Japan

by Edwin Reischauer

  Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with Soga dominance and fear of a Soga usurpation of the throne mounted at the Yamato court and resulted in a coup d’état in 645, in which the Soga were destroyed. There were two leaders of this coup. One was Nakatomi Kamatari (the surname is always given first in Japanese), whose family, under the newly acquired name of Fujiwara, was in time to dominate the court completely.

  The other was a prince of the reigning family who, though occupying the throne only briefly from 668 to 672 under the name of Tenji, was one of the few Japanese emperors who seems to have ruled as well as reigned. Among the very few others were Tenji’s brother Temmu (reigned 673–686), who also had to fight to gain the throne, and Tenji’s great-grandson Kammu (reigned 781–806). In fact, it was not until Tenji’s time that the part played by the Yamato priest-chiefs began to mirror the role of Chinese emperors. Although the idea of the centralization of power around an emperor in the Chinese manner had obviously been present in Umako’s time, and the embassies of 607 and 608 to China bore messages referring to the Japanese ruler on equal terms with the emperor of China, it was only in the second half of the seventh century that an effort was made to convert the Yamato priest-chiefs into the all-powerful monarchs of the Chinese system. They did not, however, lose their religious role in the process, but combined thenceforth the two roles of Japanese high priest and Chinese secular ruler. In the long run, the religious role was to reemerge as the dominant one.

  The coup d’état of 645 was called the Taika (Great Change) Reform. The name Taika was the first Japanese attempt to adopt the Chinese system of counting years by arbitrarily named “year periods.” In 1368 the Chinese made their year periods correspond to reigns, and the Japanese followed suit in 1868. According to this system, the first few days of 1989 are known as Showa 64 for Hirohito, whose reign was the longest in authenticated history, and with his death 1989 became Heisei 1 for Akihito, his son and successor.

  Later historians attributed to the years 645–646 a series of great political and economic changes that remade Japan according to the Chinese model, but these reforms were actually achieved only piecemeal over the remainder of the century and into the next. The chief motivation for these reforms was the desire to make Japan a more centralized and powerful state, but a certain urgency was given to this task by China’s invasion of Korea at this time and the destruction of a large Japanese army and fleet dispatched there in support of Japan’s ally, Paekche. In this stimulus to change produced by an external military menace one can see a small parallel to the much greater change forced on Japan by the threat of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.

  In the seventh century the Japanese sought to create a theoretically all-powerful emperor surrounded by an elaborate bureaucratic government modeled after that of T’ang China, which was the most highly developed and complex system of government the world had as yet seen. They made some conscious adjustments, however, to fit their own special circumstances. Outranking the Central Council of State, with its prime minister and ministers of the left and right, which paralleled the Chinese secular government, they created an Office of Deities to represent the religious functions of the emperor. Also, instead of the standard six ministries of the Chinese system, they created eight to include one for the imperial household and another for a central secretariat. These ministries and many other bureaus and offices were staffed with officials, each with an appropriate court rank.

  The creation of a central government based on Chinese models was an easier task than the development of a Chinese type of provincial administration. Communications were still too imperfect and the spirit of local autonomy too strong to permit direct rule of all parts of the land by a bureaucracy dispatched to the provinces from the court. But the Japanese adopted at least the outward forms of the Chinese system. The land was divided into sixty-six provinces. Each province was divided into counties, and each county into villages. Central government officials were sent out to rule the provinces, but the lesser officials were drawn from among the local leaders.

  The Japanese even attempted to adopt the extraordinarily complex Chinese system of land ownership and taxation. In early T’ang China, agricultural land was in theory nationalized and distributed equally among the peasants, so that each adult tax paying male could carry an equal share of the tax load. This he paid partly in produce and partly in labor, or in military service, which was considered a form of labor for the state. The whole system depended on detailed census records and land surveys.

  Even in China, despite the long tradition of centralized bureaucratic rule, this cumbersome system did not work well and tended to break down completely every few generations. That the Japanese should have attempted to apply it in their uji-dominated land was remarkable; nonetheless, it was put into practice, probably for the most part in areas long under direct Yamato control. It actually operated fairly well for a century or more and left traces throughout the country until the fifteenth century. But the conscript army, which was part of the Chinese tax system, never took on real life in Japan. After the threat of China’s seventh-century conquest of Korea subsided, Japan, as an island country, had no pressing need for large armies to defend it against invaders. The Japanese levies soon degenerated into little more than labor gangs, while the true fighting man seems to have remained the aristocrat on horseback.

