Japan
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The decline of Chinese-type political institutions and the weakening of the central goverment’s control over the provinces make the period of Fujiwara supremacy appear to have been one of unmitigated political decline. In reality, the political decay at court was offset by the growing political experience and general sophistication of the once-backward provincials. During the height of the Chinese period, they had hardly participated in the brilliant culture transplanted from T’ang to the capital district, and they had been completely overshadowed by the noble families at court. Little by little, however, they absorbed many of the basic skills and much of the culture of the continental civilization, and by the eleventh century they had reached a stage of development that permitted them to start laying the foundations for a new society and a new political structure. The population’s increased immunity to most epidemic diseases by this time also set the stage for renewed population growth and a resultant surge in the economy.
The central figure in the new society, as in the uji society that had preceded the period of borrowing from China, was the aristocratic fighting man on horseback. In ancient times he had been the warrior leader of the uji. Now, in the twelfth century, he was a local official or the manager of a tax-free shoen, defending his lands from marauders by his skill as a horseman and his prowess with bow and sword. Dressed in loose-fitting but efficient armor made up of small strips of steel held together by brightly colored thongs, he had become a close counterpart of the knight of early feudal Europe.
As late as the twelfth century, these provincial warriors accepted the capital at Kyoto as the source of all legitimate rights to land or to local government positions. Their chief economic contacts with other areas were still based on the payment of rent to estate proprietors and protectors in the capital area and the shipment of tax payments from public lands. But the central government was no longer in a position to give them protection from banditry and lawlessness, and for this purpose they began to join together to defend their own interests. Such bands were often only small family or local groupings, but larger units gradually formed around particularly prestigious leaders. The most obvious source of prestige was close association with the court, especially the imperial family. Distant branches of the imperial family had been reduced to the status of commoners by being given family names and had often gone to the provinces as officials to make their fortunes. Families of this type were in a particularly advantageous position to build up warrior bands personally loyal to them. The usual names given such imperial offshoots were Taira (also called Heike) and Minamoto (also known as the Genji). Some of these Taira and Minamoto branch families attained considerable local prominence.
Early signs of the rise of warrior cliques were to be seen in the wide-scale fighting in both the Kanto region in the east and in the Inland Sea area that culminated in 940 and 941 in the destruction of so-called rebel forces. Between 1028 and 1087 a particularly distinguished line of Minamoto gained prominence in eastern Japan, first by crushing a “rebel” Taira family and then by crushing two other prominent warrior families in northern Honshu. At times, these particular Minamoto were called on by the Fujiwara to protect their interests in Kyoto from great religious institutions nearby, which had developed their own military forces on the shoen they owned and which sought, through a joint display of Buddhist relics and military might, to overawe the court. Similarly, a line of Taira warriors that had its seat of power in the Inland Sea area was relied on by those retired emperors who challenged Fujiwara power in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Despite their virtual monopoly of military power, the provincial warriors did not question the authority of the Kyoto court until the middle of the twelfth century, when they were called into the capital area to decide by force succession disputes within the imperial and main Fujiwara families. Brief military encounters occurred in 1156 and in the winter of 1159–1160 between various leading members of the two prominent Taira and Minamoto lines. These left Taira Kiyomori the victor in unchallenged military control of the capital. He took advantage of this situation to settle down in Kyoto, have himself and family members appointed to high court posts, marry his daughter to the emperor, and in 1180 put his own grandson on the throne. Thus he established his dominance over the court in much the same way the Fujiwara had done three centuries earlier.
Fenollosa-Weld Collection/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Mounted and armored warriors, attacking a Kyoto palace in the fighting that took place from 1159 to 1160, as shown in a thirteenth-century picture scroll of the war.
Kiyomori, however, failed to build up and consolidate his own warrior band, relying instead on his control over the traditional seat of authority. But the warrior class, particularly in the distant Kanto, was eager to gain complete control over its lands, free of interference from Kyoto. Kiyomori had also failed to stamp out the rival main line of the Minamoto. The heir to it, Yoritomo, grew to manhood in the custody of a minor Taira family, called the Hojo, in the mountainous Izu Peninsula on the edge of the Kanto Plain. Taking advantage in 1180 of a call for help from a rebellious imperial prince, Yoritomo challenged the authority of the Taira and the Kyoto court. He did this simply by asserting his own right to appoint local government officials and estate managers in the Kanto region. Most of the leading warriors of the area, who were largely of Minamoto stock, responded quickly by shifting their allegiance to him, seeing in him a local source of authority better able and more likely to protect their interests than the distant court. Military leaders from all over the country soon followed suit.
This sudden break with tradition gave rise to a wave of lawlessness throughout the country, as local warriors saw a chance to increase their authority and wealth at the expense of absentee proprietors and protectors. Minamoto bands closer to the capital than Yoritomo’s attacked Kyoto, eventually seizing the capital in 1183 and driving the Taira back to their strongholds along the Inland Sea. The imperial court then appealed to Yoritomo to restore order. His younger brother, Yoshitsune, quickly seized Kyoto and then, after a pause, drove the Taira westward, annihilating them early in 1185 in a naval battle at Dannoura at the western extremity of the Inland Sea. All the remaining military bands of western Japan quickly bowed to Minamoto supremacy. Four years later Yoritomo dispatched a large force against a Fujiwara family that controlled most of northern Honshu from its brilliant provincial capital at Hiraizumi, north of the present Sendai, and through its destruction completed the conquest of the whole country.
