[caocao74]

HEIANJIDAI-AN OUTLINE

Despite its foundations being based upon the Emperor Kanmu’s desires to escape the Buddhist institutions-caused tribulations in Heijokyo (Nara) and the military victory of the Minamoto under the guidance of Yoritomo, the whole Heianjidai was largely one of peace, an epoch of sophisticated cultural developments and hostility to open conflict. Rather than the bloody feuds of the 15th and 16th Centuries, the Heianjidai was a period not devoid of political crisis, but crisis held within the confines of the Imperial government as the Emperor was never questioned but rarely allowed (primarily by the dominant Fujiwara family) to exercise authority.


Heian Politics

In 794, the Emperor Kanmu (or Kammu)(r.781-806) chose a piece of virgin territory upon which to establish his new capital, Heiankyo (the City of Peace and Tranquility), utilizing the model of the Tang Chinese capital of Chang’an (present-day Xian) to replace the former capital of Heijokyo (capital 710-784). In the simplest terms, the politics of the Heianjidai can be subdivided into four chronological segments;
1. The Early Heianjidai (794-894).
2. The Middle (or Fujiwara) Heianjidai (894-1068).
3. The Authority of the Insei Tenno (cloistered Emperor) (1068-1156).
4. The Rise of the Bushidan (1156-1185).

Throughout the Heianjidai, the country was still officially run under the Ritsuryo codes, an overall system first employed by the Emperor Tenji in the so-called Taika Reform of 645. However, as the decades passed, the state and nation underwent major transitions so that the state proved largely incapable of handling major crises, the Emperor the puppet of the Fujiwara or the Bushidan (‘warrior-groups’, first the Taira, later the Minamoto), with the few influential Insei Tenno represented exceptions to the rules rather than actual, long-term switches in authority.

The first period mentioned above was undoubtedly the era when the titular Emperor actually held some semblance of authority. The Emperor Kanmu had chosen to transfer the capital to curb the access to influence of the Buddhist clergy of Heijokyo (Nara), while also choosing to reform the administration to consolidate his position. However, his succession had been established by his father-in-law, Fujiwara Momokawa.
In 857, Fujiwara Yoshifusa (804-872) became the Great Minister of State, a post that had been left vacant for some time by an Imperial Court that felt it was needless to fill the post. His influence did not come primarily from his Imperial office but through the policy that the Fujiwara would adopt for other two centuries; marriage. In 858 (only a year after taking office), he had his grandson enthroned as the Emperor Seiwa (r.858-876), while he made himself sessho (regent), the first non-Imperial family member to hold the post. In 887, his nephew Mototsune (836-891)(who had also been sessho) became Kanpaku, a position that made him the regent of an adult Emperor, in this case the 21-year old Emperor Uda (r.887-897). The Emperor Uda, unlike Emperors Seiwa or Yozei (r.876-884), had no familial ties with the overbearing Fujiwara, so upon the death of Mototsune he 891 he chose to leave the post of Kanpaku vacant, choosing to rely upon minor counsellors as his advisors. These figures included the famed Sugawara Michizane, who in 894 made the decision to conclude the embassies to China after the collapse of the Tang dynasty. At the age of 30 the Emperor Uda abdicated in favour of Daigo (r.897-930). He was the son-in-law of the late Fujiwara Mototsune, but he chose to follow the example of Uda and rule without filling the post of Kanpaku. Later historians saw his attempts to revive the Ritsuryo system as indicative of a golden age, but he still proved unable to restrain the hereditary ambitions of the Fujiwara. The Fujiwara family realized that the scholar Sugawara Michizane posed a threat to their ascendancy. In 899 he was appointed Minister of the Right, but the Court was forced to accept Fujiwara Tokihira as Minister of the Left. For just over a year an uneasy relationship existed between the two ministers, but then Tokihira manufactured a plot that falsely laid claims of treason against Suguwara. Unable to prove otherwise, Suguwara was found guilty and was exiled to the political backwater of Kyushu, where he died in 903. It marked the collapse of the clique centred on the retention of Chinese methods of government and landownership centred upon the figure of the Emperor.

