Download Chapter 6 Imperial China and Early Japan

History 2
Chapter 6
Imperial China and Early Japan
When Xuanzang returned to China in 644, he had covered over 10,000 miles
(16,000 km). The Gaochang kingdom had fallen to the armies of the Tang dynasty,
and Emperor Taizong welcomed Xuanzang enthusiastically. He sought both
Xuanzang’s skills as a translator and the valuable information he brought about
distant lands. Historians of India and Central Asia are particularly grateful for Xuanzang’s detailed accounts of his trip, which supplement sparse indigenous sources.
After he returned, Xuanzang translated over seventy Buddhist texts, many still read
today because of their accuracy.
The overland routes through Central Asia that Xuanzang took to India—and the sea
routes around Southeast Asia taken by others—are known today as the Silk Routes.
These routes were conduits not just for pilgrims like Xuanzang but also for
merchants plying their goods, soldiers dispatched to fight in distant lands, and
refugees fleeing dangerous areas for safety. Their tales of powerful rulers in India
and China inspired chieftains in border areas to introduce new writing systems, law
codes, ways of recruiting government officials, and taxation systems, often
modifying them to suit their own societies. Some, like the Gaochang king and the
rulers of Korea, Japan, and Tibet, patronized Buddhism and adopted Tang policies.
Others, particularly in South and Southeast Asia, emulated South Asian monarchs
and built temples to deities such as Shiva (SHIH-vah) and Vishnu (VISH-new), the
most important deities in the emerging belief system of Hinduism (see Topic 2A).
The individual decisions of these rulers resulted in the religious reorientation of the
region. In 100 C.E., a disunited India was predominantly Buddhist, while the
unified China of the Han dynasty embraced Legalist, Confucian, and Daoist beliefs.
By 1000 C.E., the various kingdoms of India and Southeast Asia had become
largely Hindu, while China, Japan, Korea, and Tibet had become Buddhist. This
religious shift did not occur because a ruler of an intact empire, such as
Constantine in the West, recognized a single religion. It was the result of many
decisions taken by multiple rulers in different places over the course of centuries.
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1. Buddhism and the Revival of Empire in China, 100–1000
With the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 C.E., China broke up into different regions,
each governed by local military leaders. When the first Buddhist missionaries from
the Kushan empire arrived in China during the first and second centuries C.E., they
faced great difficulties in spreading their religion. Buddhist teachings urged
potential converts to abandon family obligations and adopt a celibate lifestyle, yet
Confucian China was one of the most family-oriented societies in the world. The
chakravartin ideal of the universal Buddhist ruler, though, appealed to leaders of
regions no longer united under the Han dynasty. During the Sui dynasty, which
reunited China, and its long-lived successor, the Tang dynasty, Chinese emperors
introduced important additions to the Qin/Han blueprint for empire, additions that
remained integral to Chinese governance until the end of dynastic rule in the early
1900s.
Buddhism in China, 100–589
The first Chinese who worshiped the Buddha did so because they thought him
capable of miracles; some sources report that his image shone brightly and could
fly through the air. The earliest Chinese document to mention Buddhism, from 65
C.E., tells of a prince worshiping the Buddha alongside the Daoist deity Laozi
indicating that the Chinese initially thought the Buddha was a Daoist deity.
After the Han dynasty ended in 220 C.E., no other regional dynasty succeeded in
uniting the empire until 589. Historians call this long period of disunity the Six
Dynasties (220–589 C.E.). During this time, Buddhist miracle workers began to win
the first converts. Historians of Buddhism treat these miracle accounts in the same
way as historians of Christianity do biblical accounts. Non-believers may be
skeptical that the events occurred as described, but people at the time found (and
modern devotees continue to find) these tales compelling, and they are crucial to
our understanding of how these religions gained their first adherents.
One of the most effective early missionaries was a Central Asian man named
Fotudeng (d. 349), who claimed that the Buddha had given him the ability to bring
rain, cure the sick, and foresee the future. In 310, Fotudeng managed to convert a
local ruler named Shi Le (274–333). Shi Le asked Fotudeng to perform a miracle to
demonstrate the power of Buddhism. A later biography explains what happened:
“Thereupon he took his begging bowl, filled it with water, burned incense, and said
a spell over it. In a moment there sprang up blue lotus flowers whose brightness
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and color dazzled the eyes.” A Buddhist symbol, the lotus is a beautiful flower that
grows from a root coming out of a dirty lake bottom; similarly, Fotudeng explained,
human beings could free their minds from the impediments of worldly living and
attain enlightenment. As usual with miracle tales, we have no way of knowing
what actually happened, but Fotudeng’s miracle so impressed Shi Le that he
granted the Buddhists tax-free land so they could build monasteries in north China.
