More than 17,000 people packed the courtyard of Nara’s grand new temple, the Todaiji, to dedicate a Buddhist statue in the spring of 752. With good reason, for this was no ordinary statue. Rising more than sixty feet from its pedestal, the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, was made of some three million pounds of metal, contributed by more than 350,000 people, and covered with gold. It sat in a cavernous wooden sanctuary, 150 feet high and 300 feet long, surrounded by a blue-tiled roof, white walls, and lacquered pillars. And it looked out, benignly, on an audience that included the reigning empress Koken, along with her father, the powerful retired emperor Shomu, and guests from across the continent.
The celebrants had to wonder what had happened to Japan. A century earlier, the country had not even had a permanent capital. Its rulers had governed from modest halls in hilly Asuka, fifteen miles south of Nara; control of the throne was in dispute. Now, the Todaiji ceremony bespoke not just power but splendor and permanence, not just the emergence of Buddhism as an official religion but the emperor’s dominance over a large bureaucracy. And the government had located itself in a city of perhaps 100,000 people, modeled after the Chinese capital of Chang’an. The Yamato clan was in total control (at least so it seemed on this dedication day), presiding over a flourishing cultural life and government that would set standards for generations to come.
The change had not, however, come easily. If the early 600s had seen the emergence of the Yamato line under Suiko and Shotoku Taishi, the mid-600s had produced an explosion of infighting within that line. “Great reforms” notwithstanding, the Soga overthrow precipitated a generation of violence in which one ambitious family then another challenged the throne, and peoples far to the east of Asuka sang plaintively: “Watching the enemy, while going through the woods . . . we fought, but now we are starving.” The culmination of the struggles came in 672, when the king Temmu established himself in power after a brutal civil war and then, with his wife/successor Jito, launched a series of centralizing reforms that turned the imperial state into something beyond the imaginings even of Suiko and Shotoku. Driven partly by fear of an invasion from expansive new dynasties in China and Korea and partly by a determination to solidify the control of the ruling line, Temmu and Jito pushed through programs in the late 600s that made an emperor-centered, Chinese-style administrative structure permanent.
Temmu first strengthened Japan’s military forces, creating an army of draftees and placing regional units under the heads of loyal families, whose court ranks were based on how closely they were related to the throne. He also began compiling the Asuka Kiyomihara Code, Japan’s first set of joint legal and administrative regulations, confirming kingly prerogatives and bringing greater regularity to government. And he and Jito went further than their predecessors in asserting his clan’s divine origins. Though the records are not entirely clear, Temmu appears to have started the custom of issuing commands under the religious title Manifest Deity, and Jito, who claimed that Temmu had descended from the sun goddess, is regarded as the first ruler to have used the title today translated as emperor: tenno, Heavenly Sovereign.
Accompanying this rise in imperial dominance was a shift in Japan’s relations with the continent. In 661, a decade before Temmu’s ascendance, a large Japanese fleet had sailed for Korea, intending to support pro-Japanese elements then contending for control of the peninsula. The fleet met with disaster, however, at the hands of a combined Chinese-Korean force off the southwestern Korean coast; as the chronicles described it, “Many of our men were thrown into the water and drowned, and our ships were unable to maneuver. Commander Echi no Takatsu prayed to heaven for victory, gnashed his teeth in anger . . . and died in battle.” That defeat brought overseas military activities to an end—for nearly a millennium. Japan’s rulers also halted diplomatic and study missions for several decades, convinced that defense must take precedence over expansion. They still would model their institutions on China and employ Korean immigrants as advisers, craftsmen, and farmers, but they would not spend money on foreign adventures.
The most visible evidence of increasing centralization was the construction of a permanent capital city. Earlier palaces had typically been abandoned when a ruler left the throne. Under Jito, a site just north of Asuka called Fujiwarakyo was selected by feng shui practitioners to become an enduring seat of government in 694. Modeled after Chinese capitals, it was laid out on a grid, with the palace at the north, seven broad streets running north-south, and twelve other avenues running east-west. It had canals, bridges, temples, parks, and markets, and as many as 40,000 residents. When it burned down early in the eighth century, after housing the governments of three successive emperors, however, it was not rebuilt.
