace there. And so it is, Kamu then still remembered as a foundational figure in Japanese history. Yes, he was the greatest emperor. He was the only emperor that really wielded a lot of power. After him, emperors stopped wielding power. And also before him, quite a lot didn't wield that power. There were always regents who were ruling instead. But Kamu was a very decisive emperor who was actually very strong and very brilliant. But after him, a particular family, the Fujiwara, took over power. So although there was always an emperor throughout the whole history of Japan, there has always been an emperor descended in an unbroken line of descent from the sun goddess. But none since Emperor Kamu have had power, and not that many before him either had power. So it's always been a system in which you have rather like, oh, King Charles, you have the figurehead at the top, but there's other people that are actually making the big decisions. And that was how it was after Kamu. But in Kamu's time, he made the big decisions. And one of his big decisions was to build the capital in Kyoto. And does Kyoto also at the same time or later, does it emerge as a spiritual center for Japan too? Does the Buddhist religion center itself in Kyoto or does it remain separate? The Buddhist religion is a very complex thing and there's an awful lot of different sects. It's rather like, you know, where is the center of the Christian religion? Is it Rome? Is it Constantinople? Is it Canterbury? There were the different sects of Buddhism arrived in Japan at different times. And the first sect grew up in Nara, as I said, and caused trouble. And that stayed in Nara. The whole point was to leave those priests behind in Nara and move to Kyoto. Other sects then grew up. A lot grew up at the time of warrior rule. They grew up in Kamakura, not in Kyoto, including the Zen sect, which became very dominant, particularly because it was the chosen sect of the warrior class. It's kind of ethics, it's mode of being, it's simplicity, it's asceticism, it's kind of purity. Its lack of words made it appeal very much to the warrior class. And there were many great Zen prelates who set themselves up in Kyoto. So if you go to Kyoto, it's absolutely full of Zen temples and other temples too, but I would say primarily Zen temples. The Zen priests had it linked with China and they were able to facilitate trade with China, to bring back ideas, bring back goods. So the Zen church became very wealthy as well as being very influential. And one of the very first Zen prelates was a man called Musou Soseki, who was the mentor of one of the first shoguns, who was one of the Ashikaga shoguns called Takauji. And Musou built the wonderful Moss Temple in Kyoto, which in his day was not mossy at all. And he also built Tenryuji, which is the Flying Dragon Temple. And that was to commemorate the soul of one of the emperors who had died, unfortunately, as a result of the shogun's actions. So that's a very famous temple that he founded. And in that temple, he created a beautiful garden. And one of the contributions he made was to decide that you could attain enlightenment, you could have a Zen life, you could practice Zen meditation, not just by meditating, but also by making beautiful gardens, by doing beautiful calligraphy, and then other arts grew up connected with Zen. In fact, most of Japanese culture, I'm not sure whether this is an exact thing or not, but a lot of Japanese culture is imbued with Zen. So later Japanese cultural things like ink painting, Noh, the Noh theatre, the tea ceremony are all kind of linked with Zen. I think for me, that early connection with the warrior class is interesting, because we associate Zen with being really calm and maybe disconnected from that idea of violence. So it's beginnings connected very closely to the shoguns and the warrior class. It's just interesting to me, I think. There's sort of two threads throughout the whole of Japanese life and Japanese history. And one is the kind of austere Zen thread, which Westerners tend to really like, and the kind of very plain, simple buildings without any furniture in and straw mats, beautiful smell of rice, straw, wooden walls and all that. And that approach appealed very much to the samurai who were very pure and direct in their attitude to life. The samurai weren't particularly about violence. Violence was sort of incidental. It was about how to lead a very direct and pure life. And the other side is the Shinto side, which is to this day, colorful and wild and crazy. And there are huge carnivals with men in loincloths. I'm using the present tense here, carrying shrines, carrying the Shinto gods on their shoulders, dancing through the streets of Kyoto and every other Japanese city, drinking lots of sake. That goes on and Zen goes on. And that's a side that Westerners tend not to quite so much identify with Japan. And that relates to a figure we're going to come to in a while, I suspect, which is Hideyoshi. There's the flamboyant side of Japan and there's the aesthetic side of Japan. So how then is Kyoto