The son of a Xiongnu (SHEE-awng-new) chieftain, Shi Le could never become a
good Confucian-style ruler because he spoke but could not read or write Chinese.
Buddhism appealed to him precisely because it offered an alternative to
Confucianism. He could aspire to be a chakravartin ruler.
Fotudeng tried to persuade ordinary Chinese to join the new monasteries and
nunneries, but most people were extremely reluctant to take vows of celibacy. If
they did not have children, future generations would not be able to perform
ancestor worship for them. A Buddhist book written in the early sixth century, The
Lives of the Nuns, portrays the dilemma of would-be converts. When one young
woman told her father that she did not want to marry, he replied, “You ought to
marry. How can you be like this?” She explained, “I want to free all living beings
from suffering. How much more, then, do I want to free my two parents!” But her
father was not persuaded by her promise that she could free him from the endless
cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. When Fotudeng met the woman’s father, he
promised: “If you consent to her plan [to become a nun], she indeed shall raise her
family to glory and bring you blessings and honor.” Deeply impressed, the father
agreed to let her enter a nunnery. Many families made a compromise; they allowed
one child to join the Buddhist order and transfer merit to the other children, who
married and had children.
Buddhists continued to win converts during the fifth and sixth centuries. They
gained support because Buddhist teachings offered more hope about the afterlife
than did Confucian and Daoist teachings.
The original Indian belief in the transmigration of souls as expressed in the
Upanishads (oo-PAHN-ih-shahdz) presumed that someone’s soul in this life stayed
intact and could be reborn in a different body. But the Buddhists propounded the
no-self doctrine, which taught that there is no such thing as a fixed self. Each
person is a constantly shifting group of five aggregates—form, feelings, perceptions,
karmic constituents, and consciousness—that change from one second to the next.
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Accordingly, there is no self that can be reborn in the next life. This idea proved
extremely difficult for people to grasp and was much debated as a result.
Gradually, Chinese Buddhists abandoned the strict no-self doctrine and began to
describe a series of hells, much like the indigenous Chinese concept of the
underground prison, where people went when they died.
By the year 600, Buddhism was firmly implanted in the Chinese countryside. A
history of Buddhism written in that year explained that three types of monasteries
existed. In the largest 47 monasteries, completely financed by the central
government, educated monks conducted regular Buddhist rituals on behalf of the
emperor and his immediate family. In the second tier were 839 monasteries that
depended on powerful families for support. The final category included over
30,000 smaller shrines that dotted the Chinese countryside. Dependent on local
people for contributions, the monks who worked in these shrines were often
uneducated. The number of monks never exceeded more than 1 percent of China’s
total population, which was about 50 million in 600.8
China Reunified, 589–907
After more than three hundred years of disunity, the founder of the Sui dynasty
reunified China in 589. Then, in less than thirty years, the Tang dynasty succeeded
the Sui. The Sui and Tang emperors embraced the chakravartin ideal, for they
hoped Buddhism would help to bind their many subjects together. The Tang
emperors ruled more territory than any dynasty until the mid-eighteenth century,
and Chinese openness to the influences of Central Asia made Tang art and music
particularly beautiful.
Consciously modeling himself on the great chakravartin ruler Ashoka, whose
support for the Buddhist order was well known in China, the Sui founder gave
money for the construction of monasteries all over China. He also built a new
capital at Chang’an, the former capital of the Han dynasty, with a gridded street
plan. The city housed 120 new Buddhist monasteries.
In 604, when the Sui founder died, his son succeeded him and led his armies on a
disastrous campaign in Korea. He was soon overthrown by one of his generals,
who went on to found the Tang dynasty. After only eight years of rule, in 626, the
Tang founder’s son, Emperor Taizong, overthrew his father in a bloody coup in
which he killed one brother and ordered an officer to kill another.