In its place, the country established its first permanent capital, Nara, in 710. The site was selected by the reigning empress, Gemmei, in consultation with Fujiwara Fuhito, head of the family that had become the emperors’ most influential advisors. Laid out, once again, on a grid with the palace at the north, it covered seventy-two square blocks, stretched eight miles in circumference, and eventually boasted a population of 100,000. Within it were forty Buddhist temples, a 130-foot-wide avenue running south from the palace, markets bustling with glassware, flutes, and foodstuffs from as far away as Chang’an and Persia, and streets filled with visitors from across Asia. Except for the fact that they felt no need to build a city wall, the builders adhered to Chinese styles in everything, from the placement of the palace to the layout of the streets: remarkable evidence of the respect with which Japan’s rulers continued to hold the Middle Kingdom. Nara would serve as capital through eight imperial reigns (four female, four male), remaining the seat of government for seventy-five years and producing a plethora of new law codes, religious practices, and cultural styles. It appears to have been during these years that people began referring to their realm as Nihon.
Nara’s success sprang in part from a series of remarkable and interesting rulers. The first two, both women, oversaw the beginning of copper mining, the first minting of coins, and the issuance of both the great Yoro legal code and the Nihon shoki. Empress Koken sat on the throne twice, first when the Great Buddha was dedicated and then during a darker time in the 760s, when the ambitious Buddhist priest Dokyo won her affections and nearly stole the throne. The most influential Nara emperor was Shomu, a son-in-law of Fujiwara Fuhito, who took the throne in 724 and dominated official life for more than thirty years, even though he abdicated in 749. Shomu was an activist administrator who proclaimed the absolute authority of the tenno. “It is We who possess the wealth of the land,” he proclaimed in 743; “it is We who possess all the power in the land.” To make that proclamation reality, he sent military excursions to the north, into the southern Emishi regions, as well as into areas still incompletely controlled in Kyushu. He became the first ruler to wear Chinese-style monarchical robes. And he did more than anyone since Shotoku to define the relationship between state authority and religion.
Imbued with a fervent faith in both Shinto and Buddhism, Shomu believed that successful rule depended on the ruler’s virtuous behavior, a belief that was reinforced by a series of natural disasters and economic problems in the 730s, including a smallpox epidemic estimated to have taken the lives of up to 70 percent of the population in some regions, including all four of Fuhito’s sons. Interpreting those calamities as punishment for his own profligate ways and moved by the example of his pious wife, who was admired for opening medical clinics and caring for the needy, he threw himself into the promotion of Buddhism. He built the Great Buddha, pressuring 2.6 million people (nearly half of Japan’s population) to make donations to pay for its erection, and conscripting resentful, sometimes rebellious, peasants to do the construction work. He also sponsored monasteries and nunneries, gave rice fields to favored temples, ordered each province to build a temple, and had block-printed scriptures—one of the world’s first examples of printing—distributed and read across the country. Nor did he slight Shinto. He offered prayers to the kami (god-spirits) and erected a shrine to the Shinto deity Hachiman outside the Todaiji courtyard. After generations of rivalry, Buddhist and Shinto adherents were encouraged to support each other as part of a complementary religious system that would come to be called Ryobu (two-facet) Shinto.
Nara’s most important contribution to Japanese history may have been the completion of a governing structure known as the ritsuryo system, or the system of penal and civil codes. The various seventh-century attempts at refining and codifying laws culminated now in an intricate set of regulations that would influence Japanese government for a millennium. The twenty-volume Yoro codes were drafted in 718, based on a now lost set of laws from 701 called Taiho. Drawn up under Fujiwara Fuhito’s supervision and divided into administrative and penal categories, they attempted to apply the Tang governing principles to Japanese institutions, while demonstrating by their very creation that Japan was independent from China.
The codes’ central goal was to support a hierarchical, nationwide social and administrative system, with the tenno at the top and the government at the center. Power flowed from the emperor, who was served by the Council of State, the Council on Shrine Affairs, and great numbers of central officials who in turn supervised lesser officeholders in sixty-six kuni (provinces) and more than 500 districts. Officials were ranked according to their positions. Taxes or tributes were levied according to a complex formula that distributed land units to households on the basis of how many adult men, women, children, and servants lived in them—the assumption being that all land belonged to the emperor, who had the right to distribute it. A regular census would serve as the basis for reallocating land and updating tax registers.
