Japanese feudalism was to survive, at least in outward form, far past the sixteenth century—in fact, until the middle of the nineteenth. As we shall see, this late feudalism, which again was probably attributable to Japan’s relative isolation, was quite different from anything Europe ever experienced. Because of the long duration of feudal rule in Japan, it is small wonder that the impress of feudalism lay heavily upon modern Japan. It can be seen in the strong military traditions of the Japanese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in their unconscious assumption as late as the 1930s that military men were somehow less selfish and more honest than civilians and therefore had a right to political authority. Even today there are survivals in the strong master-disciple and boss-client relationships to be found in certain areas of Japanese society.
The warrior class brought with it an ethos quite different from that of the previously dominant court nobility. The military man gloried in a life of warfare, in the Spartan virtues, and in the ascetic practices of self-discipline and physical and mental toughening. He put great store on loyalty and personal honor and prized bravery, valor, and frugality. He made a cult of his sword, a cult kept alive as late as World War II by Japanese officers who proudly lugged cumbersome traditional swords into the jungles of Southeast Asia. His outstanding virtues—endurance in adversity, a great capacity for unswerving personal loyalty, and dogged perseverance in achieving a goal—became characteristics that still are observable among the Japanese. While the sensitive and slightly effete society of the late Fujiwara period seems quite remote from modern Japan, even the early feudal system is clearly recognizable as the ancestor of the Japan we have come to know in modern times.
Although the Gempei War, as the Taira–Minamoto conflict was called, came at the very beginning of the Japanese feudal age, it has always been looked back on as the time when the ideals of warrior society were established. Its incidents became a major theme of much of later Japanese literature. The custom for warriors to commit suicide in a hopeless situation, at first to avoid disgrace and torture but later more to demonstrate loyalty, started at this time and became a sort of ideal. The approved method of suicide, known as seppuku (or more vulgarly harakiri, “belly slitting”), was a particularly painful way to die but was well calculated to display contempt for the enemy and loyalty to one’s lord. It has been glorified and romanticized ever since and even today may help account for the Japanese fascination with the subject of suicide.
The ascendancy of the warrior class naturally brought with it cultural as well as political shifts, but much less markedly so. There was naturally a new emphasis in literature and art on war and the value system of the military man, but otherwise most of the trends in poetry, prose, architecture, and painting went on little affected by the political transformation, and in the field of sculpture there was a renaissance of the classic traditions of the Nara period. For example, the 49-foot bronze Great Buddha (Daibutsu) of Kamakura, which is of virtually equal size but far greater beauty than the Great Buddha dedicated at Nara in 752, dates from the middle of the thirteenth century. Basically, there was a continuity of cultural trends between the Fujiwara and Kamakura periods. This was probably because the rising military society lived so long side by side and in close contact with the old court. The warrior leaders of Japan, unlike many of their European counterparts, were not cultural boors but prided themselves on their literary talents, fine calligraphy, and poetic skills. It is not surprising, therefore, that the classic arts and literature continued to have a major influence on Japanese society throughout the feudal period and until modern times.
A profound shift in Buddhism, however, was going on during this period, though for the most part quite independently of the political changes. Buddhism had come from India to China and then to Japan as a highly intellectualized philosophy with a rich literature, glorious art, and colorful ceremonies that appealed to the upper classes. Early Indian Buddhism had stressed the pain and vanity of human existence. It accepted the common Indian belief that the individual is reborn again and again into this world, with his status in each life depending on his actions in previous existences. The Buddha taught that this endless and painful chain of causality, or karma, could be broken only by overcoming the desire for life and, through this enlightenment, achieving a sort of salvation, known as nirvana. This was the merging of the individual ego with the cosmos, much as a drop of water loses its identity in the vastness of the sea.
Japan National Tourist Organization
The Great Buddha (Daibutsu) at Kamakura, cast in the middle of the thirteenth century. The temple building housing it was swept away by a tidal wave.
These concepts, which seemed unduly pessimistic to most Chinese and Japanese, had become considerably modified during their long journey across Asia from India to China and were further modified in China itself. This more diverse set of beliefs was known as Mahayana, or the Greater Vehicle, but even these concepts appealed at first to the Japanese much less than the art, ceremonies, magical powers, and general Chinese culture that accompanied Buddhist philosophy. Up through the eighth century, the six so-called Nara sects of Buddhism were largely confined to the court aristocracy, but two new sects introduced from China early in the ninth century proved to have a more popular appeal. Both were brought back by monks who had accompanied the embassy of 804 to China.
One of these monks was Kukai, better known as Kobo Daishi (Daishi means “great teacher”), who introduced the Shingon, or True Word, sect, establishing it at his headquarters on Mt. Koya, on the southern rim of the capital area. Shingon was an esoteric (meaning “secret”) sect, emphasizing magic formulas, incantations, masses for the dead, and other ceremonials, as well as an elaborate iconography and pictorial representations of Buddhist philosophy. Under Shingon leadership, the deities of Shinto were identified as the local Japanese manifestations of universal Buddhist deities. The two religions became so thoroughly intertwined, theologically and institutionally, that it was not possible to disentangle them from each other until the nineteenth century, and then only by government fiat.
