Japan
Page 4
Most of the poems were quite brief, following a strict pattern of thirty-one syllables called the tanka (short poem). The tanka was too slight to do more than suggest a natural scene and, by some deft turn of phrase, evoke an emotion or some sudden insight. Within its narrow limits, however, it could be both delicate and moving.
The kana syllabaries also made possible more extensive literary works in Japanese. In the tenth century stories, travel diaries, and essays appeared, written in a Japanese that sometimes achieved considerable literary distinction. For the most part, educated men, much like their counterparts in medieval Europe, scorned the use of their own tongue for any serious literary purpose and continued to write histories, essays, and official documents in Chinese; but the women of the court, who usually had insufficient education to write in Chinese, had no medium for literary expression other than their own language. As a result, while the men were pompously writing bad Chinese, their ladies consoled themselves for their lack of education by writing good Japanese—and created, incidentally, Japan’s first great prose literature.
The golden age of the first flowering of Japanese prose was the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Most of the writers were court ladies living in ease and indolence, and the commonest form of literary expression was the diary, liberally sprinkled with “short poems.” Some of the diaries told of travels, but more often they concerned the intrigues, ceremonials, and constant flirtation and lovemaking that characterized court life at this time. The outstanding work of the period, however, was not a diary but an extremely lengthy novel, the Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), written by Lady Murasaki early in the eleventh century. This is an account of the love adventures and psychological development of an imaginary Prince Genji. It is not only the earliest example of a major genre of world literature but, both in the original Japanese and in the magnificent English translations by Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker, it constitutes one of humanity’s major literary achievements. The diaries and novels by court ladies were clear evidence of the development of a true native Japanese culture. They had no prototypes in Chinese literature and were entirely Japanese. The transplanted Chinese civilization had flowered into a new culture, and the Japanese, a people only recently introduced to the art of writing, had produced a great literature of their own.
Section of one of the Genji Scrolls, illustrating the early eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji.
One may wonder why Japanese writing is still burdened with Chinese characters, if a thousand years ago the Japanese had already developed a phonetic script well suited to their language. The only explanation is the continuing prestige of China and the Chinese language. Most learned men continued to write in Chinese, but as their knowledge of the foreign tongue declined during the period of lessened contact with China, kana additions crept increasingly into their bastard Chinese texts. Others inserted Chinese words written in characters into Japanese kana texts. The result of both tendencies was the development of a hybrid writing system that has become the standard written Japanese of modern times. In it, nouns and other uninflected words and the roots of verbs and adjectives are represented by characters insofar as possible, leaving for hiragana the inflections and whatever else cannot be conveniently written in characters. Katakana is reserved for foreign names and words not deriving from Chinese characters or for terms we might put into italics.
The inevitable complexities of such a system of writing have been compounded by other factors. Chinese characters, having come to Japan over a prolonged period of time and from different dialectical areas in China, often are pronounced in more than one way in Japan, few of them very close to the original Chinese pronunciations. In addition, they are used not just for borrowed Chinese words, but also for Japanese words of corresponding meaning. It is as if the Chinese character for “water” were to be used in English to represent the word “water” and also to represent the element “aqua” in “aquatic.” Many characters also represented Chinese words that corresponded in meaning to several different Japanese words. For example, the Chinese word shang, written by the character , has Japanese equivalents variously read as ue, kami, agaru, ageru, and noboru, to list the commonest, just as it has such English equivalents as “on,” “above,” “upper,” “to mount,” and “to present.”
The coexistence of both Japanese and Chinese readings for most characters and the multiplicity of Japanese readings for many means that every line of modern Japanese presents a series of miniature problems in reading and interpretation. Moreover, thousands of technical and scholarly words have been manufactured out of Chinese lexical elements, though often in Japan itself, much as North Europe has coined words like “telephone” out of Mediterranean word roots. Unfortunately, many of the word compounds produced from Chinese words in this way are identical as pronounced in Japanese. For example, an abridged dictionary lists no fewer than twenty distinct words of Chinese type all pronounced kōkō. This is one reason why new words in Japanese and many substitutes for older ones are now often taken from more distinct English words and written in katakana.
The current Japanese writing system is dismayingly complex, and this situation cannot be easily corrected. Chinese characters have worked themselves deeply into the whole culture and have acquired for the Japanese artistic and psychological values they would be loath to abandon. Since World War II the number of characters in common use has been drastically reduced, and the writing of many of them has been considerably simplified. Although the use of characters seems on the whole to be slowly declining, the system remains probably the most difficult and cumbersome in common use anywhere in the world and is not likely to be changed significantly in the near future.
The spectacular development of a native Japanese literature was accompanied by equally profound changes in other fields. The arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture began to show distinctive Japanese characteristics. In art, the Japanese displayed a flair for abstract design and for narrative scroll paintings, which depicted court ceremonials and the histories of monasteries and of warfare. In architecture, they showed a clear preference for buildings set in natural surroundings, instead of the stately, balanced architecture of China.