Family lives also were regulated; only men were allowed to file for divorce, but women with children were allowed to remarry after a husband was “detained abroad for five years,” or after three years if he ran away. A Ministry of Military Affairs oversaw a national army. Another bureaucracy administered shrines and temples. On the penal side, penalties were harsher for commoners than for officials and priests, with punishments ranging from whipping or beating for lesser offenses to jail, banishment, and death. The Council of State could issue a death sentence, but lower officials could merely have people beaten.
The ritsuryo regulations were too complex to be followed fully for very long. Actual landholding patterns differed widely from the codes’ detailed allotment system, and reallocations occurred less and less frequently as time passed. Taxes were unevenly assessed, as people cheated or found loopholes. But the codes had a lasting impact. They reinforced the principle of hierarchy, both human and geographical, while instilling respect for the rule of law. And they formed the basic legal framework that was used well into the medieval era. Perhaps most important, they showed that while Chinese approaches to government might be lifted up as the norm, traditional customs and values remained potent. In contrast to China, the ritsuryo system provided for no exam system to recruit officials. Nor could Japan’s sun-descended emperors lose their right to rule, as they could in China. All women over the age of six received land grants, whereas only married women received land in China. And the establishment of a powerful Council on Shrine Affairs had no Chinese counterpart.
Another contrast between official expressions of how things should be and local reality lay in the lives of commoners. On the one hand, farmers were tied more fully than ever to the emerging state system, as the Nara government built highways to each of the country’s major regions to facilitate interchange and control. There were seven such roads, extending as far south as Dazaifu in Kyushu and into the frontiers of the north. These roads made it easier to send troops, to distribute official communications, and to collect taxes, and they made it harder for people in distant regions to ignore the demands of the ritsuryo system. On the other hand, the highways gave powerful evidence to those who traveled them that local life was more dynamic and varied than capital stereotypes might have suggested.
In the view of the rich and powerful, peasants were poor and inferior, existing to provide food and taxes, nothing more. Nor was that view entirely wrong, for farmers knew much of hardship. Their taxes largely paid the government’s way. They had to provide food and shelter for an average of thirteen people per household. And they, more than others, understood the dual capriciousness of nature and the bureaucracy, vulnerable as they were to illness and even starvation when the weather became bad or tax collectors turned harsh. Tax and land records show that a rising class of moneylenders in the Nara countryside got rich by exploiting poor farmers; they also show an eruption of rural vagrancy, as families fled to unknown regions to avoid debts and taxes. “No fire sends up smoke” at the peasant’s hearth, said a poetic provincial official; “a spider spins its web” in the cooking pot, “with not a grain to cook.”
Poverty and difficulty, however, did not indicate passivity or inferiority; nor did they tell the entire story. The sources that describe the farmers’ plight also show people struggling, resisting, and playing—often quite vigorously. The numerous laws against vagrancy—including a stipulation in the Yoro code that “when a household absconds, the group shall be responsible for its pursuit”—suggest that farmers did more than complain; many responded to trouble by seeking a fresh start in a new location or by finding ways to avoid taxes. A frustrated eighth-century court official noted: “Cultivators flee to the four corners of the realm, avoid taxes and labor service, and become dependents of princely and ministerial households. . . . Many cultivators in the realm abandon their official place of residence and wander as they please.” Others emigrated to the frontier, sometimes in groups of a thousand or more. Then there were those who protested, creating troubles that reached into Nara itself. An edict in 731 complained that rebellious ruffians “numbered thousands and intimidated the superstitious people.” And stories of quarrels between commoners and officials were legion; one official named Tatsumaro reportedly killed himself when he could no longer stand the tension involved in balancing the emperor’s demands for revenue with the farmers’ complaints. Peasants may not have been organized enough to change the system, but neither did they take hardship passively.
Another sign of commoner agency lay in the peasants’ responses to popular Buddhism. By the early 700s, crowds in many regions were flocking to sermons by a number of self-appointed priests without ties to established temples. The most prominent of these was Gyoki, the charismatic, unconventional son of a Korean immigrant family who propagated Buddhist doctrines that offered salvation to all. Until his death in 749, at age eighty-one, he attracted huge numbers of followers throughout the Kinai region, reportedly preaching to as many as 10,000 at a time—and healing people, building bridges, and opening new rice lands. The official chronicles said that people “would compete with one another in running to honor him,” and that those who “rushed to follow him, yearning to become lay priests, numbered in the thousands.” The authorities accused him of raising too much money and spreading confusion, but he was too popular to be stopped, and Shomu eventually endorsed his emphasis on good works and enlisted his help in gathering support for the Great Buddha.