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In 645, when Xuanzang wrote asking permission to return, the emperor’s brilliant
military leadership had succeeded in extending Tang China’s borders deep into
Central Asia. Taizong was able to fulfill the chakravartin ideal by making generous
donations of money and land to Buddhist monasteries and by supporting famous
monks like Xuanzang.
One of Taizong’s greatest accomplishments was a comprehensive law code, the
Tang Code, that was designed to help local magistrates govern and adjudicate
disputes, a major part of their job. It taught them, for example, how to distinguish
between manslaughter and murder and specified the punishments for each. Tang
dynasty governance continued many Han dynasty innovations, particularly respect
for Confucian ideals coupled with Legalist punishments and regulations.
The Tang Code also laid out the equal-field system, which was the basis of the
Tang dynasty tax system. Under the provisions of the equal-field system, the
government conducted a census of all inhabitants and drew up registers listing
each household and its members every three years. Dividing households into nine
ranks on the basis of wealth, it allocated to each householder a certain amount of
land. It also fixed the tax obligations of each individual. Historians disagree about
whether the equal-field system took effect throughout all of the empire, but they
concur that Tang dynasty officials had an unprecedented degree of control over
their 60 million subjects.
Emperor Taizong made Confucianism the basis of the educational system. The
Tang set an important precedent by reserving the highest 5 percent of posts in the
government for those who passed a written examination on the Confucian classics.
Taizong thus combined the chakravartin ideal with Confucian policies to create a
new model of rulership for East Asia.
One Tang emperor extended the chakravartin ideal to specific government
measures: Emperor Wu (r. 685–705), the only woman to rule China as emperor in
her own right. Emperor Wu founded a new dynasty, the Zhou, that supplanted the
Tang from 690 to 705.
The chakravartin ideal appealed to Emperor Wu because an obscure Buddhist text,
The Great Cloud Sutra, prophesied that a kingdom ruled by a woman would be
transformed into a Buddhist paradise. (The word sutra means the words of the
Buddha recorded in written form.) Emperor Wu ordered the construction of
Buddhist monasteries in each part of China so that The Great Cloud Sutra could be
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read aloud. She issued edicts forbidding the slaughter of animals or the eating of
fish, both violations of Greater Vehicle teachings, and in 693 she officially
proclaimed herself a chakravartin ruler. In 705 she was overthrown in a palace
coup, and the Tang dynasty was restored. Documents and portrayals of the time do
not indicate that Emperor Wu was particularly aware of being female. Like the
female pharaoh Hatshepsut, Emperor Wu portrayed herself as a legitimate dynastic
ruler.
The Long Decline of the Tang Dynasty, 755–907
Historians today divide the Tang dynasty into two halves: 618–755 and 755–907.
In the first half, the Tang emperors ruled with great success. They enjoyed extensive
military victories in Central Asia, unprecedented control over their subjects through
the equal-field system, and great internal stability. The first signs of decline came in
the early 700s, when tax officials reported insufficient revenues from the equal-field
system. Then in 751 a Tang army deep in Central Asia met defeat by an army sent
by the Abbasid caliph, ruler of much of the Islamic world. This defeat marked the
end of Tang expansion into Central Asia.
In the capital, however, all officials were transfixed by the conflict between the
emperor and his leading general, who was rumored to be having an affair with the
emperor’s favorite consort, a court beauty named Precious Consort Yang. In 755
General An Lushan led a mutiny of the army against the emperor. The Tang
dynasty suppressed the rebellion in 763, but it never regained full control of the
provinces. The equal-field system collapsed, and the dynasty had to institute new
taxes that produced much less revenue.
In 841, a new emperor, Emperor Huichang, came to the throne. Thinking that he
would increase revenues if he could collect taxes from the 300,000 tax-exempt
monks and nuns, in 845 he ordered the closure of almost all Buddhist monasteries
except for a few large monasteries in major cities. Although severe, Huichang’s
decrees had few lasting effects.
The eighth and ninth centuries saw the discovery by faithful Buddhists of a new
technology that altered the course of world history. In China, devout Buddhists
paid monks to copy memorized texts to generate merit for themselves and their
families. Sometime in the eighth century, believers realized that they could make
multiple copies of a prayer or picture of a deity if they used woodblock printing.
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At first Buddhists printed multiple copies of single sheets; later they used glue to
connect the pages into a long book. The world’s earliest surviving printed book,
from 868, is a Buddhist text, The Diamond Sutra.