Fujiwara Tokihira was succeeded by Fujiwara Tadahira (880-949), who recovered the position of Kanpaku in 930. From 967 until the last decades of the Heianjidai, the Fujiwara dominated the Imperial Court, through the marriage of daughters to heirs to the throne and the monopolization of influential government posts. The Fujiwara, like the lesser great houses, devolved authority away from the Imperial throne, assuming state titles for their retainers and establishing complex provincial networks of landowning, armed vassals. The Fujiwara became so dominant under Fujiwara Michinaga (between his assuming the clan headship in 995 to his death in 1028) that he did not even assume the title Kanpaku to legitimize his de facto authority, centred upon administering the state through his own mandokoro (private administrative office) and the marriage of his daughters to four different Emperors (respectively Akiko, Kenshi, Toshiko and Yoshiko to the Emperors Ichijo, Sanjo, Go-Ichijo and Go-Suzaku).

Centred upon the Court, but based in the provinces, the real breakdown that destroyed the Ritsuryo system was the development of shoen (private estates). Under the Ritsuryo system (which had never truly functioned as planned by early idealists influenced by Tang China), land was the property of the Imperial line, equally distributed to support worthy post-holders, but like the posts themselves, the land became the hereditary property of the leading families and thereby no-long really belonged to the Emperor. From 743 any reclaimed land was granted to the reclaimer, hence state ownership was undermined from an early period. As decades passed and the government officials saw it was in their factions’ interests to permit the development of shoen, rather than curbing it, and indeed one of the largest holders of shoen by 1185 was the Imperial family itself. As more land was opened up, by the 10th Century tenants would rush to ‘commend’ (legally-transferred) their property to a great lord, temple or monastery, securing in return freedom from centrally-demanded revenues and corvees, and positions as administrators with a fixed portion of the land’s yield. These procedures lay outside the Ritsuryo system, an accepted practice than once legislated in favour of. By the 11th Century, many of these shoen were so protected by powerful ‘commendees’ that the government officials, even the Imperial police, were unable to enter to enforce their commissions.
Of course, while the Fujiwara concentrated upon the dominance of the state, in the provinces new forces were at work. In northern Honshu, military forces had been made necessary in the campaigns to subjugate the Jomon-descended Emishi (the ancestors of the present-day Ainu). Many of these forces had been hastily-prepared local forces, often inferior on a man-to-man basis to the Emishi tribesmen, but in the wake of the campaigns were left a huge number of warriors. Many of these warriors were to become the early samurai, servants of the local stewards whose task was the police their shoen and prevent (or battle against) incursions from neighbouring shoen (an all-to-common occurrence between the rival temples). Most among the ranks of these armed families emerged Taira Masakado and Fujiwara Sumitomo, renegades who turned against Imperial authority, rebelling in the 930s in the East and West (respectively). There were then the Earlier Nine Years War (1051-1062) and the Later Three Years War (1083-1087) fought by the commissioned Minamoto family against the rebellious Abe in northern Honshu. The capital was never threatened, but the integrity of the state was fundamentally destabilized and leaving Imperial, and Fujiwara, authority ignored.

Michinaga was succeeded by Fujiwara Yorimichi (992-1074, sessho 1016-1068), but his ambitions were seriously undermined by an unavoidable problem; a shortage of daughters. In 1068 Go-Sanjo (r.1068-1072) succeeded to the throne upon the death of Go-Reizei. He was the son of Go-Reizei, and hence the great-grandson of Fujiwara Michinaga, but his mother was a non-Fujiwara concubine, making him the first Emperor since Uda not to be born to a Fujiwara mother. Go-Sanjo wished to investigate the whole issue surrounding the fiscal and political manipulation of shoen, but through their non-cooperation the Fujiwara forced his abdication after only four years on the throne. He was then succeeded by the Emperor Shirakawa (r.1072-1086) but this was another blow to the ambitious Fujiwara. Like his father, Shirakawa abdicated, and became the Insei Emperor. This literally meant that the Emperor had abdicated and taken Buddhist orders, but in reality they had reestablished themselves as independent sources of authority, manipulating child-Emperors in a style the Fujiwara had perfected.
Shirakawa had been the titular Emperor for fourteen years, but he remained as the influential Insei Emperor for another forty-three, and then in quick succession, the pattern was followed the Emperors Toba (r.1107-1123) and Go-Shirakawa (r.1155-1158), who respectively were Insei Emperors for twenty-seven and thirty-four years. Rather than attempting to reform the Ritsuryo system and remove the Fujiwara, they attempted to make themselves the focus for authority, not the puppets of it. Overall, the aim was to exploit the existing system rather than the implementation of a system from the then-defunct Tang dynasty.