In addition to providing a permanent capital and a foundation for the ritsuryo system, Nara also nourished a golden age in culture, as the emperors threw their resources into creating a city—and a government—as grand as that in China. Architectural marvels in themselves, the city’s temples also were rich repositories of art, particularly of Buddhist sculpture. While the Great Buddha was massive, few thought it beautiful. Many of the smaller sculptures, by contrast, combined a naturalism and a grace that later generations would try to emulate. The court also encouraged music, dance, and acrobatics, with a Court Music Bureau promoting the private study of instrumental music and the public performance of gagaku (“elegant music”), an enduring classical form that utilized flutes (including the shakuhachi), mouth organs, gongs, drums, lutes, and the thirteen-stringed koto. Significantly, many of the court’s best-loved songs and dances also incorporated popular, even bawdy, materials from the villages.
Even more impressive than the visual and performing arts was poetry. Although the period’s earliest writings, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, were in prose, the Nara masterpiece was the Man’yoshu, a collection of more than 4,500 poems by women and men from all walks of life, compiled in an effort to emulate China’s imperial anthologies of poetry. Although most of the poems were in the thirty-one-syllable form called tanka (short poem), some were long and discursive. The content was as varied as the writers. Many wrote about life’s impermanence, others about Japan’s natural beauty. There were paeans to (and by) sovereigns, verses about travel, musings on the death of loved ones, the seasons, and romantic love, as in this tanka by the courtier Lady Kasa:
If love meant death,
I would have died,
Then died again,
Yea, a thousand times and more.
In contrast with the poetry of later eras when formal rules restricted form and content, the Man’ydshii verses were as varied as life itself.
The pagoda at Kiyomizu temple, founded in Kyoto early in the Heian period, illustrates the multistoried style typical of pagodas at Japan’s Buddhist temples. Constructed to hold sacred scriptures and relics, the pagoda was thought to be specially charged with spiritual forces. Photo by Chris McCooey.
Since neither sophisticated administrative codes nor cultural brilliance assured political tranquility, the decades after Shomu’s death again plunged the regime into conflict. In 769, the monk Dokyo seemed on the verge of becoming tenno until leading courtiers banished him to the north. During the 770s, rival lines of the imperial family used murder and intrigue to get their men on the throne, while temples competed for political influence. And warfare reoccurred continuously in northern Honshu, as Yamato forces tried to subdue the Emishi, who by now were mining iron ore and gold and engaging in trade with the continent as well as with Nara. The end of the Emishi wars would not come until the early ninth century, after the loss of thousands of Japanese troops, when victory was claimed by a general with the daunting title “Field Marshal Conqueror of the Barbarians, Provisional Middle General of the Kon’e Guard, Police Commissioner of Mutsu and Dewa, Junior Fourth Rank Upper, Governor of Mutsu, Chinju Shogun.” Even after that, the Emishi would remain quite independent, a continuing challenge to Yamato claims of unity.
By the time the violence waned, Emperor Kammu and another powerful Fujiwara patron, Momokawa, had moved the capital again, to a supposedly temporary palace area jammed with hastily built structures in Heian, twenty miles north of Nara. The temporary proved durable, however, and over the next millennium the city, which eventually was called Kyoto, served as home to seventy-four emperors.
The four centuries we know as the Heian Period, 794-1185, saw a continuation of the emperor-centered, hierarchical ritsuryo system. But competing groups found innovative ways to manipulate that system, and practical authority shifted in these years: first from the emperors to their aristocratic advisors, then to a series of retired emperors, with other groups making serious challenges at times. The overall result was four hundred years of relative peace: a time when rivalries were decided by political maneuvering more often than by violence, and when Nara’s cultural sprouts matured into a harvest of exceptional music, art, and literature.
