III. THE IMPERIAL AGE
The emperors—The aristocracy—The influence of China—The Golden Age of Kyoto—Decadence
From that time onward the emperor enjoyed impressive titles. Sometimes he was called Tenshi, or “Son of Heaven”; usually Tenno, or “Heavenly King”; rarely Mikado, or “August Gateway.” He had the distinction of receiving a new appellation after his death, and of being known in history by an individual name quite different from that which he bore during his life. To ensure the continuity of the imperial line, the emperor was allowed to have as many wives or consorts as he desired; and the succession went not necessarily to his first son, but to any of his progeny who seemed to him, or to the Warwicks of the time, most likely to prove strongest, or weakest, on the throne. In the early days of the Kyoto period the emperors inclined to piety; some of them abdicated to become Buddhist monks, and one of them forbade fishing as an insult to Buddha.25 Yozei was a troublesome exception who illustrated the perils of active monarchy: he made people climb trees, and then shot them down with bow and arrow; he seized maidens in the street, tied them up with lute strings, and cast them into ponds; it pleased His Majesty to ride through the capital and to belabor the citizens with his whip; at last his subjects deposed him in an outbreak of political impiety rare in the history of Japan.26 In 794 the headquarters of the government were removed from Nara to Nagaoka, and shortly thereafter to Kyoto (“Capital of Peace”); this remained the capital during those four centuries (794-1192) which most historians agree in calling the Golden Age of Japan. By 1190 Kyoto had a population of half a million, more than any European city of the time except Constantinople and Cordova.27 One part of the town was given over to the cottages and hovels of the populace, which seems to have lived cheerfully in its humble poverty; another part, discreetly secluded, contained the gardens and palaces of the aristocracy and the Imperial Family. The people of the court were appropriately called “Dwellers above the Clouds.”28For here as elsewhere the progress of civilization and technology had brought an increase in social distinctions; the rough equality of pioneer days had given way to the inequality that comes inevitably when increasing wealth is distributed among men ac cording to their diverse capacity, character, and privilege. Great families arose like the Fujiwara, the Taira, the Minamoto and the Sugawara, who made and unmade emperors, and fought with one another in the lusty manner of the Italian Renaissance. Sugawara Michizane endeared himself to Japan by his patronage of literature, and is now worshiped as the God of Letters, in whose honor a school holiday is declared on the twenty-fifth day of every month; and the young Shogun Minamoto Sanetomo distinguished himself by composing on the morning before his assassination this simple stanza, in the chastest Japanese style:
If I should come no more,
Plum-tree beside my door,
Forget not thou the spring,
Faithfully blossoming.29
Under the enlightened Daigo (898-930), greatest of the emperors set up by the Fujiwara clan, Japan continued to absorb, and began to rival, the culture and luxury of China, then flourishing at its height under the T’ang. Having taken their religion from the Middle Kingdom, the Japanese proceeded to take from the same source their dress and their sports, their cooking and their writing, their poetry and their administrative methods, their music and their arts, their gardens and their architecture; even their handsome capitals, Nara and Kyoto, were laid out in imitation of Ch’ang-an.30 Japan imported Chinese culture a thousand years ago as it imported Europe and America in our own day: first with haste, then with discrimination; jealously maintaining its own spirit and character, zealously adapting the new ways to ancient and native ends.
Stimulated by its great neighbor, and protected by orderly and continuous government, Japan now entered that Engi period (901-922) which is accounted the acme of the Golden Age.* Wealth accumulated, and was centered in a fashionable life of luxury, refinement and culture hardly equaled again until the courts of the Medici and the salons of the French Enlightenment. Kyoto became the Paris and Versailles of France, elegant in poetry and dress, practised in manners and arts, and setting for all the nation the standards of learning and taste. Every appetite was full and free; the cuisine invented novelties for the palate and heaped up feasts for gourmands and gourmets; and fornication or adultery was winked at as a very venial sin.32 Silks of fine texture clothed every lord and lady, and harmonies of color wavered on every sleeve. Music and the dance adorned the life of temple and court, and graced aristocratic homes attractively landscaped without, and luxuriously finished with interiors of bronze or pearl, ivory or gold, or wood most delicately carved.33 Literature flourished, and morals decayed.
Such epochs of glittering refinement tend to be brief, for they rest insecurely upon concentrated wealth that may at any moment be destroyed by the fluctuations of trade, the impatience of the exploited, or the fortunes of war. The extravagance of the court finally ruined the solvency of the state; the exaltation of culture above ability filled administrative posts with incompetent poetasters, under whose scented noses corruption multiplied unnoticed; at last offices were sold to the highest bidder.34 Crime rose among the poor as luxury mounted among the rich; brigands and pirates infested the roads and the seas, and preyed impartially upon the people and the emperor; tax-gatherers were robbed as they brought their revenues to the court. Gangs of bandits were organized in the provinces, and even in the capital itself; for a time Japan’s most notorious criminal, like ours, lived in open splendor, too powerful to be arrested or annoyed.35 The neglect of martial habits and virtues, or military organization and defense, left the government exposed to assault from any ruthless buccaneer. The great families raised their own armies, and began an epoch of civil war in which they contended chaotically for the right to name the emperor. The emperor himself was every day more helpless, while the heads of the clans became again almost independent lords. Once more history moved in its ancient oscillation between a powerful central government and a feudal decentralized regime.