Combined with the complexities of a dominant non-Imperial family at Court, the existence of an Emperor and often more than one Insei Emperor were the growing powers of the leading Bushidan and their leading families in the 12th Century. Initially, the leading military families were the Minamoto (who generally supported the Fujiwara) and the Taira (who allied themselves with the Insei Emperors). However, by 1155 both the Imperial family and the Fujiwara had divided into various factions, with the new Emperor (Go-Shirakawa)(with the support of Fujiwara Tadamichi) being challenged by the former Emperor (Sutoku, r. 1123-1142) with the assistance of Fujiwara Yorinaga (Tadamichi’s brother) and Minamoto Tameyoshi), returning in the Hogen no Ran (Hogen Disturbance) of July 1156 when warriors serving both camps battled in the streets of Heiankyo. Go-Shirakawa succeeded successfully to the throne, but when he abdicated in 1158 in favour of Nijo (r.1158-1165) he found his authority curtailed by the new power in the capital, the warrior Taira Kiyomori. In a period when corporal punishment had been rare, capital punishment unheard off, and when the Imperial Palace was guarded by bowmen without arrows (the pulling of their bowstrings was aimed to repel unwelcome spirits), these turbulent times caused great shocks. The situation worsened when in 1159 the Heiji no Ran (Heiji Disturbance) erupted when Fujiwara Nobuyori and Minamoto Yoshitomo seized Emperor Nijo and Insei Emperor Go-Shirakawa while Taira Kiyomori was away from the capital. The coup attempt flopped and the ‘rebels’ executed when Kiyomori returned with his samurai.
The Fujiwara had manipulated the Imperial government meticulously, but the rise of the Taira under Kiyomori saw the nature of Japanese government transformed, into one of fear and retribution. Kiyomori was appointed dajo Daijin (Chief Minister) in 1167, and, following Fujiwara precedent, married his daughter (Shigeko) to Emperor Takakura, a marriage which produced the future-Emperor Antoku (r.1180-1185).
Despised by those outside of the Taira network, the situation escalated until Prince Mochihito called upon the warriors of the East to rally to him in 1180 to topple the Taira. The surviving sons of Minamoto Yoshitomo (Yoritomo, Yoshitsune and Noriyori) rallied, along with their cousin (and rival) Yoshinaka, too late to save the prematurely-launched campaign of Mochihito but by 1185 the Taira had been destroyed at the Naval Battle of Dan no Ura, a costly defeat which had resulted in the killing or suicide of the Taira leadership, including the child-Emperor Antoku. This marked the effective end of the Heianjidai, as the victorious Yoritomo was appointed Shogun in 1192, legitimizing his establishment of a government in Kamakura, the foundations for the Kamakura Bakufu, and the rise of the military as a force in government.


Economy and Society

In an agricultural society such as Japan of the Heianjidai, society and the economy were closely intertwined. Outside the only large city in the country (Heiankyo), communications were poor, while the snobbish Court looked down upon those who lived in the provinces, with exile often meaning only being forced to leave the capital.
In the provinces, the shoen was the basic unit of the economy and local society, the unit upon which most people lived. Since coinage was rare outside of Heiankyo, the provinces relied upon a barter system (with the standard currency being clothes or fabric). Despite the hardships involved and the discrimination shown them by the aloof members of the Court, those who lived upon shoen were far better off than those left upon the remaining public lands. Naturally, the migration of peasants from public land continued unabated to the shoen, further reducing the state’s revenues base. By 1185, half of Japan’s arable land was in the form of shoen.
While the continued growth of shoen hurt the Imperial tax-base fundamentally, they sustained the aristocratic families (generally descended from the uji, the clans of pre-Heianjidai Japan). They also sustained those vassals, provincial governors, stewards and Bushidan leaders upon whom the aristocrats looked down upon. The rest of society (the bulk) was viewed as little more than productive animals by those aristocrats in Heiankyo. However, those who lived upon shoen were lightly taxed compared to later periods and far freer than under the Tokugawa Bakufu, and military campaigns in the countryside were rare.