One source of Heian’s distinctive culture was Japan’s increasing separation from the continent. Relations with Korea became strained in the ninth century, as Japanese officials worried that peninsular officials had expansive designs (one midcentury official memo accused the Koreans of “evil intentions” and said that visitors from there “offer no gifts as tribute and spy on state affairs under the guise of commerce”). Further west, China’s Tang dynasty had by then passed its peak, weakening the Middle Kingdom’s allure even as Japan’s officials and style-setters grew more selfconfident about their own tastes and traditions. The court stopped writing Chinese-style histories in 887, and in 894, it discontinued its official embassies to China. The government also began trying harder to control private travel to and from the continent, setting up an office at Dazaifu in northern Kyushu to regulate foreign interchange. As a result, most contacts took the form now of priestly pilgrimages and private trade, which developed fairly extensively after the tenth century—or of Korean and Chinese pirates plundering Japanese silk and other luxury items. Migration from Asia slowed to a trickle. Perhaps most significant of all, the Japanese developed their own phonetic writing symbols, called kana, creating a complex system that blended Chinese characters with kana and, in the process, fueled an explosion of writing. While the Japanese never cut themselves off wholly from Asia, the tendency toward independence was undeniable.
The most dramatic political changes resulted from the emperors’ gradual loss of influence, even though they remained on the throne. The Yamato tenno still controlled the system in the early 800s, but by midcentury their Fujiwara advisers had maneuvered themselves into power, dispensing patronage and manipulating the ritsuryo system in a way that left the sovereigns with prestige but limited clout. Indeed, by the middle of the tenth century, the northern or Hokke branch of the Fujiwara had become absolutely dominant in the capital. All the while, officials and commoners in the countryside grew less dependent on the center, generally paying their taxes and providing corvee labor but taking charge of local affairs: punishing miscreants in their own ways, and dealing as they could with the three-year famine/epidemic cycles that kept the population static across these centuries at about six million.
The Fujiwara family members’ culture and extravagance—their luxurious residences, patronage of the arts, elegant lovemaking—did more than anything else to set them apart from the other power-hold-ers of Japanese history, but the key to their ascendance lay in their ability to play a hard political game. Late in the ninth and early in the tenth centuries, for example, when two emperors attempted to counter the Fujiwara’s hold on power by giving high office to Michizane, of the rival Sugawara family, the Fujiwara responded brutally, questioning his loyalty to the throne and having him banished to northern Kyushu, where he lived under house arrest and complained, in verse:
Farm children brought me vegetables,
And my kitchen helper made me a thin gruel.
I wasted away like a lonely crane bereft of its mate.
He was dead within two years, possibly of malnutrition, and people in Heian began blaming each new fire or windstorm on his angry ghost. But his experience made them think thrice before challenging the Fujiwara.
One source of the family’s control was their skill in nurturing powerful allies and placing their own people in key offices. They drew support from several of the country’s most powerful temples, including the Kofukuji in Nara. The family also managed, from the mid-800s onward, to have its men named regents to most rulers, first to minors sitting on the throne and then, after the 880s, to adult emperors. And they took charge of the Heian’s Office of Police. By the tenth century, they controlled the city’s security forces, its board of appointments, and most of its key administrative posts, as well as the emperor’s calendar and decision-making process.
Equally important, the Fujiwara married their daughters off carefully. Following earlier traditions, they made every effort to place Fujiwara offspring in the palace as wives of promising princes. Women no longer ascended the throne in this era, and gender roles became more sharply delineated; women were now denied the right to hold most offices or participate in government ceremonies. Exclusion from the public arena did not render women powerless, however; it simply meant that they had to shape affairs less formally, as mothers and spouses of influential men—who typically moved into the wife’s family residence on marriage. Fujiwara Onshi, the kokumo (mother of the nation, or queen mother), for instance, forced her way into her emperor-son’s bedroom to demand that he support her brother Michinaga as regent. “The imperial mother,” said a tenth-century official, “makes affairs of the court solely her own.” The best known imperial mother was Fujiwara Shoshi, who influenced five emperors—two sons, two grandsons, and a great-grandson—in the eleventh century and included among her ladies-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the Tale of Genji, which is considered the world’s first novel.