affected by the Sengoku period? As we move into this period of fracturing and then towards the reunification of Japan, does Kyoto remain important even as power is dispersed more widely across Japan? So just before we get to the Sengoku period, we have various very important shoguns, the Ashikaga shoguns, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. Yoshimitsu was the third in the line of the Ashikaga shoguns. And there'd been lots and lots of warfare before his time. And the Ashikaga shoguns were of the warrior class. So to get to be a shogun, they were of the Minamoto family, which entitled them to be shoguns. But the first two spent most of their reigns putting down all the kind of rival problems that were coming up. Yoshimitsu was very, very clever. And he was also a great patron of the arts. And he first of all built the flower palace, which was to the north of the emperor's palace, indicating that he was more powerful than the emperor. And the emperor came to his palace for a visit. He stayed for about five days in the flower palace. And they had boating and they had dancing and they had theater and they had all these wonderful things. And in the end, both the emperor and Yoshimitsu were 23 at the time. And the emperor poured some sake for Yoshimitsu, which emperors don't normally do. So Yoshimitsu was incredibly pleased. So he did a dance in response to having had sake poured for him. He then, as soon as he could, he did what a lot of these guys did, which was he abdicated, gave the kind of token power to his son, which meant he didn't have to worry about admin. And he could then spend his whole time being a patron of the arts, which is what he really liked. And he founded a temple called Shokokuchi, which was the main school of painting for a whole school of artists. There was the greatest ink painting artist of Japan called Seshu came out of that school. He also, he fell in love with a young lad called Zeyami, who was 12, and Zeyami became his companion. And Zeyami was the one who created under his auspices the no theater. So Zeyami was from a theater family. So clearly he was very, very low class by definition. But because he was Yoshimitsu's companion, he was able to mix with the, you know, the most cultured people in the entire land and acquire all that gloss. And he then created a theater, which would be for these people, a very sort of austere, ethereal, beautiful theater, which would be for very, very cultured people, which was the no theater. So Yoshimitsu patronized all these different sorts of art, sponsored them, encouraged them. Also, the tea ceremony was growing up in his time. Those are the main things I think ink painting and the no theater. Also pottery, ceramics, calligraphy, poetry writing. Poetry writing goes right through the entire history of Japan. People are always writing poetry. He is famous as a major patron of the arts. That's the whole point of Yoshimitsu. And is it under Yoshimitsu, do we see the high point of the power of the shogun? If he's now being considered above the emperor and the emperor is serving him sakai, are we seeing a real high point of the shogun and the shogun's power in Kyoto? Yeah, that's quite an interesting question, because that's probably right, that this was the high point of the power of the shogun in Kyoto. His grandson Yoshimasa was the one who presided over Kyoto being burnt down. So that was obviously a low point of the power of the shoguns. And after then, people like Odonobunaga and Hira Yoshi could not become shogun because they were not of the right family or the right class. They could become very, very powerful and become the regent. But then the most powerful shoguns of all, of course, were the Tokugawa, but they shifted their power base to Edo. So within Kyoto, probably Yoshimasa was the most powerful of the shoguns. And then after him, we have the Sengoku period, which is the period of incredible warfare, which is completely bonkers warfare. I mean, it was a couple of different lords who really hated each other. There was a whole excuse for it, but the excuse is kind of irrelevant. These two lords, I think it was the Hashimoto's and the Yamunas, have been itching to fight for a long time, and they fought for 10 years. It's said that they destroyed the whole of Kyoto. That's not quite true. They destroyed the upper class part of Kyoto. So 10 years of fighting included looting, arson, and all these other things. But this mainly happened. This was the temples. This was the palaces. That lot got destroyed. Meanwhile, the shogun who lived at that point was a guy called Yoshimasa, who was living during the end of the 15th century. And he retired. He was very interested in the arts, and he was not remotely interested in fighting. And he kept well out of this fighting. And he went off to the east of the city, and there he built a fabulous pavilion, the silver pavilion. And there he carried on having a life of leisure and art with his friends. While all this was going on in Kyoto, his pavilion was facing away from the city, so it didn't have to