Significant changes also began to occur in borrowed Chinese political and economic institutions. The whole system from the start had been much too complex and sophisticated for the needs of the relatively small and backward land Japan still was. The wonder is not that the system began to break down, but that the Japanese had succeeded in adopting as much of it as they had. Even in China, the central government was constantly fighting the natural tendency of taxpaying peasants and lands to gravitate to the estates of influential families or for power to slip into the hands of factions at court or of semiautonomous local magnates. In only recently centralized Japan, these tendencies were even harder to resist, and a breakdown of the system was all the more inevitable.
The key defenders of central government power in the Chinese system were the bureaucratic scholar-officials. The system of selecting these men mainly through competitive scholastic examinations was only just being perfected during the seventh century. Because of the newness of this system even in China and the especially strong sense of hereditary aristocratic rights in Japan, the Japanese could not bring themselves to adopt wholeheartedly the Chinese concept of a bureaucracy based on educational merit. They used this system mostly for the selection of minor clerical functionaries and normally left the top government posts open only to those of high birth. This meant that a powerful bureaucracy did not develop and actual control remained in the hands of those families in the best position to misuse it for their own benefit. The court nobles also proved reluctant to leave the pleasant life at the capital to take up assignments in the provinces. Already in the eighth century they began to send deputies in their place, thus leaving the provinces much less closely regulated by the court than they should have been
A m
ore deep-seated problem was the keeping of tax lands in production and equitably divided among the peasants who bore the tax burden. The introduction of agriculture as part of Yayoi culture had produced a veritable population explosion, which kept the islands comparable to or ahead of the major countries of Western Europe from then until today. The economic and administrative innovations absorbed from China from the sixth century on seem to have continued this trend of rapid population growth at least through the first third of the eighth century, but then an unwelcome import from the continent reversed the picture. Japan’s maritime isolation and sparse contacts with the outside world seem to have kept it relatively free from serious worldwide epidemics, but now increased intercourse with the continent suddenly brought waves of diseases to which the Japanese had not yet built up immunities. Between 735 and 737 smallpox swept the land, in much the way the Black Plague ravaged medieval Europe, killing perhaps a quarter or a third of the people. Subsequent epidemics periodically repeated the tragedy, until by the end of the twelfth century the islanders had developed adequate immune systems.
During these centuries of fluctuating population, it was difficult to maintain the rigid Chinese type of land ownership and taxation. Because of epidemics, dikes, sluices, and other water works needed for paddy rice farming would fall into disrepair, and as a consequence cultivated fields would be abandoned. Rapid population growth between epidemics would necessitate the restoration of the fields by any means possible. Before the adoption of the Chinese system, the large work units of the uji may have adequately met comparable situations on a local scale. The nationalized Chinese system, however, was less flexible. What was needed was more local initiative and variation.
The government attempted various countermeasures. Most important was its decree in 743, shortly after the great smallpox epidemic, to permit land ownership in perpetuity to families that restored fields to productivity, but this measure, of course, undercut the whole Chinese system. In 749 some great monasteries at the capital were granted estates, known as shoen, to help defray their expenses. Such shoen proliferated, particularly in areas where much of the agricultural land had been abandoned, and some of them fell into the hands of nonclerical officials.
From the original adoption of the Chinese land holding and tax system, the aristocratic families of the capital region and the provinces had retained the bulk of their lands as tax-free rank, office, and special merit fields (the same system had applied in the early T’ang). Since these families controlled the large numbers of peasants needed to restore fallow fields and open new lands, they, together with the great capital monasteries and Shinto shrines, took the lead in establishing new shoen. The aristocrats were also well placed to win official recognition of their new holdings and increase their tax-free status, sometimes obtaining for them the right to immunity from official inspection.
One way the shoen grew was through the commendation of lands to them by harried taxpayers, much as happened in early feudal Europe. Commendation was resorted to because the rental payments to the new proprietors were less than the earlier tax payments had been, and the powerful new owners had the influence and know-how at court to arrange such legal changes.
In this way between the ninth and twelfth centuries much of the agricultural land was gradually transformed from taxpaying public domain into shoen. Often made up of scattered tracts of ricefields, these estates were sometimes owned by powerful provincial families, but more commonly by the great court families and major Buddhist and Shinto institutions of the capital region. The shoen system was quite complex. Rights to income from the estates, called shiki, were divided among a whole hierarchy of persons or institutions. At the bottom was the actual cultivator, with his family workers and hired hands. Above him was the controller of the estate, usually a family of local prominence acting, in theory, merely as the manager for the proprietor. The latter, as we have seen, was usually a great court family or religious institution. In many cases, above the proprietor would be a protector, that is, some even more powerful family or religious institution. This system of multiple incomes from a single piece of land is reminiscent of conditions in medieval Europe.