The Fujiwara also used the Heian era’s emerging landholding system to strengthen their hold on power. The Nara principle that all land belonged to the emperor required regular censuses and land reassignments so that taxes could be assessed. By the early 800s, that process had become too cumbersome for effective enforcement. Censuses were discontinued, reallocations declined, and local control of land expanded. Concomitantly, a practice that had begun in the Nara years—the accumulation of “private” estates, called shoen, by temples and aristocratic families—gathered force. Under the early ritsuryo system, the idea of permanent ownership was given a foothold when religious institutions and landholding families were promised enduring title to land they reclaimed from forests, as long as they paid taxes. Now, in Heian, these groups competed energetically in finding new ways to secure permanent lands: as gifts for services rendered to the emperor, as rewards for holding certain offices, or by taking over the lands of poor farmers, often in exchange for a promise that the peasant’s rents would be lower than taxes had been. By the middle of the Heian period, most of these estates had become tax free, often even free from entry by government inspectors or other officials. Needless to say, the vast expansion of this system strained government income. But it gave the Fujiwara, who owned thousands of shoen, the financial base to dominate politics.
Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, written about 1000 CE, describes the brilliant court life of the Heian years. This painting, taken from a thirteenth-century edition of Murasaki’s other important literary contribution, her diary, depicts elaborately attired court ladies with long hair, painted eyebrows, and rosebud-red lips. They care for children and wait on men, who typically wore hats, from within a curtained enclosure. TNM Image Archives.
The shoen system also engendered growing independence and diversity in the provinces. Since estate managers answered to Heian-based families or temples rather than to the central government, they were able to act with increasing autonomy in their many duties: directing the estate’s annual planting and harvesting, purchasing and selling its products, securing housing for cultivators and workers, and communicating with estate owners in the capital. Temples and shrines also became heavily involved in local commercial affairs under the shoen system, sending out agents to market expensive goods and loaning money at high interest rates to poor and rich patrons alike. A class of rich farmers emerged outside the shoen too, as collaborators with local authorities in loaning money or assuring that their neighbors’ taxes were paid. The result of all this activity was the growth of stronger, more assertive provincial regions and a remarkable spread of commerce, travel, and money-lending.
Evidence of local vibrancy shows up in a variety of mid-Heian records. The archives of Kozanji temple outside Kyoto, for example, have turned up letters of travelers that describe monks doubling as commercial agents, buying and selling horses for local hunters; landholders competing with each other to secure loans for the spring planting; local patrons “arriving early to get good seats near the stage” at temple dances and promising “to offer congratulatory gifts to the performers”; and low-ranking noble families moving into the provinces and “seizing cultivators’ fields to add to their own holdings.” Similarly, a late tenth-century complaint by local officials in Owari, some eighty miles northeast of Heian, describes not only a complex highway system that a governor was failing to maintain but an impressive array of local products that he was requisitioning as taxes. He is “cheating us,” the document read, “by taking silk taffeta, handwoven hemp cloth . . . oil, China grass (karamushi) cloth, Indian madder, and silk floss.” To meet his demands, the petition said, “we have to sell the property of our ancestors and to endanger the survival of our children and grandchildren.” The growing provincial potency was demonstrated by the governor’s removal from office the year after the complaint was lodged.
In the capital itself, the Fujiwara influence peaked in the early eleventh century. Although these decades saw more than their share of provincial unrest and an unusual number of palace fires—some accidental, some set by thieves—they are regarded as the glory time of the regent Michinaga, a man known for his erudition, poor health, and love affairs, along with his determined manipulation of the levers of power. He ran society not by bold policies or efficient government but by controlling the web of networks around the throne. He was father-in-law to three emperors and grandfather to two. He was related by blood to most of the decisionmakers. He used his ties to direct the interminable backroom discussions that characterized decision-making. “This world, I think, is indeed my world,” he wrote in a 1018 poem. “Like the full moon I shine, uncovered by any cloud.” Emperors conducted ceremonies and centered things; officials discussed and consulted; Michinaga dominated.
It should not surprise us that Michinaga expressed his self-satisfaction in verse, because art and culture experienced a heyday during his years. The aristocrats made up less than half a percent of the populace, but they were highly literate, educated in Chinese literature and thought as well as in the growing body of Japanese writings. They had sufficient income from the shoen to construct fine residences and spend time in the arts. And they knew that literary and artistic skill would gain them as much respect and influence as political acumen would. The result was the emergence of a sophisticated urban populace who produced one of history’s richest feasts of dance, architecture, painting, music, and literature, all governed by refined aesthetic standards. For a society so recently illiterate—indeed for any society—the output was stunning.