  One major aspect of the adoption of the Chinese political pattern was the establishment for the first time of a permanent capital—Japan’s first city. Hitherto the capital had shifted, usually with each reign, to the estate of the new ruler, in part to avoid the pollution of his predecessor’s death. The first capital, called Heijo but now known as Nara, was located in the Yamato Plain. It was laid out in 710 in ambitious imitation of Ch’ang-an, the great T’ang capital, as a rectangle of checkerboard streets, with the palace and government buildings at the north end of the great central north-south avenue. It was 2.5 by 3 miles in size, as compared with Ch’ang-an’s 5 by 6 miles. Unlike Ch’ang-an, a world metropolis of more than a million people, Nara, even in its reduced size, was far too large for Japan’s small population and backward conditions; its western half was never built up, nor were the great city walls, characteristic of all Chinese cities, ever constructed. They simply were not needed in insular Japan. Despite its shortcomings, this ambitious effort was impressive for the Japan of that time, and the old capital area is still dotted with many stately tile-roofed monasteries dating from that period and representing the best remaining architecture from the T’ang period anywhere in East Asia.

  Toward the end of the eighth century the emperor Kammu, possibly with the intent of escaping the influence of the great Buddhist temples that ringed Nara, decided to abandon this first city and build a new capital. In 794 this second city, called Heian, was laid out 30 miles north of Nara. Again the scale was ambitious, a rectangle some 3 by 3.5 miles, and again the city wall and the western half of the city never materialized. But this second capital, later to be known as Kyoto, remained the imperial capital of Japan until 1868, and the checkerboard pattern of its principal streets still accurately reflects the Chinese-style city laid out over a thousand years ago. The time when the capital was at Heijo is known as the Nara period (710–784) and the early centuries after its removal to Kyoto as the Heian period (794–1185).

  Most of the changes in government, economics, and life carried out during the great transformation of Japan that took place between the sixth and ninth centuries were embodied in elaborate Chinese-type law codes. The earliest remaining one is that of 701, drawn up during the Taiho year period but known to us only through later commentaries. The Japanese also adopted the Chinese concept that a major duty of government was to maintain a clear historical record of the past as a guide to political action. Such efforts to compile official histories were continued until 887. From this idea stemmed the two early Japanese histories already mentioned, the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon shoki of 720. These f
irst two histories are fairly reliable accounts of the period after about A.D. 400, but they also preserve the naive and primitive mythology of antiquity. They were clearly used to shape both the mythology and early historical traditions in a manner that would enhance the prestige of the Yamato court. At times in later periods these early histories and their mythology were also utilized to whip up among the Japanese people a sense of uniqueness and ultranationalist fervor, as during the wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  The process of learning and borrowing from China was, of course, not limited to politics. In fact, what the Japanese were learning culturally and intellectually at this time was to have a deeper and more lasting influence than the borrowed political institutions. For the most part, the latter decayed within a century or so and eventually disappeared in all but name. But many of the religious concepts, artistic skills, and literary forms learned during these centuries, far from losing their vigor, continued to develop and shaped the basic cultural patterns of later ages.

  Buddhism grew greatly in strength in the capital area and enjoyed even higher official favor than the native Shinto cults, but it remained much weaker in the provinces. The emperors and noble families built splendid temples and monasteries and sponsored impressive Buddhist ceremonies. One emperor, Shomu, conceived the idea of erecting a monastery and nunnery in each province and a great central monastery at the capital to symbolize religiously the whole concept of political centralization. The 53-foot seated bronze Great Buddha (or Daibutsu) at the central Todaiji monastery, which was dedicated in 752, remains one of the largest bronze figures in the world, though it has been somewhat disfigured by later repairs. The personal effects of Shomu and other artifacts and fine works of art from this period are preserved in great quantity in the Shosoin storehouse, which stands nearby. Many Japanese emperors, tiring of the heavy burdens of their dual religious and secular roles, began to abdicate the throne and retire to the quiet life of a Buddhist monk.

  Besides Buddhism, the Japanese absorbed a great many other Chinese concepts and ideals, such as Confucian philosophy, the historical lore of that ancient land, its rich literature, and many Chinese myths and superstitions. They also learned a great deal of China’s advanced technology in textiles, metal work, bridge building, architecture, and the like. The Buddhist temples themselves were architectural masterpieces. They housed beautiful and deeply spiritual bronze, lacquer, clay, or wooden statues of divinities, exquisite religious paintings, and other magnificent works of art. Some of these art treasures had been brought from the continent, but others of equal beauty and artistic merit were produced in Japan. They attest to the amazing success with which the Japanese absorbed much of the best in the Chinese artistic tradition and indicate the early development of a happy combination of artistic taste and superb craftsmanship that ever since has characterized the Japanese.

  In art, the Japanese could have had no better teachers than the Chinese; but in the field of writing, Chinese influence was less fortunate. Japanese is a language of simple phonetic structure but polysyllabic, highly inflected words. It can be written easily by phonetic symbols. The Chinese writing system is not adapted to phonetic transcription or the representation of inflections, however. It lacks inflections, and in ancient times the words were mostly monosyllabic. As a consequence, the Chinese found it possible to develop and hold to a writing system in which all the individual words were represented by unique symbols, originally of pictographic origin, which we usually call characters and are known in Japan as kanji (“Chinese writing”). These characters range from a single line to represent “one” to the calligraphic monstrosity in twenty-five strokes representing the word “bay” and forming the wan of Taiwan.