see it was burning. And it was facing towards the lovely mountains on the east. And he was, again, an amazing patron of the arts. And under him, ink painting flourished, pottery flourished, every possible art form. Oh, linked verse became very important. So the war came to an end. The part of the city that had not burnt down was the part where the merchants and the artisans were, because they were poor chaps. And so nobody bothered with looting them, but they weren't that poor. So they were actually supplying and selling stuff to both sides in this war and getting richer. And the end of the Onin war, this is the Onin war, everything had sort of fallen apart, because Kyoto was in such a state of devastation. The emperor was very poor. One emperor had to wait for about 10 years for some donor to pay for his coronation. And another emperor died and didn't get buried because nobody could afford to pay for a funeral. That took quite a long time. And another emperor sold his calligraphy. That was the only way he could kind of keep going. So and Francis Xavier, the Jesuit priest, showed up in Japan at that time. He showed up in a city called Yamaguchi. And his theory was, I will go to Kyoto. I will convert the emperor to Catholicism. And then everybody else in the whole country will follow him. And he got to Kyoto. It was a complete wreck. It was sort of a burnt out ruin. He couldn't find the emperor. So he gave up. So that was Kyoto. The result of that was the whole society kind of fell apart. And a lot of the lords headed out to the provinces, partly because they were broke, because they'd had their houses burnt down. I mean, there are quite a lot of peasants and serfs could come out of the countryside into the city and recreate themselves as merchants or as artisans, because they could make things, they could sell things. And so a whole new culture grew from that period of incredible disaster. In fact, a really fantastic and flamboyant culture arose from that period of disaster. How does Kyoto become involved then in the reunification of Japan? Is it still somewhere that people focus on as the capital? If you want to control Japan, you have to control Kyoto. It was the capital. It was just was the capital. So the first great unifier who eventually started bringing stuff together was Oda Nobunaga, who was a really amazing figure. And he came from a very small domain, very small, if you like, Princeton. And through brilliant, brilliant warfare, managed to take more and more land. And with each land, his army grew bigger and bigger. And eventually, it's very complicated, but he was asked to reinstate the Shogun. The big question was, who's the Shogun? And the Shogun, it was still the old Shoguns, just like the ones I mentioned who had done Yoshimitsu and Yoshimatsu, who had been such patrons of culture. So one of their descendants, Yoshiyaki, was around and he was a pretty hopeless guy. But he was officially the Shogun. So Nobunaga's excuse for entering Kyoto was to reinstate him as Shogun. But actually, he, like a lot of these guys, is this Yoshiyaki. The Shogun was very treacherous. We wanted to get rid of Nobunaga, and he instigated a plot against him. So Nobunaga had him arrested and taken off to a castle in the middle of nowhere and left there forever. So that was the end of him. Nobunaga could not become Shogun because Shoguns had to be members of a certain family. And he was not a member of that family, the Minamotas. But he was definitely the most powerful person in the land. And he also had to butter up the Emperor. So the Emperor was still rather broke. The Emperor throughout centuries was very often very poor, and very often just basically getting pocket money from whoever is in power, but still had respect and was still officially descended from the Sun Goddess, the most respected person in the entire land. So Nobunaga then gave the Emperor lots of money and burnished. The Imperial Palace made it good. So he gave himself legitimacy as a ruler by helping out the Emperor. So aside from the damage done to Kyoto at the beginning of the period, the political fracturing of Japan and then it's coming back together doesn't really impact Kyoto's position and power. No. Also, Japan, unlike England, is a country of, up to that point, mainly wooden buildings, and a country of lots of earthquakes. If you've ever been there, you know exactly what to do if there's an earthquake. I'd be under my desk in a second if there was an earthquake. So people are used to everything falling down, and they're used to everything going on fire because that happens in earthquakes, and they're used to rebuilding. So it didn't take as long as it would have taken to rebuild London, to rebuild Kyoto. It didn't take that long. So it could be rebuilt pretty quickly. And it happened again and again in the history of Kyoto, and also in the history of Edo, which was the city that later became Tokyo. Time and time again they were burnt down. So Kyoto was back on its feet quite quickly, but it was just known to be the capital. The name Kyoto means capital