After 755, no Tang emperor managed to solve the problem of dwindling revenues.
In 907, when a rebel deposed the last Tang emperor, who had been held prisoner
since 885, China broke apart into different regional dynasties and was not reunited
until 960.
The Tang dynasty governed by combining support for Buddhist clergy and
monasteries with strong armies, clear laws, and civil service examinations. In so
doing, it established a high standard of rulership for all subsequent Chinese
dynasties and all rulers of neighboring kingdoms.
The Song Dynasty in China
The Tang dynasty (618–907), permanently weakened by the An Lushan rebellion of
755, came to an end in 907. China then broke apart until 960, when the founder of
the Song dynasty (960–1276) reunited the empire. The dramatic rise and fall of
Chinese dynasties sometimes left the political structure basically unchanged, and
this happened during the transition from the Tang dynasty to the Song. The new
Song emperor presided over the central government. Almost all government
officials were recruited by means of the civil service examinations, making the
Song the world’s first genuine bureaucracy. Despite the loss of north China to the
Jin, Song officials successfully managed the transfer of the central government to a
new capital in the south, where they presided over two centuries of unprecedented
economic growth.
The Growth of Civil Service Examinations
The Song dynasty was the only government in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century
world to recruit its bureaucrats via merit, as measured by a grueling series of
examinations. At the time of the dynasty’s founding in 960, civil service
examinations had been in use for over a thousand years. But it was only in the
Song era that the proportion of the bureaucracy who had passed the civil service
examinations exceeded 90 percent. The tests were not always fair, but they were
more equitable than the system of appointments by heredity or social position used
elsewhere in the world. As a result, the Song era saw a decisive shift from
government by aristocracy to government by merit-based bureaucracy.
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During the Song dynasty, exam candidates took two rounds of exams: the first in
their home prefecture and the second in the capital. The emperor himself
conducted the final stage, the palace examinations, in which those placing highest
in the written exams were examined orally. Those placing highest were given
prestigious entry-level jobs, because even they had to work their way up the
bureaucracy.
The government examiners devised different types of exams over the centuries.
Successful candidates had to demonstrate mastery of a classic text, compose
poetry, or write essays about problems the central government might face, such as
inflation or defeating border peoples. Those who wrote the questions were seeking
to test a broad range of learning with the expectation that they could select the
most educated and so, they believed, the most virtuous, men to become officials.
The examinations were not open to everyone. Local officials permitted only young
men from well-established families to register for the first round of exams. Unlike
farmers’ sons, who were lucky to attend village school for a year or two, the sons of
privileged families had the time and money to study for the exams, often at home
with a tutor. Preparation required long years of study.
In the eleventh century, successful exam candidates tended to come from a small
group of one hundred families living in the capital, Kaifeng. This was the elite into
which Li Qingzhao and Zhao Mingcheng were born, and both her father and her
father-in-law had received the highest possible degree of advanced scholar.
As the population grew and printed books became more widely available,
examinations became more competitive. By 1270, in some prefectures in southeast
China (particularly in modern Fujian), as many as seven hundred men competed
for a single place in the first round of the examinations. The high number of
candidates must have increased the literacy rate: some historians believe that one
in ten men, but many fewer women, could read.
The examinations were outwardly fair, but in fact, the sons and relatives of high
officials were eligible to take a less competitive series of examinations, an
advantage called the shadow privilege. Since Zhao Mingcheng’s father was grand
councilor, the highest official in the bureaucracy, his shadow privilege extended to
his sons, grandsons, sons-in-law, brothers, cousins, and nephews. In the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, as more men became eligible for the shadow privilege,
fewer candidates took the open examinations.
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As competition increased, so did the pressure to cheat. Some candidates paid
others to take the exams in their place, copied others’ answers, or bribed graders.
Crafty students also bought commercial aids, like miniature books with tiny
characters the size of a fly that they could smuggle into the examination halls.
2. State, Society, and Religion in Korea and Japan, to 1000
In Korea and Japan, rulers introduced Buddhism to their subjects because they
hoped to match the accomplishments, particularly the military success, of the Tang
dynasty. By the year 1000, both Korea and Japan had joined a larger East Asian
cultural sphere in which people read and wrote Chinese characters, studied
Confucian teachings in school, emulated the political institutions of the Tang, and
even ate with chopsticks.