One characteristic of Heian culture was the artists’ emancipation from Chinese models. People continued to admire China, and men did most of their public writing in Chinese. Official documents, too, were composed in Chinese. By the tenth century, however, most things cultural had taken on a more Japanese hue. In architecture, for example, Michinaga’s son Yorimichi defied formalistic Chinese styles in the 1050s when he constructed the era’s representative building, the Phoenix Hall at the Byodoin temple southeast of Kyoto, surrounding the building with water and flanking the central hall with long, delicate, airy wings. Native tastes were also exemplified in the new Japanese-style paintings called yamato-e (Yamato pictures), which typically were done on the sliding walls and folding screens of aristocrats’ homes and graced by poems written in flowing calligraphy.
Even more original—and Japanese—were the late Heian emakimono, or picture scrolls. Typically thirty or forty feet long, they narrated stories with pictures and (sometimes) writing when unrolled from right to left. Some of them were religious; the most remarkable were secular, sometimes jocular. The ethereal Genji Scroll, illustrating the elaborately dressed figures of Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, is generally regarded as the best. More fun is the cartoon-like animal scroll, credited to a priest named Toba, that portrays squirrels, rabbits, frogs, and monkeys acting as priests, officials, and even Buddha himself. Chinese visitors disdained this sort of work and continued to refer to the Japanese as provincial barbarians, but the paintings revealed a growing self-confidence and a level of artistry that would be much admired by later generations.
Heian cultural life was also marked by an overweening religiosity. The court sponsored two sects, Tendai and Shingon, both of which spread their esoteric teachings from mountaintop centers. But while aristocrats generally followed one or both of these, they rarely stopped there. Like the commoners, most also took up a personalized mixture of practices related to the Shinto worship of kami, the aestheticism of a new mountain religious order called Shugendo, and the magic of folk religion. They were also influenced by the rise of Amida Buddhism, a doctrine that promised entry into the Pure Land of the Western Paradise to anyone who had faith in the compassionate Buddha Amida. Monks from the Tendai center at Mount Hiei, just north of Kyoto, became advocates of this people-oriented faith, too, as did Kuya, a charismatic priest in the tradition of Gyoki, who traversed the country helping the poor and preaching salvation. All of these religions had two things in common: they were pervasive, and they were eclectic. Although officials liked to organize religion into distinct doctrines and sects, the Heian citizenry—aristocrats and commoners, priests and laity—engaged in a mix of practices that ignored categories.
One of the late Heian period’s most enduring works, this animal scroll, attributed to the priest Toba, playfully used frogs, rabbits, and other animals to poke fun at the pretensions of priests and officials. TNM Image Archives.
These religions played a key role in energizing the Heian arts. Temples provided a site for many of the era’s finest buildings and pagodas, including the Phoenix Hall. Priests turned out paintings on religious themes—Amida descending to earth on a host of clouds, bodhisattvas spreading enlightenment, the abstract geometric forms called mandalas, which represented all of the elements of the cosmos—as a means of explaining doctrine to the uninitiated. Monks such as Kukai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, made calligraphy into a significant art form. Sculptors turned out a range of Buddhist figures, from fierce guardian deities to gentle representations of a tranquil, seated Amida. The greatest innovation in Heian sculpture was the use of wood: small images made of a single piece in the early years, large and lifelike images in the later Heian years, crafted by joining several pieces of wood together.
A rising emphasis on the subdued and the simple as the essence of beauty may have been the most distinctly Japanese feature of Heian aristocratic culture. Certainly the era’s aesthetic sensitivities encompassed colorful and lively things. Court ceremonies included grand promenades. Palace women wore multilayered court robes, reddened their lips, blackened their teeth, and whitened their faces, and men dressed extravagantly. Moreover, several literary masterpieces exuded earthy wit, some of it sexual. The Pillow Book of Lady Sei Shonagon, for example, includes a lover who “starts snoring” in its list of “hateful things,” and adds: “fleas, too, are very hateful.” But it was the appreciation of gentle emotions and quiet elegance that dominated Heian literature and art. To be respected, one had to demonstrate good taste, write poetry in a polished hand, and understate things. A key concept in the Heian cultural vocabulary was miyabi, or courtly refinement. Another was mono no aware, or sensitivity to the pathos of things, to life’s fragility and thus its beauty. The writer Ki Tsurayuki caught the essence of Heian aesthetic tastes in his famous description of poetry. “Japanese poetry,” he wrote, “has for its seed the human heart. . . . Who among men does not compose poetry on hearing the song of the nightingale among the flowers, or the cries of the frog who lives in the water?”