Yoritomo was now in unquestioned military control of the whole land, but he carefully avoided the mistakes Kiyomori had made. He eschewed high posts in the imperial government, and by taking for himself in 1192 the title of shogun, an old term for commanders in wars against the Ainu in the north, implied that he was merely the general of the central government’s army. He also remained at the headquarters he had established at Kamakura, now a seaside resort and suburb of Tokyo, building there, in the heart of his area of power, his own military government. In a sense, Japan now had two separate governments, each handling its own sphere of activities and not interfering with the other. But Yoritomo’s government, in reality if not in theory, was clearly the controlling power. It came to be known as the bakufu, or “tent government.” This term, commonly translated in English as “shogunate,” became the generic name for all later governments of the warrior class. Since Kamakura was the only real locus of power, people soon brought to it all legal cases, even though they involved rights to governorships and estates derived in theory from the imperial court.
Yoritomo’s bakufu had a quite simple structure, even though it bore a heavy burden of litigation. A legal code for warrior families, known from the “year period” as the Joei Code, was drawn up in 1232, but basically the new regime depended on the customary law that had been growing up throughout Japan. The whole basis of government was the rather one-sided bond of personal feudal loyalty to Yoritomo on the part
of the members of the Kanto warrior class who had joined his cause and other local military men who had been allowed to enlist as his “vassals” or “honorable housemen” (go-kenin). The reward for their loyalty was his guarantee of their rights to property and posts as managers of estates or as local officials. To many of them he gave the new position of jito, which also carried with it rights to shiki, or income. Jito was a term just coming into use and signified various degrees of managerial, police, judicial, and other authority over estates or public lands. Land and positions confiscated during the war against the Taira and in later disturbances provided ample openings for positions of this sort; other openings were created by confiscations from warriors of dubious dependability or simply by giving jito as a new title to existing local officers.
The jito differed from the earlier managers and local officials in that their authority derived exclusively from Kamakura, not Kyoto. Since they had the military and judicial power of Kamakura behind them, they had a good chance to increase their income and authority at the expense of absentee proprietors and protectors, as well as the local officials who lacked Kamakura’s backing. Starting in the 1190s, the bakufu also began the regular appointment of shugo (the word means “protector”) in most of the provinces. Their duties were to lead the other local “housemen” of Kamakura in suppressing crime and rebellion and in providing guard services in Kyoto. Throughout the country, the bulk of the most desirable posts as jito and virtually all the appointments as shugo went to warriors from the Kanto. There was also a clear policy of favoring families of relatively lowly origin but unquestioned loyalty over families of older or more distinguished lineage who seemed more likely to challenge Kamakura’s authority.
At first the Kyoto court welcomed the suppression of the lawlessness let loose by the five-year war between the Taira and Minamoto, but soon it realized that inevitable erosion of its own authority was being caused by the new system. An emperor, believing that much of the warrior class was chafing under the control of the bakufu and would join his cause, “revolted” against Kamakura in 1221 in what has been called the Jokyu Disturbance, but he was easily suppressed and exiled from court. Kamakura took this opportunity to expand greatly its control throughout western Japan, and a bakufu headquarters was established within Kyoto itself.
The Kamakura bakufu remained throughout a thinly spread, small organization. It consisted of only a few thousand personal vassals of the shogun, scattered mainly as jito throughout the country and organized under the loose supervision of the provincial shugo. Above the jito and shugo were a few small administrative and judicial bodies at Kamakura, supervising this whole fragile system of rule. Despite its simple structure, however, the Kamakura system proved quite effective; it survived two major crises and lasted a century and a half, until 1333.
One crisis was the disappearance of the Minamoto line of shoguns. In theory, the whole system depended on the personal loyalty of the “housemen” to the shogun, and yet the Hojo family, which had been the custodians of Yoritomo, managed to do away with the Minamoto and take over control of the Kamakura government as regents for a purely symbolic shogun. Yoritomo himself, fearing the rivalry of his close relatives, had had them destroyed, including Yoshitsune, the chief general in the fighting against the Taira. After Yoritomo’s death in 1199, his Hojo widow, Masako, together with her father and later her brother, became the chief powers in Kamakura. Together they engineered the deaths of Yoritomo’s two sons and placed an infant Fujiwara in the post of shogun in 1219. After 1252, imperial princes were used in place of Fujiwara nobles to play this symbolic role.
The Kamakura period thus demonstrated in extreme form the tendency for rule from behind the scenes. An emperor at Kyoto was merely the puppet of a retired emperor or a Fujiwara regent, whose sham government was in fact controlled by the private military government of a shogun, who in turn was the puppet of his Hojo regent. The Hojo also demonstrated another lasting characteristic of the Japanese political system—the tendency for joint rather than individual rule. The regent was joined from 1224 on by another leading member of the Hojo family who acted as a “co-signer.” Other key posts, such as the controller of the Kyoto headquarters, were shared by two men, while most key decisions were made by boards of councilors in Kamakura.