city. Kyoto is the capital and Tor is city. And the name Tokyo, incidentally, Tor is eastern, and Kyoto is the same Kyoto, its capital. But Kyoto was the capital, and that was that. And so each of these unifiers, the first being Nobunaga, first of all established themselves in Kyoto. So Nobunaga didn't finish the process of unification. He had a very dramatic and spectacular assassination by one of his own men. It's an amazing story, but that happened in Kyoto. He was in a temple where it was his land. He thought he was absolutely fine. He didn't have that many guards, and one of his own generals turned against him. So he was killed there. And his trusted lieutenant, who was a guy called Hashiba Hideyoshi, Hashiba Hideyoshi had a lot of different names. He started off the son of a farmer and he was called Hiyoshi. And he was also called Saru-san, which means Mr. Monkey, because he was an ugly bloke and looked like a monkey. He was small and ugly. He had a lot of girlfriends. He had a really devoted wife to whom he wrote wonderful letters. This is all by the by. Hideyoshi is a great guy. Hideyoshi came galloping back from the campaign he was engaged in when he heard that Nobunaga had been killed. And basically Nobunaga's method had been force and violence. Hideyoshi was the man with the golden tongue. He used persuasion. He was nice to people. And he got everybody to pledge allegiance to him. Everyone right across the whole archipelago as it existed at that time. So that didn't include what is now Hokkaido, but from the top of Honshu Island down to the bottom of Kyushu, pledged allegiance to him. And then, so there's this period of 30 years between when Nobunaga walks into Kyoto, which is in 1568. And Hideyoshi's death in 1598, that 30 years was an unbelievable period of glory. And because Hideyoshi came from a poor family, he was a farmer's son. He had climbed his way right through the ranks, which only two people in the whole of Japanese history did. But he sort of didn't have anything to prove to anybody. He was very nice to the emperor, but he loved culture. He wanted to enjoy all those wonderful things that the upper classes had. But under him, the sort of culture he liked was chō. He liked display. He liked sort of flamboyancy. For example, there are paintings of the wonderful kimonos people wore. And there are also beautiful paintings of how Kyoto looked, with all the people on the streets, people dancing, the beautiful buildings, the temples, the palaces. He built a palace in the middle of called Jūrakudai, in the middle of Kyoto, where Nijo Castle is. That now, for those of you who've been there, anyone who's been there, right in the center. And then he also built Momoyama Castle in the south of Kyoto. And he also, while he was at it, I'm not sure if I'm answering your question anymore, but he had an enormous tea party for the entire population of Kyoto, the entire population, including all the poor people, and got them all to come. And it occupied a whole sort of enormous shrine grounds. And I think there was something like 800 tea pavilions there. Part of tea is displaying your beautiful utensils. And he displayed his gold utensils. And he also had an entire tea hut made of gold, the golden tea hut. Which is sort of ironic, because the whole point of tea is that it is poor, and it is aged, and it is austere, and it is all those things. But he did the reverse. But that was okay too. Bringing a bit of bling to the tea ceremony. You mentioned then that there were some illustrations of Kyoto. Do we have a good idea of what Kyoto may have looked like in its heyday? It depends what you think was the heyday. I mean, we know what it looked like in Emperor Kamu's time when it was founded. Yeah, we know that very, very well. I think for some reason we know that better than we do how it looked in Hideyoshi's day, but it looked quite similar. So it was laid out in a grid plan. Let's start with Emperor Kamu. So in the Heian period, it was laid out on a grid. Like a chessboard with equal sized square areas. And then it had long boulevards going down the middle. It had small lanes going off to the sides. It had the Emperor's Palace up at the top with beautiful green roofs, red columns. Very spectacular. You could see the Emperor's Palace wherever you were. And along these boulevards, people trundled in ox-drawn carriages. Ladies were hidden. Always hidden. But when they'd trundle up and down in ox-drawn carriages, they'd always let a bit of their brocade robes sort of flow out of the window so that people would know there was somebody really special inside. There's a huge story of what their lives were like in Heian. It was very interesting. People would write poetry. One of the key things was whether you were any good at writing poetry or not. If you heard that a lady was beautiful, you would compose a poem and you'd write it on beautiful scented note paper. And you would have it sent to her. And she'd take a look at it. You'd never seen her because you don't see these ladies. You would not have seen her. And you, of