The other monk returning from the embassy of 804 was Saicho, better known as Dengyo Daishi, who introduced the Tendai sect at the great Enryakuji monastery he established on Mt. Hiei just northeast of Kyoto. Tendai teachings were all-inclusive; they treated esoteric Shingon and all other forms of Buddhism as differing levels of Buddhist truth, fitted to different levels of individual understanding. Because of its broad intellectual base and the strategic location of its chief monastery, which looked down on the capital, Tendai became the source of most later sectarian developments in Japanese Buddhism.
Through these two new sects, Buddhism began to spread much more widely among the people. Starting in the late tenth century, strong emphasis was placed on the concept that history was entering a degenerate age when people could no longer achieve salvation themselves but had to rely on faith, particularly in the Buddha Amida. The nature of salvation also shifted from the extinction of self as in the original idea of nirvana to a belief in an afterlife in the Pure Land Paradise of Amida. Such concepts of achieving salvation through faith, curiously enough, were closer to basic Christian tenets than to original Buddhism. But they were strong enough to predominate not only among the common people but also at the court.
The spread of this emphasis on salvation through faith may have fitted the age of serious epidemic diseases, and the decline of epidemics by the Kamakura period and the resultant increase in population and improvement of economic conditions also fit in well with a great social and geographic spread of Buddhism. There seems to have been a general heightening of culture at this time among the lower classes throughout the country. This is suggested not only by their increased participation in Buddhism but also by the fact that commoners, who had been notably absent from the classic art and literature of the earlier Chinese age, began to be depicted in painting and then in
literature from the eleventh century on.
The belief in winning salvation by calling on the name of Amida became embodied in sectarian form in the Jodo, or Pure Land, sect, founded by the monk Honen in 1175. The teachings of his greatest disciple, Shinran (1173–1262), led to the founding of another sect called the True Pure Land sect, or simply Shinshu, the True Sect. Shinran taught that there was no way to salvation except through faith and the wholehearted calling on Amida’s name, known as nembutsu. He preached “the equality of all in Buddhism,” saw no special role for the monkish life, and thus advocated marriage for the clergy. Later followers emphasized writing Buddhist texts for the common people in Japanese rather than traditional Chinese. They also made the sect the largest one of all and built its lay congregations into powerful secular bodies, which at points in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries challenged the warrior class for political leadership.
Another popular sect was founded in 1253 by Nichiren (1222–1282) and bears his name. Of very plebian origin, Nichiren was intolerant of all other forms of Buddhism, insisting that the only way to salvation was by calling not on Amida but on the Lotus Sutra, a Buddhist scripture that promised the ultimate salvation of all living creatures. Naturally, his followers frequently came into conflict with other sects and with the political authorities. He also showed a strong nationalistic streak, claiming that Buddhism had degenerated in India and China and that his brand of Japanese Buddhism was the only truth. The intolerance and fighting spirit of Nichiren is still reflected today in the vigor of Soka Gakkai, a recent Nichiren offshoot which is the largest of the post-World War II religious movements.
While the faith sects were popular with all classes and served in particular as mediums of self-expression for the lower classes, there was also at this time another new and distinctive Buddhist movement, which was significant in another way. This was Zen, which means “meditation.” Meditation as an important Buddhist practice goes far back in India and China and had been introduced much earlier into Japan, but in the Kamakura period it was given sectarian expression by two monks who had studied in China. In 1191 Eisai brought the Rinzai sect of Zen, which emphasized sudden enlightenment through koan, or meditation on insoluble or even nonsense problems. Dogen introduced the Soto sect in 1227; he emphasized enlightenment through zazen, or long periods of “sitting in meditation.” Zen received special favor from the Kamakura bakufu and its successors, perhaps because it was institutionally new and not connected with the powerful and rich earlier sects. Its character-building disciplines also came to appeal to the warrior class and became a lasting element in the Japanese personality.
5
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE FEUDAL SYSTEM
The Kamakura system, however effective for a while, was peculiarly susceptible to the ravages of time and change. It depended on the personal loyalty of a band of warriors who had originally come for the most part from the Kanto and were knit together by old ties and the fact that Kamakura, not Kyoto, was the source and guarantor of most of their property and power. As the generations passed, this sense of personal loyalty declined among their descendants, now considerably increased in numbers and scattered as jito throughout the whole land. Loyalty for them was more likely to be directed toward personally known strong local leaders, particularly the families holding the post of shugo, rather than toward distant Kamakura and its purely symbolic shogun.