Even those areas that were not turned into shoen but remained part of the public domain and were under the control of the provincial governments took on many of the characteristics of the estates. Appointments as governors of certain provinces became the hereditary right of particular families and were looked on as a fixed source of family income. The governors in turn often assigned the functions of local control over their lands to aristocratic provincial families, often on a semihereditary basis. Thus the control of these lands and income from them were privatized in much the same way as those of the estates.
The net result of all this was a steady loss of income and functions on the part of the central government. Most of the movement of goods throughout the country was no longer based on tax payments to the central government but on the payment of rents and fees on private estates or on public lands to the noble families and religious institutions of the capital area. The elaborate Chinese-style central government had progressively less to do, and as a result increasing emphasis was placed instead on the ceremonial aspects of government. From the late eighth century on, a few relatively simple organs of government were developed to handle more efficiently the remaining functions that the government did perform. From time to time, efforts were made to recapture the control once exercised by the central government and to stem the growth of shoen, but always without success in the long run.
Although the power and institutions of the central government gradually atrophied and a number of noble families and religious institutions became its multiple successors as the real controllers of the land, Japan’s insularity saved it from foreign conquest, and the antique religious aura of the imperial family saved it from usurpation, as might have occurred under comparable conditions in China or elsewhere in the world. One of the noble families, however, did win almost complete control over the imperial line, much as the Soga had a few centuries earlier. This was the Fujiwara, descended from Nakatomi Kamatari, one of the two main leaders of the Taika coup of 645. The family was nearly snuffed out when Kamatari’s four grandsons all fell victim to the smallpox epidemic of 737, but subsequently their descendants returned to prominence and by the ninth century had come to hold most of the top government posts. Like the Soga, they also intermarried with the imperial line, and in 858 Fujiwara Yoshifusa became the regent for the child emperor, who was the son of one of his daughters. This was the first time anyone outside the imperial family had occupied this position. Yoshifusa’s adopted son and heir, Mototsune, likewise became regent in 876, and in 884, when an adult came to the throne, he invented for himself the new post of kampaku, or chancellor, to describe the position of a regent for an adult emperor.
The Fujiwara family so dominated the court during the next two centuries that the period from 858 to 1160 is commonly called the Fujiwara period. The family was at its height from 995 to 1027 under the leadership of the glorious Michinaga. At this time Lady Murasaki described in her Tale of Genji the culturally sophisticated and languorous life of the court aristocracy.
Nothing could have been further from the imperial autocracy and bureaucratic power of the centralized Chinese political system than the picture Lady Murasaki gives of the heyday of the Fujiwara. Nor did the Japanese described in her novel bear much resemblance to those of the uji system of primitive times. But the life, culture, and political system of the Fujiwara period clearly derived a great deal from both of these earlier societies. It was a welding of the two into a new and distinctively Japanese culture.
Occasionally the imperial family challenged Fujiwara leadership, but never with lasting success. The emperor Uda, who was not born of a Fujiwara mother, made a valiant effort in the late ninth century, and from 1069 up to the thirteenth century abdicated emperors frequently had the final say at court. Since the headquarter
s of retired emperors were known as in, their rule was called insei.
Despite the efforts of some retired emperors, the Fujiwara retained the posts of regent and chancellor and normally had control over the court, which they maintained until the great political transformation of 1868. The rise to power in the late twelfth century of a provincial military aristocracy greatly curtailed the authority of the Fujiwara and their government, but a surprising degree of prestige and authority lingered on, with the court remaining important until the sixteenth century. Only in an isolated, tradition-bound country like Japan could a powerless government have continued to exercise so much influence for so long or a purely symbolic imperial line have survived usurpation. In fact, it was during the Fujiwara period and its aftermath that a typically Japanese pattern of rule through figureheads became normal: It became the rule rather than the exception for the person or group in nominal control to be the pawn of some other more directly powerful person or group.
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THE BIRTH OF A FEUDAL SOCIETY
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, while the spotlight was on the Fujiwara and the brilliant literary and artistic accomplishments of the court they dominated, others offstage were preparing the next acts in the drama. The capital aristocrats had transformed the borrowed civilization of China into a native culture, but they had lost control over the political and economic life of the country. While they were going through the forms and ceremonies of little more than a sham government and devoting their energies more to the arts of poetry-writing and lovemaking than to governing, local military aristocrats were gaining practical experience managing the provinces and shoen, and controlling the peasants on them, with little direction from the capital. The somewhat decadent, effeminate courtiers at Kyoto were producing a literature and art that future generations would look back to with pride, but their less sophisticated and hardier country cousins were laying the foundations for an entirely new Japan.