course, would be a prince or an aristocrat or a noble. You wouldn't be just a person. And she would take a look at your poem, look at your calligraphy, look at your paper, and decide if you were worth getting to know any better or not. And if she thought you were, then she would brush a reply. These are very short poems. And she'd send it back. And then you would take a look at it. And you'd think the same thing. Oh, that calligraphy is not that great. Maybe I won't bother. Or you'd think, wow, this is amazing calligraphy. And then you would wait till nighttime. And when it was pitch dark, because it was pitch dark, you would go in to her palace and you wouldn't see her. And all around would be her servants. But servants don't exist and they can't see anything. So that's OK. And they would know it was you because you would be wearing a particular perfume that you had blended yourself. And wherever you went, everybody would note that this is Prince Genji. So you would go and you'd make love to her in the dark. And then you'd leave before cockrove. And maybe if things went on, you might get to have a look at her and discover whether she was actually beautiful or if she wasn't beautiful. So there was all this stuff going on among the aristocracy. That was Kyoto in that heyday, which is around like the 9th, 10th centuries, which is the era of the tale of Genji, which is the world's first novel. Then if we kind of sweep past all these other wonderful periods and we get up to the time of Hideyoshi, Hideyoshi sort of basically laid out Kyoto as it is now. He cut those squares in half. So you have rectangular blocks rather than square blocks. He also built a wall around the outside of the city, which isn't there anymore, but he had that built. He also built these glorious palaces. So you would have very glorious palaces on the main boulevards, which again are still always in like a chess board laid out like a grid. And you'd also have glorious temples, probably not radically different in appearance from glorious palaces. And then you'd have the whole merchant's area, which would be tiny little lanes of small dark houses with bamboo blinds outside, very nice houses, which still exist. If you go to Kyoto, you can go down these little lanes. They're so thin that you have to walk down or you just go down on a bicycle or something. They're sort of dark wood houses, steep, steep stairs, several floors. I think they're called eel lanes because they're like eels. They're kind of long and thin like eels. And then you could see from the streets of Kyoto, you could see the mountains to the east, which is where Yoshimasa was looking when Kyoto was burning down behind him. You could see the mountains to the north. You could see the mountain to the northwest, which is always the unlucky direction, where there was a huge complex of temples on the top and still is. And you could also see Arashiyama to the west, which is where the Flying Dragon Temple was and lots of other beautiful temples and bamboo crows. So you always could see those all around. You can't to this day. So Hideyoshi laid out Kyoto as it is now, basically. And the street plan is still the same as Hideyoshi laid it out. I said, why would northwest have been considered an unlucky direction? Why was that particularly inauspicious? That's an almost impossible question to answer. All I can say is the northwest was the unlucky direction. It just was in geomantic terms. So when Emperor Kamu had the capital built there, one of the things he knew was that there was already in the northwest a mountain called Mount Hiei on which was a huge Buddhist temple. So that therefore counteracted the unluckiness. That was very important. And then more Buddhist temples and more Buddhist temples were built on that same mountain. And in the end, there was something like 3000 Buddhist temples up there, which was all an excellent thing for countering the unluckiness, except it became rather unlucky itself, because those Buddhist priests then came down and started rampaging around the city. And then, unluckily, Nobunaga had to go up and destroy the entire temple compound, which he did. He burnt down the whole lot. But there are temples there again. But why the northwest? I don't know. It's like if you picture the tube map, it's sort of around Stratford up there. It's kind of that's the unlucky direction. Fascinating that it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that they put all of these temples there to counteract the badness of the northwest. And then all of the badness comes out of the northwest to rampage through the city and they have to go and destroy everything in the northwest. Presumably, you've got all of the nobility living in their big palaces. But would there have been other walks of life in different parts of Kyoto that were perhaps a little less auspicious? Yeah. Starting at the top, you'd have the emperor there. You'd have his courtes there. You'd have lots of warriors who'd also live in fairly fabulous villas. You'd also have lots of monks and priests. There's loads of