The other great crisis of the time was the most serious threat of aggression from abroad that Japan was to experience before the twentieth century—the attempted Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281. The Mongols, a nomadic people of the steppe lands north of China, conquered in the first half of the thirteenth century all of Central Asia, southern Russia, and much of the Middle East, and their armies penetrated through Hungary to the Adriatic Sea. At the eastern end of this vast empire, they completed the subjugation of Korea in 1259 and crushed the last organized resistance in China itself in 1276. In the east, only Japan remained free of their rule. When the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan sent emissaries to Japan demanding capitulation, the terrified courtiers of Kyoto were ready to accede. But the warriors of Kamakura refused and made their stand unmistakably clear by beheading some of the emissaries.
Such a direct affront could not go unpunished; in 1274 a strong Mongol force set out on Korean ships to subdue Japan. Certain small islands were seized and a landing was made at Hakata Bay near the modern city of Fukuoka in northern Kyushu. Before any decisive engagement could be fought, however, the Mongols decided to withdraw their fleet to the continent because of the threat of the inclement weather. That they would return was a foregone conclusion. For the next several years Kamakura kept many of its vassals from the western part of the country on guard in northern Kyushu and busy constructing a wall around Hakata Bay to contain the vaunted Mongol cavalry.
The Mongols did come again in 1281, this time with a great joint armada of Korean and Chinese ships, and again a landing was made at Hakata Bay. The invading forces are estimated to have numbered about 140,000 men, the greatest overseas expedition the world had as yet seen. The Mongols were accustomed to large-scale cavalry tactics, which had met no match anywhere in the world, and they had superior weapons at their disposal, such as the gunpowder bomb hurled by a catapult. Against this overwhelming force, the Japanese had a mere handful of knights accustomed only to single combat. But the Mongols were slowed by the wall the Japanese had built and by the attacks of smaller Japanese boats, which maneuvered more easily in the narrow waters of the bay. Before the Mongols could deploy their full forces ashore, a typhoon descended upon the fleet and destroyed it, bringing the invasion to a disastrous end. To the Japanese, the typhoon was the kamikaze, the “divine wind,” protecting the land of the gods from foreign invaders. The incident has, of course, loomed large in Japanese historical memory and contributed to the irrational conviction many Japanese once had that their land was sacred and inviolable.
Shashinka Photo Library
Mongol soldiers aboard ships in their invasion of Japan in 1281, as portrayed in a picture scroll by a Japanese artist of the time.
The period between 1156 and 1221 marked an epochal change in Japan and the start of seven centuries of rule by military men. Until 1180 the old imperial government and the estate system it had produced had remained basically intact, despite the shifting of much of the real military power to local warrior bands and the Taira usurpation of power at Kyoto. The Minamoto, however, created a new source of authority and, while outwardly recognizing the legitimacy of the old imperial government, developed new institutions that, like a cancer, were consuming the old body politic. An entirely new type of government was growing up within the increasingly empty shell of the old, making use of the old institutions but based on fundamentally different principles—those of feudalism. The basic cement of government had become the lord-vassal relationship of personal loyalty on the part of one man or family to another; political positions were becoming identified with the relationship of persons to control over and income from agricultural land; most positions were
becoming openly hereditary; and a new aristocracy of warriors, while paying deference to the old court elite, was clearly in control of the country.
The theoretical supremacy of the imperial government and the survival of many of its functions and rights make the Kamakura period not fully feudal, but the resemblance to the feudalism of Western Europe was striking and was to become progressively more so. The origins of the two systems were also probably much alike. In both cases, they seem to have grown out of a special blending of concepts of centralized imperial rule with native traditions of tribal organization and personalized bonds of loyalty. In Europe these two ingredients came from the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribal background of the peoples of North Europe; in Japan they came from T’ang China and the uji form of organization of primitive Japan. Apparently this exact blend is an unusual one in world history, because Japan affords the only close and fully developed parallel to Western feudalism.
There were, however, many differences between the two systems. Feudalism came a little later in Japan than in Europe, paralleling between the late twelfth and sixteenth centuries much the same course Western Europe followed from the ninth through the thirteenth, and the conditions of high feudalism, corresponding, say, to eleventh- and twelfth-century France, were not achieved in Japan until the beginning of the sixteenth century. This lag in Japan may have resulted from the lack of external pressures, which allowed a slower and more spontaneous transition from imperial to feudal institutions. In both areas, however, the feudal system was strongly legalistic at first, and at their heights both stressed the obligations and promises of the lord as well as the vassal, in order to try to keep the allegiance of the latter during an age of constant warfare. But the difference in the backgrounds of the two feudal systems—the strong legal concepts of Rome versus the emphasis on ethics in Confucian China—perhaps made the tone of feudalism more legalistic in the West and more moralistic in Japan. As a result, Japanese feudal relationships were commonly phrased in absolute terms and described like the relations between father and son, while in the West an emphasis on feudal rights proved to be the background for the later development of democratic institutions.