Episode 429 - The Glorious Fool
Added 2022-03-11 17:54:11 +0000 UTCFirst, a confession; I did write this episode primarily as an excuse to re-read one of my very favorite scholars, the always tremendous Dr. Donald Keene. His biography of Yoshimasa is just a brilliant and highly accessible piece of writing (as is everything he wrote) and I recommend it very highly if you're interested in the period or in the arts in Japan more generally. Indeed, while I'm somewhat resistant to doing episodes on foreigners who studied Japan (barring extremely significant exceptions like Isaac Titsingh or Engelbert Kaempfer), Keene is such a presence in the English-language scholarship on Japan that I do feel like I should do something on him at some point.
I also really enjoyed this episode because Ginkakuji was actually one of my first tourist destinations in Japan. I visited the country for the first time with some friends in the summer of 2006, and after a brief stopover in Tokyo (staying mostly in Asakusa), we made our way to visit a Japanese friend in Kyoto. She took us around to a bunch of touristy places--Lake Biwa and Enryakuji, Kiyomizudera, Fushimi Inari Taisha, the usual suspects. But Ginkakuji was the very first place we stopped, and I still remember how struck I was by the beauty of the place. Yoshimasa really did have an eye for aesthetics, if nothing else. It's easy to judge the man (and to be clear, he deserves it), but I can't help but remember how I felt the first time I saw precisely what his exacting artistic standards helped to create.