unbelievable number of temples. I mean, uncountable number of temples and monasteries in Kyoto and sub-temples. So there'd be loads of monks living in those places. Then you have down one side of the city is the River Kamo. And you've got the River Kamo dividing the city from the eastern mountains. And at the foot of the eastern mountain is an area of flat land, which became a big area of carnival. So if you wanted to have fun, you go there. So when you're having a respectable life and your wife and your family and everything else are there, you stay away from the mountains. But you could also cross the bridge to this area of carnival where there would be some more wrestling. There'd be jugglers, there'd be theater, and there would be ladies of pleasure, lots of ladies of pleasure. And at various times, as you're within Hideyoshi's reign, a particular man whose name was Saburoe Mon Hara, he said to Hideyoshi, why don't I gather together these ladies of pleasure? Who are a little bit chaotic because it's good to have a bit of order. There's no issue with morality about this, it's to do with orderliness. So he gathered them into particular places which became pleasure quarters, which of course were number one, there was a wall around them, so you could keep an eye on what went on because there were bad guys that went there as well as good guys. Number two, you could tax them. And so these became very famous pleasure quarters. There's one in Kyoto, there's very famous one in Edo, which is now Tokyo. So there's all those people. There's all the inhabitants of the pleasure quarters. There's all the theater people. Theater people and denizens of the pleasure quarters were considered the lowest of the lower. That's a bit like, don't put your daughter on the stage. They were kind of low level people on one hand, but on the other hand, they were kind of celebs. So when you see woodblock prints, a lot of those are of courtesans and they're of theater people. And those were like pin-up posters. So that would be the fun part of the city, over between the river and the mountains. The river was called the Kamo. And in 1603, which is just after Hideyoshi's time, there was a woman called Izumo no Okuni, who was a shrine maiden. And she thought of a fabulous way of advertising her wares, which was to dance on a stage. Usually she cross-dressed, she dressed like a man with swords. And she did very funny skits and loads of people came to watch her perform. So that gave a lot of customers for afterwards. And that was the beginning of what became known as the Geisha and the courtesan. Of course, people don't like that, had always been around, but this was a kind of coalescing of it. Which brings me to the other people I forgot about, which is of course the Portuguese. So the Portuguese were there in Hideyoshi's time. In fact, they got there before Hideyoshi's time. They got there in about 1535. And there was a whole kind of, what's the word, a sort of seasoning of Japanese culture with Portuguese stuff. The dishes like tempura came from Portuguese cuisine, which was called tempura because the Portuguese used to eat fried foods on certain holy days called a tempura. And Hideyoshi enjoyed wearing Portuguese clothes. In fact, lots of it was a real hot thing among the Japanese nobles was wearing Portuguese clothes. You're wearing a cross. It didn't mean anything. It's like, you know, they were fashion victims, but they thought this is really great. And so there were also, when you see pictures of Okuni dancing, this woman dancing, there were Portuguese there watching her as well. There was also the Portuguese around Oda Nobunaga. There were some that knew him very well and he liked them. He had no interest in Christianity, but he just thought these are clever men. They're kind of fanatical like him. So he liked them. So there's that whole flavor of the Portuguese around the place as well. Kiyo-oto, the way you describe it, sounds like a fascinating, bustling cultural hub where there is just something going on all of the time. It sounds like an incredible place to be. Oh yeah, absolutely. I was kind of reading up around it in preparation for talking to you and thinking, as I always think about Japan, damn, I wish I could have been there. I wish I could have been at Hideyoshi's tea party for sort of the entire population of Kyoto. He also had a cherry viewing party for a thousand people. I wish I could have seen those glorious kind of gold painted screens. I mean, this is the thing that within his palace was the absolute opposite of the austerity of Zen. The walls were painted in gold with paintings on them, but the gold also made it very bright inside because it caught the light. There's very little lighting inside those enormous rooms. I would love to have been to Japan or been in Japan at that time. I think it would have been a fantastic place to be. Also, Kyoto was and is a center of craftsmanship. So very beautiful fabrics, very beautiful pottery, very beautiful making of incense, fans, just about everything that you think of when you think of