  The Five-Storied Pagoda and, to its right, the Kondo (Golden Hall) of the Horyuji Monastery near Nara, dating from the seventh century and probably the oldest wooden buildings in the world.

  The Chinese student has always been faced with the grim necessity of mastering several thousand of these characters before he could be considered literate. In addition to this problem, the ancient Japanese were faced with the added difficulty that the Chinese writing system was not suited to the writing of their language. Had Japan been the neighbor of some Western or South Asian country using a phonetic script such as our own alphabet, the Japanese would have quickly learned to write their native tongue with efficiency and ease. Unfortunately, geographic accident decreed otherwise, and the Japanese were burdened with the most cumbersome of writing systems. Like the youth of China, the young people of Japan were sentenced generation after generation to years of mentally numbing memory work simply to learn the rudiments of writing.

  Because of the tremendous prestige of all things Chinese and the difficulty of adapting Chinese characters to the writing of Japanese, the early Japanese made little effort to write their own language. Proper names and brief poems in Japanese were spelled out laboriously with one Chinese character used phonetically for each syllable, but little else was attempted. Instead, the Japanese wrote in straight and often reasonably good classical Chinese. Using Chinese much as medieval Europeans used Latin, they wrote their histories, geographies, law books, and official documents of all sorts. They even attempted to imitate Chinese literary forms, and men of education prided themselves on their ability to compose poems in Chinese.

  The great transformation of Japan from the late sixth until the early ninth centuries is all the more remarkable for having been achieved through the difficult medium of the Chinese writing system. This writing system, more than anything else, gave an unmistakably Chinese, or East Asian, cast to Japanese civilization, and even today the use of Chinese characters appears to Westerners to be among the most colorful and distinctive aspects of Japanese culture.

  3

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIVE CULTURE

  The period of greatest learning from the continent lasted from the late sixth century until the middle of the ninth, but then a subtle change began to take place in the Japanese attitude toward China. The prestige of all things Chinese remained great, but the Japanese were no longer so anxious to learn from China or so ready to acknowledge Chinese superiority. After three centuries of borrowing, elements from the Chinese system had become so thoroughly familiar to the Japanese as to have taken on a life of their own. There existed, at least in the capital district, a cultured society with its own political and social institutions, patterned of course after Chinese models, but changed to fit Japanese needs by conscious experimentation and slow, unconscious modification. The Japanese were no longer a primitive people, overawed by the vastly superior continental civilization and eager to imitate anything Chinese. Japan was reaching a state of cultural maturity that made it ready to develop along its own lines. The emphasis shifted from borrowing more new things to adapting and assimilating what had already been acquired.

  A contributing reason for the lessened interest in learning from China was the political decay that became marked in the T’ang dynasty as the ninth century progressed. In 894 it was decided not to send a proposed mission to China because of the turmoil in that land. Merchants and Buddhist monks continued to travel between the two countries, but there was a decided lessening of contact between them for the next few centuries, and the resulting increase in Japanese isolation hastened the cultural modifications already well under way in the islands.

  One of the clearest signs of increasing divergence from Chinese patterns was the development during the ninth and tenth centuries of an adequate way of writing Japanese. The new writing system evolved from the use of certain Chinese characters in greatly abbreviated form as simple phonetic symbols devoid of any specific meaning in themselves. Since the Chinese characters each represented one monosyllabic word, the phonetic symbols derived from them stood for a whole syllable, such as ka, se, or mo. The result was a syllabary rather than an alphabet. Except for a final n, Japanese syllables all end in vowels, limited to the
five basic vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, pronounced as these are in Italian.

  The Japanese syllabary, or kana as it is called, was at first a confused affair. For one thing, the Chinese characters used were abbreviated in two different ways. In one system, called hiragana, the whole character was written in a stylized or cursive form. Thus the Chinese character meaning “slave” became the hiragana symbol standing for the sound nu. In the other system, called katakana, some element of a character was chosen to represent the phonetic value of the whole. Thus this same Chinese character for “slave” became the katakana symbol , also standing for nu. Another complexity was that the choice of characters for abbreviation as kana was at first quite haphazard, and usually several were used for any one syllable. In fact, both hiragana and katakana became standardized only about a century and a half ago, and variant forms are still sometimes used in everyday correspondence.

  The Japanese syllabaries formed more clumsy writing systems than alphabets, but they were reasonably efficient for writing Japanese, and with their development there appeared a literature in the native tongue. As noted before, even at the height of the Chinese period, poems had been composed in Japanese and laboriously written down by the use of unabbreviated Chinese characters to represent each syllable phonetically. It was in this way that the 4,516 poems collected around the year 760 in a great anthology known as the Man’yoshu (Collection of a Myriad Leaves) were recorded. The new kana were much simpler, and the courtiers and their ladies developed a veritable craze for jotting down poems on almost every conceivable occasion and exchanging them in their frequent love letters. The best of these poems were collected by the court in the Kokinshu (Ancient and Modern Collection) of 905 and in twenty later imperial anthologies over the next five centuries.