These standards were set by women as much as by men; for Heian cultural life was driven by both genders, and its literary scene was dominated by women. The era’s written output was voluminous, including collections of tales, travel narratives, gossipy histories, autobiographies, and court diaries, with women producing the best known works. The Pillow Book, which introduced the miscellany genre, is an example. It gives us nearly 200 of Lady Sei’s witty essays on everything from snow-covered peasant huts to priests’ attire, from “things that fall from the sky” (hail and snow) to “things that should be short” (“the speech of a young girl”) and things that are “squalid” (“the inside of a cat’s ear”). It also provides sharp insight into daily life at the court. While men were more prominent in poetry, even there, one of the most popular writers was the shadowy Ono Komachi, who became legendary for her poems and her beauty. A major contributor to the era’s first major anthology, the Kokinshu, she describes a range of powerful human experiences, including the nights when “my breast throbs / my heart is ravaged by flame” because a lover has failed to show up.
The pride of Heian literature was fiction, especially the masterpiece that defined the era, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji, which runs to more than a thousand pages. Most of the story describes the life and dalliances of the “shining Genji,” a courtier known for his great learning, his elegant attire, his skill in the arts, and his love affairs. The novel’s power lay partly in its exquisite illustrations of miyabi: delicate courtesans making snowballs on a winter evening, flowers climbing the walls of a poor woman’s home, Genji writing love notes on a tree leaf. It also illustrated the complex power relationships between men and women. And it showcased the era’s love of poetry; it contains 795 poems. Moralists sometimes have derided Genji and his etiquette-obsessed court as lecherous and avaricious. More typical are those who see him as the epitome of a world that not only preserved a broad peace for centuries but produced an exquisite, creative array of arts and literature.
During the late eleventh century, the imperial family took back political power—not through its reigning emperors, but through family members who would ascend the throne, then abdicate a few years later and retire to a monastery, where they could operate from behind the scenes in a system known as insei (literally, “cloistered government”). When Gosanjo became emperor in 1068 as the first sovereign born to a non-Fujiwara mother in nine generations, he instituted an aggressive program to get control of the private-estate system back into the emperor’s hands. Though he died only five years later, before he could accomplish all he desired, his policies were replicated and extended by three successors, all of whom dominated government from retirement. For the next seventy-five years, the insei accumulated many private estates for the imperial family and then used the revenues from those estates to cement alliances with the newly important Taira and Minamoto military families, and restore the imperial line to dominance.
One thing that kept the insei from gaining even fuller control was the tumultuous nature of public life after the mid-eleventh century, which spurred a sharp decline in the ristusyo structures. The Fujiwara did not give up easily, though many of their fights were among themselves now, with a rival clan branch that had roots in the Emishi dominating a rich and sophisticated center at Hiraizumi, hundreds of miles north of Heian, for a century after the 1080s. The retired emperors also were threatened by the Buddhist establishment, which was concentrated in the many Tendai temples that had been built on the slopes of Mount Hiei. Buddhist temples had always fought with each other over issues like land control and the right to ordain priests. Beginning in the late eleventh century, however, the fights between Hiei temples grew bitterly violent, leading to repeated attacks by the temples’ armed units, with widespread burning of buildings and significant loss of lives. The temples also sent increasing numbers of armed monks into the Heian streets to demand privileges from the government. While the conflicts did not threaten the existence of the insei, they made it increasingly difficult for it to exercise control.
The later Heian years also faced the government with spreading violence in the provinces: for example, an effort in the 1030s by the warrior Taira Tadatsune to wrest control of a large region north and east of present-day Tokyo, two far northern struggles against the Emishi in the last half of the century over land and control issues, and constant problems with Inland Sea piracy early in the 1100s. Heian Japan had, until now, been a land of relative peace, a place where culture and refinement trumped martial skills, a country whose political struggles were carried out by intermarrying and maneuvering, not by fighting. It is not surprising, then, that these disturbances precipitated predictions of doom. Nor is it surprising that the retired emperors found it necessary, more and more, to seek assistance from networks of military families that had begun developing in provincial Japan. Lacking an army themselves, worried about the Fujiwara, and threatened by religious and provincial violence, they saw little option by the early twelfth century but to begin turning to the Taira and Minamoto warriors for help. It was an understandable move. Midcentury developments, however, would prove it a dangerous one.