Japan. All those exquisite artifacts were being made in Kyoto and are being made in Kyoto. I guess it's not a spoiler. We mentioned it a little bit earlier that Kyoto isn't the capital of Japan anymore. Does Kyoto then have a kind of fall? Why does the capital move away from there at some point? So after 14, let's see, we're still with Hideyoshi. After Hideyoshi's death, he wanted his son, Hidiyori, to succeed him. That didn't work out. There was a huge battle in Sekigahara in 1603 and Tokugawa Ieyasu won. And he finally properly unified Japan and brought it to peace. He gave Japan 250 years of peace, which was a phenomenal time and an incredible sort of development of culture. At the beginning of this period is 1603, the battle. The end of this period is 1868. And in that 250 years, Japan changed completely and became close to becoming the modern place it is now. And what happened was that his descendants, rather as with the emperors, the first guy is very strong, but then you have sort of not such great people succeeding him. Some were better, some were worse. But towards the end, things were probably not as great as they might have been. Added to which the Tokugawas had ancient enemies and they had defeated them in the battle of Sekigahara. And those enemies were from the southwest, from the Kyushu area. From the sort of southwestern part of Honshu. And they wanted their revenge and they rose up. And with the help of the British, and they actually toppled the last of the Tokugawa Shoguns, who abdicated. And at that point, the southwestern lords took over. So they once again didn't have legitimacy, but they once again immediately said, oh, we represent the emperor. And that gave them legitimacy. But they decided in that 250 years, the Tokugawa's capital was not Kyoto. The official capital was Kyoto, but the Tokugawa city was Edo. So the center of policy, the center of government, the center of culture, more and more gravitated towards Edo. And so these southwestern lords decided that they would make the capital, not Kyoto, but Edo. And so they marched up, they took Edo castle. And in 1868, the then emperor who was 14, I think, or 16, he was a teenager, marched or didn't march. He was carried by Palanquin, top with a Phoenix, up to Edo and into Edo castle, which became the imperial palace and Edo became Tokyo, which is the eastern capital. So therefore, Kyoto was no longer the capital at all. It was no longer the official capital. So there was a kind of time of, I think, of being a bit depressed. I think the people of Kyoto were a bit depressed, particularly because the emperor was the heart of their whole city. And then he'd gone. But he did that same emperor when he was old, was taken back to Kyoto and buried in Kyoto. I think he was buried on the site of Hideyoshi's Jūrakudae, of Hideyoshi's glorious palace, which had long since disappeared. But that's where he is. So Kyoto did have its kind of down moment. And then the people of Kyoto decided they had to do something about this. But what they realized was that Kyoto is still the cultural center. And it was still where all these wonderful handicards were made. There's also the sort of feeling that you get in Japan. You can almost spot a Kyoto person. It's a bit like, I don't know how to put this, a bit like spotting an old Etonian. They're a little bit posh and they're a little bit cool. They're very, as the sort of aesthetic, they're very good at tea ceremony. They're very good at flower arranging. They might be more likely to wear a kimono than somebody from Tokyo, for example. So that Kyoto culture remained and that Kyoto classiness remains. There's a famous proverb, which is that the people of Osaka will bankrupt themselves for a good meal. But the people of Kyoto will bankrupt themselves for a fine piece of silk. So they're like that. They're kind of clothes people. I've forgotten what the people of Tokyo will bankrupt themselves for. It's not food and it's not clothing. So Kyoto somehow had a resurgence. It was also the center of the geisha, which is quite important, actually. It re-created itself as a center of traditional culture. So Tokyo is a big modern city. And as you know, Kyoto did not get bombed in World War II because it's such a center of traditional culture. It's got so much. And also it's not entirely, but it's largely a wooden city. And there was also a law was passed, which again, I think has been broken. But there are laws about the height of buildings you can build in Kyoto. You're not supposed to build very tall buildings. So it's mainly a low rise city. So it has maintained its kind of aura of being somewhere classy, somewhere creative. Maybe it's the heart and maybe Tokyo is the head or something. Yeah, it's interesting that the politics sort of overtakes Kyoto and the emperor leaves, but Kyoto manages to cling onto enough things to retain its importance. I should say in the heart of Japan and the Japanese, it still means something. It doesn't just kind of give up and fade away. But it also has had that position for a thousand years. That's