Buddhism and Regional Kingdoms in Korea, to 1000
The northern part of the Korean peninsula, which came under Han rule in 108
B.C.E., remained under Chinese dominance until 313 C.E., when the king of the
northern Koguryo (KOH-guh-ree-oh) region overthrew the last Chinese ruler.
Because the Chinese presence had been limited to military garrisons, there was
little lasting influence.
During this time, Korea was divided into different small chiefdoms on the verge of
becoming states. The three most important ones were Koguryo (traditionally 37
B.C.E.–668 C.E.), Paekche (traditionally 18 B.C.E.–660 C.E.), and Silla (traditionally
57 B.C.E.–935 C.E.). Historians call these dates “traditional” because they are
based on much later legends, not contemporary evidence. Constantly vying with
each other for territory and influence, the three kingdoms adopted Buddhism at
different times but for the same reason: their rulers hoped to strengthen their
dynasties.
Before the adoption of Buddhism, the residents of the Korean peninsula prayed to
local deities or nature spirits for good health and good harvests. The vast majority
lived in small agricultural villages and grew rice. The ruling families of the Koguryo
and Paekche (PECK-jeh) kingdoms adopted Buddhism in the 370s and 380s and
welcomed Buddhist missionaries from China. Like Chinese rulers, the Koguryo and
Paekche kings combined patronage for Buddhism with support for Confucian
education. They established Confucian academies where students could study
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Chinese characters, Confucian classics, the histories, and different philosophical
works in Chinese.
The circumstances accompanying the adoption of Buddhism by the Silla (SHE-luh)
royal house illustrate how divided many Koreans were about the new religion. King
Pophung (r. 514–540), whose name means “King who promoted the Dharma,”
wanted to patronize Buddhism but feared the opposition of powerful families who
had passed laws against it. Sometime between 527 and 529, he persuaded one of
his courtiers to build a shrine to the Buddha. However, since such activity was
banned, the king had no choice but to order the courtier’s beheading. The king and
his subject prayed for a miracle. An early history of Korea describes the moment of
execution: “Down came the sword on the monk’s neck, and up flew his head
spouting blood as white as milk.” The miracle, we are told, silenced the opposition,
and Silla became Buddhist.
By the middle of the sixth century, all three Korean kingdoms had adopted proBuddhist policies, and all sent government officials and monks to different regional
kingdoms within China. When the delegations returned, they taught their
countrymen what they had learned. With the support of the royal family, Buddhist
monasteries were built in major cities and in the countryside, but ordinary people
continued to worship the same local deities they had in pre-Buddhist times.
From 598 into the 640s, the Sui and Tang dynasties led several attacks on the
Korean peninsula, all unsuccessful. As a result, in the middle of the seventh
century, the same three kingdoms—Paekche, Koguryo, and Silla—still ruled a
divided Korea. In 660, the Silla kingdom allied with the Tang dynasty in hopes of
defeating the Paekche and Koguryo kingdoms.
The combined Silla-Tang forces defeated first the Paekche and then, in 668, the
Koguryo dynasty. By 675, the Silla forces had pushed Tang armies back to the
northern edges of the Korean peninsula, and the Silla king ruled a united Korea
largely on his own.
Silla’s rule ushered in a period of stability that lasted for two and a half centuries.
Silla kings offered different types of support to Buddhism. Several rulers followed
the example of Ashoka and the Sui founder in building pagodas throughout their
kingdom. One Chinese Buddhist text that entered Korea offered Buddhist devotees
merit if they commissioned sets of tiny identical pagodas that contained small
woodblock-printed texts, usually Buddhist charms. The text said that ninety-nine
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such miniatures were the spiritual equivalent of building ninety-nine thousand
lifesize pagodas. The Koreans adopted the brand-new Chinese innovation of
woodblock printing.
The Silla rulers implemented some measures of Tang rule, but not the equal-field
system or the Confucian examination system, which were not suited to the stratified
Korean society of the seventh and eighth centuries. The bone-rank system classed
all Korean families into seven different categories. The true-bone classification was
reserved for the highest-born aristocratic families, those eligible to be king. Below
them were six other ranks in descending order. No one in the true-bone
classification could marry anyone outside that group, and the only way to lose truebone status was to be found guilty of a crime. The rigid stratification of the bonerank system precluded civil service examinations.
