Dominic Sandbrook

The Gion Shoja bells ring the passing of all things.

Twin Sal trees, white in full flower, declare the great man's certain fall.

The arrogant do not long endure.

They are like a dream one night in spring.

The bold and brave perish in the end.

They are as dust before the wind.

So those are perhaps the most celebrated lines in all of Japanese literature.

They will strike a chord surely with all of our listeners.

They are the classic evocation of the Buddhist teaching that all things will and must pass.

And today on The Rest Is History, many things will be as dust before the wind.

The lives of formidable and brave warriors, the power of mighty dynasties, and the peace and prosperity and security

that for many years had reigned in Kyoto, the great imperial capital of Japan.

And Tom, these events, we know about them because they're described in the book of the Heike, which is the great war epic, the Iliad of medieval Japan, isn't it?

That attitude is a luxury, isn't it?

It's a luxury that comes with comfort and security.

Completely.

Presumably patronage and various kinds of reward, I guess.

In the first episode, you were talking about how samurai culture was sort of perverted, as it were, and used as an inspiration for militaristic nationalism in the 1930s.

There were loads of stories about beheading competitions by the Japanese soldiers in China when they took places like Nanjing.

And, you know,