a really long time. It's also things like it's the home of tea ceremony. It's the home of flower arrangement. I mean, the headquarters of the various schools of tea ceremony, mainly in Kyoto. It's also, for example, it's the home of Noh, which is the very sort of zen imbued theater of the samurai. But then Kabuki, which is really wonderful and wild and wacky. That's more the theater of Tokyo. I mean, you can see Noh in Tokyo. You can see Kabuki in Kyoto, but the sort of heart of it somehow are those cities. And at Heian Shrine, which is a very central, very beautiful shrine in Kyoto in the summer in June, they have something called Takigi no, which is no performed by torchlight, which is burning brands. So it's lit by torchlight. There's these kind of figures performing no very, very slowly and singing this kind of very extraordinary singing, which I can't attempt to describe. But that is Kyoto. So they're very different from each other. Has no theater not changed very much since Kyoto's sort of heyday at the end of the Sengoku period, maybe? Is that something that someone from 16th century Kyoto would still recognize today? Does it connect us to this past? It's interesting. I haven't thought about that, but my immediate thought would be yes. The most famous no plays are written by Zeyami, and he is from the period of Yoshimitsu, which is way before those wars. There are some other no plays, but they're mainly still written by him. They are the repertoire. The way that the no stage is, which has a long kind of platform leading to the stage. There's a pine tree painted on the back. The costumes are very lavish, but very stylized and is performed with masks. So the main character wears a mask and the masks are very, very famous. They're works of art. The mask, as it moves, it changes expression. So you have the same mask and as the face moves, it can look happy. It can look sad. Also, the head actor of the no theater is going to be the oldest man. It's performed entirely by men, and you can get an old man playing the part of a beautiful young woman, and you completely believe it. And I saw a no performance when actually the actor's mask fell off. So you see the face of the old man. You look, you see a young woman. You see a young woman. You just do. I think most of the singing is done by chorus who sit at the side of the stage and they have drums that they play, that they beat. They have flutes that they play. I would say it is probably that people from the 15th century would probably recognize it. Kabuki changed a lot. Kabuki is a different thing. Kabuki is absolutely wonderful. And up till the 19th century, the Kabuki actors improvised. And I've also seen a production of Kabuki in which this fabulous actor, he commits the ritual suicide. He commits seppuku in a waterfall. So you've got a real waterfall with real water on the stage. Big stages, much bigger than you get in London. Huge stage. So he drives his sword into his stomach. Red blood comes pouring out. He then makes a speech of about half an hour, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with red blood pouring out. And then he says, no, I should die. And then he finishes it. It's like that. It's really extraordinary. I was going to end by sort of asking you whether you would have liked to have lived in Kyoto during the Sengoku period. I'm getting a sense that I might be able to guess at your answer. Is it a place you think you would have liked to be? When you say the Sengoku period, you see that includes the period when it got burnt down. I could have been a merchant when it got burnt down. That would be okay. I think it would have been really fun being there. I could have been a Portuguese because I'm not Japanese. When you see pictures of all these Japanese pictures of the time showing life, everybody's out on the streets, they're all dancing, they're having festivals. Yeah, it would depend who you were. You'd want to have had a bit of money, I think. And you possibly would have more fun if you were a man than a woman. But you could probably have some fun if you were a woman too, actually. I think you probably could. Yeah. And all of Hideyoshi's gold ceremonies and parties and things like that, that all sounds like a fantastic time to be in Kyoto. Yeah. No, I think those 30 years between 1568 and 1598, I think that would have been an amazing time to have been in Kyoto. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Leslie. It's been an absolute pleasure to get to know Kyoto a little bit better and to understand its importance to Japan during this period, but also beyond it to today. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. You should definitely go. I will definitely try. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join us next time as we explore a key aspect of Assassin's Creed and ask how we could fit in to feudal Japan. What clothes might we wear? What might we eat? And would I be the most legendary samurai of all time? So join us for the next episode to find out more about the history behind the world of Assassin's Creed.