The Silla kingdom entered a period of decline after 780. From that time on,
different branches of the royal family fought each other for control of the throne,
yet no one managed to rule for long.
The Emergence of Japan
Japan is an island chain of four large islands and many smaller ones. Like Korea,
Japan had no indigenous writing system, so archaeologists must piece together the
island’s early history from archaeological materials and later sources like the
Chronicle of Japan (Nihon shoki) (knee-HOHN SHOW-kee), a year-by-year
account written in 720. The royal Yamato (YAH-mah-toe) house, this book claims,
was directly descended from the sun-goddess Amaterasu (AH-mah-TAY-rah-soo).
The indigenous religion of Japan, called Shinto (SHIN-toe), included the worship of
different spirits of trees, streams, and mountains, as well as rulers. People buried
their chieftains with goods used in daily life and distinctive clay figurines, called
haniwa (HAH-knee-wah), a modern term meaning “clay rings.”
In the fifth and sixth centuries, many Koreans fled the political instability of the
disunited peninsula to settle in the relative peace of Japan only 150 miles (240 km)
away. These Korean refugees significantly influenced the inhabitants of the islands.
The Yamato kings gave titles modeled on the Korean bone-rank system to powerful
Japanese clans. They had the most sustained contact with the Paekche kingdom
because the two states had been allied against the Silla kingdom.
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Once the Paekche royal house adopted Buddhism, it began to pressure its clients,
the Yamato clan, to follow suit. In 538, the Paekche ambassador brought a gift of
Buddhist texts and images for the ruler of Japan, but the most powerful Japanese
families hesitated to support the new religion. The conflict among supporters and
opponents of Buddhism lasted for nearly fifty years, during which the Paekche
rulers continued to send Buddhist writings, monks, and nuns.
Two miracles played a key role in persuading the Japanese to adopt Buddhism. The
first occurred in 584, when Soga no Umako, the leader of the powerful Soga
family, which had provided the Yamato clan with many wives, saw a small
fragment of bone believed to be from the original Buddha’s body. Skeptical of the
relic’s authenticity, he tried to pulverize it, but his hammer broke, and when he
threw the relic into water, it floated up or down on command. As a result, Soga no
Umako became an enthusiastic supporter of Buddhism. Three years later, in 587,
the thirteen-year-old Soga prince Shotoku (574–622) went into battle against the
powerful families opposed to Buddhism. Prince Shotoku vowed that, if the Soga
clan won the battle, their government would support Buddhism. The pro-Buddhist
forces won. These miracle tales illustrate the early stages of state formation as the
Soga family tried to unify the region through Buddhism. For the next forty years, the
Japanese court depended on Korean monks to learn about Buddhism. Only in the
630s were there enough knowledgeable Japanese monks at court to conduct
Buddhist rituals correctly without Korean guidance.
Chinese forces never threatened Japan as they had Korea, and Japan embarked on
an ambitious program to learn from China. Between 600 and 614, it sent four
missions to China, and then a further fifteen during the Tang dynasty. A large
mission could have as many as five hundred participants, including officials,
Buddhist monks, students, and translators. Some Japanese stayed in China for as
long as thirty years.
In 645, the Fujiwara clan overthrew the Soga family, and the Yamato clan
remained the titular rulers of Japan. The Fujiwara continued to introduce Chinese
institutions, particularly those laid out in the Tang Code like the equal-field system.
However, they modified the original Chinese rules so that members of powerful
families received more land than they would have in China.
The Fujiwara rulers sponsored Buddhist ceremonies on behalf of the state and the
royal family at state-financed monasteries. The Fujiwara clan built their first
Chinese-style capital at Fujiwara and the second at Nara in 710, which marked the
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beginning of the Nara period (710–794). Both were modeled on the gridded street
plan of Chang’an. In 794, the start of the Heian (HEY-on) period (794–1185), the
Fujiwara shifted their capital to Kyoto, where it remained for nearly one thousand
years.
Gradually the Fujiwara lessened their efforts to learn from the Chinese. The final
official delegation went to China in 838. Because Japanese, like Korean, was in a
different language family, Chinese characters did not capture the full meaning of
Japanese. In the ninth century, the Japanese developed an alphabet, called kana
(KAH-nah), that allowed them to write Japanese words as they were pronounced.
