Episode 432 - The Tale of Nakako, Part 2
Added 2022-04-01 19:19:34 +0000 UTCTo start us off, and in keeping with last week, here are a few of the fascinating things I had to cut from Dr. Rowley's account for time. First, there's some tremendous discussion of her interviews with the modern day Kutta-Suzuki family (the same family that housed Nakanoin Nakako during her exile) that really shed light on how the family lineage was preserved. There's also a bit more about her maid O-yasu, who is even less present in the record than Nakako--but frankly, that also makes her motivations and story interesting to speculate about. Finally, there's a long section at the end about life as a Buddhist nun, including interviews with current day nuns at Hoji'in where Nakako lived out the last 30 years of her life.
This was actually some of the most fun I've had scripting episodes in a while because of how intriguing the process of piecing Nakako's life together was. Among other things, I actually spent a lot of time just trying to find a photo of Nijo village; most of what I could find in terms of images of southern Izu tend to focus on touristy areas along the coast, and it doesn't help that many of the place names have changed from their early Tokugawa counterparts (for example, Nagatsuro, where Nakako blew ashore, is now called Nakagi in Minamiizu distirct; I was only able to find it because of a map from the 1940s I happened across that still had Nagatsuro on it). But even that was a great example of how challenging trying to trace the past in the present can be. It's a fun exercise in being a detective and trying to retrace things many people still take for granted.