Culture

What stands out from all the events and trends of the Heianjidai was the aesthetic tradition that developed and cultivated so much of what would later become the fundamental points of Japanese art, music and literature. From the literary works such as the Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) by Murasaki Shikibu, or The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, one views the aristocratic importance in the capital of a discerning sense of what was ‘correct’, an appreciation of perceived beauty, but also arrogant courtly tastes, snobbery and elitist conformity. Devoid of the appreciation of Chinese poetry or an understanding of what colours represented perfectly an age or season, the lower orders were simply the producers of the fine goods required to feed aristocratic tastes.
Undoubtedly, the literature of the period fundamentally altered the culture of the Japanese. With the introduction of the syllabic script (kana), the exact sounds of the Japanese language could be reproduced on paper. This innovation has been put down to the monk Kukai, and it was certainly in use by the early 9th Century, replacing the adopted-Chinese characters as the language of native literature, particularly that literature produced by women, while Chinese kanji remained the script of government business.
An early beneficiary of the introduction of kana was tanka, a form of poetry based upon 31-syllables. The Imperial family remained a cultural focus (if not political) and in 905 the Emperor Daigo ordered Ki Tsurayuki to compile the Kokinshu (Anthology of Ancient and Modern Poems), the first great work of Imperial poetry. Such courtly poetic tastes were followed by the poet who wrote the Ise Monogatari (Tale of Ise, c.980), Ariwara Narihara, and the poetess Ono no Komachi. All placed the literary spotlight upon the fleeting, temporary concept of mono no aware (the pathos of things).
Poetic works were crucial to Heian culture, and formed a central part of court life, but undoubtedly the greatest work of literature to emerge in the period (possibly from all of Japanese history) was the Genji Monogatari, written by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu. The work’s central character was the amorous Prince Genji, believed to have been a tragic representation of Fujiwara Michinaga. Other women famously recorded their thoughts in literary works (the witty, and often cynical or cruel, diarist Sei Shonagon and the unknown authors of Sarashina nikki (As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams) and Kagero nikki (The Gossamer Years), but none have matched the fame of Murasaki Shikibu. These works were written in the golden years of Fujiwara dominance, but by the 12th Century, native themes gained in popularity. In the early 12th Century, the Konjaku Monogatari (Tales of Now and Then) was composed of many popular stories, while later in the century (in 1179) Go-Shirakawa ordered the compilation of an anthology of folk songs. Other authors (the monk Saigyo, Fujiwara Teika and Kamo no Chomei) combined emotive Japanese tales with the courtly traditions of the Heianjidai.
A major influence upon the visual arts of the Heianjidai was clearly the Buddhist sects, particularly the Shingon sect which placed great importance upon the role of mandalas (cosmological diagrams) and statuary groups. Other popular (in aristocratic terms) visual arts were the Yamato-e (colourful landscapes) rather than traditionally sombre Chinese landscapes, decorative calligraphy and the emaki (narrative handscrolls), which were often influenced by literary works like the Genji Monogatari. But without any doubt the most seen (it’s on the Japanese 10 yen coin) visual artifact of the Heianjidai is the Ho-o-do (Phoenix Hall) of the Byodoin, a temple in Uji (near Kyoto) completed in 1053 by Fujiwara Yorimichi.


Religion

Buddhism was not new to Japan in the Heianjidai, having first arrived in the 6th Century from the Korean Kingdom of Baekje, but the period saw the arrival of the leading sects and its development into a truly popular faith. Esoteric Shingon from introduced from China in 806 by Kukai, a year after Saicho had returned with the Tendai (Tiantai in Chinese) sect, a Chinese development of Mahayana Buddhism. Respectively, they established the powerful temples of Enryakuji upon Hieizan and Koyasan.
However, Buddhism was not the sole faith of the people of the Heianjidai. To accommodate itself into its adopted nation, Buddhism and the native Shinto were formulated to be compatible with one another. The synthesis, Shinbutsu, recognized such issues as the Shinto kami as actually being Mahayana Buddhas. In fact, if one were to just glance at the spirituality of the Imperial Court, rituals were a composite of tenets from Buddhism, Shinto and Chinese cosmology.
The advantage that the huge Buddhist Kenmon temples established for themselves was their financial base (shoen) and their political muscle (often demonstrated through use of Sohei, temple militias), something Enryakuji was infamous for until its violent destruction by Oda Nobunaga in the autumn of 1571.

[Gubook Janggoon]

Hmm..I seem to have missed this...well got to do what I usually do with your threads.

[caocao74]

Gubuk Janggoon, on Mar 13 2005, 12:03 PM, said:

Hmm..I seem to have missed this...well got to do what I usually do with your threads.

I'll keep trying with the Japanese work if you keep up the good work on Korean history. If only we could unearth someone who can make Indian history a tad simpler