A Japanese woman named Murasaki Shikibu (MOO-rah-sock-ee SHE-key-boo)
used only kana to write one of the world’s most important works of literature, The
Tale of Genji, in 1000. Some have called it the world’s first novel. The book relates
the experiences of a young prince as he grows up in the court. Lady Murasaki spent
her entire life at court, and her novel reflects the complex system of etiquette that
had developed among the Japanese aristocracy. For example, lovers choose sheets
of paper from multiple shades, each with its own significance, before writing notes
to each other. While the highest members of Japan’s aristocracy could read and
write—men using both Chinese characters and kana and women more often only
kana—the vast majority of their countrymen remained illiterate.
The Decline of the Heian Court
Gradually the Fujiwara nobles began to entrust responsibility for local government,
policing, and tax collection to their warriors, known as samurai, literally “one who
serves.” Though often of humble origins, a small number of warriors had achieved
wealth and power by the late 1000s. By the middle 1100s the nobility had lost
control, and civil war between rival warrior clans engulfed the capital.
Military clans acquired increasing importance during the period 1156–1185, and
warfare between rival families culminated in the establishment of the Kamakura
Shogunate (kah-mah-KOO-rah) in eastern Honshu, far from the old religious and
political center at Kyoto. The standing of the Fujiwara family fell as nobles and the
emperor hurried to accommodate the new warlords. The Tale of the Heike, an
anonymously composed thirteenth-century epic account of the clan war, reflects a
Buddhist appreciation of the impermanence of worldly things, a view that became
common among the new warrior class. This class eventually absorbed some of the
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Fujiwara aristocratic values, but the monopoly of power by a nonmilitary civil elite
had come to an end.
By 1000, Japan had become part of the East Asian cultural realm. Although its
rulers were predominantly Buddhist, they supported Confucian education and used
the Tang Code as a model of governance. The Fujiwara family modified some
Chinese institutions, like the equal-field system, to better suit Japanese society.
From Aristocratic to Feudal Japan
Although the Japanese emperors had earlier looked to China as a model, in 900
certain warrior clans gradually gained power and forced the emperor to retire to
Kyoto, abandon Chinese-style government, and remain as a figurehead. In 1185,
the Minamoto (ME-nah-MOE-toe) clan defeated its rivals and established a new
capital at Kamakura, a city just outside modern Tokyo.
During the Kamakura period (1185–1333), political power rested in the hands of
the shogun, or general, who claimed to govern on behalf of the emperor and
appointed members of powerful clans to office. The shogun distributed land and
privileges to his followers. In return they paid him tribute and supplied him with
soldiers. This stable, but decentralized, system depended on balancing the power
of regional warlords. Lords in the north and east of Japan’s main island were
remote from those in the south and west.
Between 1333 and 1338 the emperor Go-Daigo broke the centuries-old tradition of
imperial seclusion and aloofness from government and tried to reclaim power from
the shoguns. This ignited a civil war that destroyed the Kamakura system. In 1338
the Ashikaga Shogunate (ah-shee-KAH-gah) took control at the imperial center of
Kyoto.
Provincial warlords enjoyed renewed independence. Around their imposing
castles, they sponsored the development of market towns, religious institutions, and
schools. The application of technologies imported in earlier periods, including
water wheels, improved plows, and Champa rice, increased agricultural
productivity. Growing wealth and relative peace stimulated artistic creativity,
mostly reflecting Zen Buddhist beliefs held by the warrior elite. In the simple
elegance of architecture and gardens, in the ritual of the tea ceremony, and in the
eerie, stylized performances of the Noh theater and the contemplative landscapes
of artists, the aesthetic code of Zen became established in the Ashikaga era.
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Despite the technological advancement, artistic productivity, and rapid
urbanization of this period, competition among warlords and their followers led to
regional wars. By the later 1400s these conflicts resulted in the near destruction of
the warlords. The great Onin War in 1477 left Kyoto devastated and the Ashikaga
Shogunate a central government in name only. Ambitious but low-ranking warriors,
some with links to trade with the continent, began to scramble for control of the
provinces. Japan entered its most feudal, de-centralized period that would last until
a new group of powerful warlords emerged to unify the country at the end of the
16th century.
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