The Yamato Court — Sleep Podcast

The light is going down the western hills, and the plain catches it last of all. It holds the warmth, then lets it go, one field at a time. And in that final hour of the day, the earth itself has a shape: a great keyhole of packed earth, ringed by a double ditch, the rear of it full and round, the front a broad square — half a kilometre of ground that no one has ever built on, because no one ever did. The town grew around the mound the way water grows around a stone. A slow bedtime history of the Yamato court: the court that made Japan, of emperors, mounds, and the meeting of two faiths.

About an hour and a quarter, in the voice of the show. We lie on the plain at dusk, and meet the legend of the sun; we walk the hills of earth, and the yamato kings; we watch a gold statue arrive, and the war over a god; we stand before the regent and the sun goddess queen, and the first temples; we read the new law; we follow the clan behind the curtain; and we come, at the end, to the two ways that become one, and the name of the fusion, and the long memory.

A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About eighty minutes. The court chronicles were compiled in the eighth century; where the legend and the archaeology part ways, the narration says so.

Sources (a selection): Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE); Brown, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 1 (1993); the Daisen Kofun excavation reports (Nara National Museum); UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Mozu-Furuichi Kofun Group” (2019); the Hakutaka and Shōtoku entries (World History Encyclopedia); the Seventeen-article constitution (c. 604 CE); the Taika Reforms edicts (645 CE); Wikipedia, “Yamato kingship” and “Emperor Jimmu” entries; the Asuka and Kofun period excavations (Nara, Kansai).