Another factor in the decay of the system was the custom of dividing a warrior family’s income, which was normally in the form of shiki revenue from the office of jito, among all the sons and even daughters. As a result of such divided patrimonies, many knightly families, while still owing service to Kamakura, could ill afford the military equipment of a mounted warrior and the feudal services expected of them. Long years of preparation against the actual and anticipated Mongol invasions made the situation particularly severe for the warriors of Kyushu, on whom the main burden had fallen. There was deep dissatisfaction because defense against external enemies, unlike the defeat of internal foes, produced no rewards in the form of new lands to be parceled out to deserving warriors. The financial situation of some of Kamakura’s vassals had become so bad by the late thirteenth century that many were seriously in debt. On occasion the bakufu tried to aid them by ordering the cancellation of warrior debts, as was most notable in the sweeping order of 1297, which was euphemistically called tokusei, or “virtuous government.”
Because of the gradual erosion of the loyalty of the warrior class to the Hojo-dominated bakufu and resentment at the increasing domination of Kamakura by that family, the whole system collapsed quite suddenly when it was challenged in 1333. An emperor known as Go-Daigo (or Daigo II) had developed the anachronistic idea that the emperors themselves should rule, and Ashikaga Takauji, the head of a Kanto shugo house of distinguished Minamoto lineage who was sent to suppress him, simply shifted sides. Another Kanto leader of similar lineage and status then marched on Kamakura and destroyed the Hojo.
While Go-Daigo futilely attempted to restore imperial rule, these two generals fought each other for military supremacy, and Takauji emerged victorious. Meanwhile he had broken with Go-Daigo, who fled from Kyoto in 1336 and set up his court at Yoshino in the mountains on the southern edge of the capital area. Takauji placed a member of a rival branch of the imperial family on the throne, giving Japan two imperial courts, a “northern” one at Kyoto and a “southern” one at Yoshino. The half-century during which this situation existed is known as the period of the Northern and Southern Courts, a term taken from a similarly named period in Chinese history. It was ended only in 1392, when the third Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimitsu, persuaded the southern court to return to Kyoto on a promise—which was never honored—that it would alternate with the other line on the throne.
Meanwhile Takauji and his successors had been busily attempting to restore a new bakufu to exercise centralized control over the military class. Takauji made Kyoto his headquarters and obtained for himself the title of shogun in 1338, but there could be no thought of rewelding the whole warrior class into a single band of vassals loyal to the Ashikaga in the manner of the Kamakura system. Instead, the Ashikaga attempted to create a three-tier form of feudalism in which the various shugo, assigned the control of one or more provinces, would be the shogun’s vassals, and they in turn would control the lesser warriors of their repsective provinces, while also staffing the few simple organs of central government set up in Kyoto.
Many of the shugo were cadet branches of the Ashikaga family, and for a while in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the bakufu did operate as a reasonably effective central government. It was at its height under Yoshimitsu, who became shogun at the age of ten in 1368 and dominated the bakufu until his death in 1408, even though he abdicated the position of shogun in 1394. He and some of his successors tried to exercise despotic rule and achieve a position like that of the kings of early modern Europe. The shogunate, however, started to decline seriously after the ruling shogun was assassinated in 1441, and it lost all control over the country during the Onin War, which swept all of Japan from 1467 until 1477. For the next century Japan was plunged into incessant warfare. The Ashikaga shoguns, however, continued to occupy their now largely symbolic post until 1573, much like their powerless fellow Kyoto residents, the emperors and Fujiwara regents. The whole period from 1333 to 1573 is commonly known either as the Ashikaga period or as the Muromachi period from the location in northern Kyoto of the Ashikaga headquarters.
Apart from a short period of apparent stability, the Ashikaga shogunate was far from being an effective central government for most of the more than two centuries that bear its name. It exercised little or no control over distant shugo, and it was usually under the domination of the powerful shugo near the capital, who developed hereditary rights to the top bakufu posts. These families frequently fought one another for domination of the shogunate or were engaged in internecine succession wars of their
own. In fact, it was succession disputes among some of the leading shugo families that were chiefly responsible for the outbreak of the Onin War, which marked the end of all effective central control.
The weakness of the government and the almost incessant warfare during the Ashikaga period suggest the possibility of general economic and cultural decline, but this was far from the case. There was a marked growth in technology and in the economy as a whole throughout the Kamakura and Ashikaga periods, both undoubtedly stimulated by growing population and increased contact once again with the continent. There had never been an end to the movement of traders and monks between Japan and China, but it seems to have expanded rapidly from the late twelfth century on. A sign of this was the introduction of the Zen sects in the early Kamakura period by monks returning from China, and Zen monks played a large part in both commercial and cultural contacts with China during the Ashikaga period. Japanese merchants also began to play a larger role than before. Coming as they did from a militarized, feudal land, it is not surprising that their activities often shaded off into piracy. They would simply take by the sword what they could not get by trade. These Japanese pirate-traders, known as wako, laid waste the coasts of Korea during the fourteenth century, and then shifted their main area of activity to China during the next two centuries.
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