A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower (12 page)

At times there was famine relief, and during particularly serious disasters such as the great smallpox epidemic there was even tax exemption for peasants. In an attempt to increase incentives for land reclamation, a law change in 743 allowed peasants who cleared land to hold it in their families in perpetuity. This revision was part of a trend that saw land increasingly returning to private ownership.
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However, in general the tax burden worsened for peasants, who comprised 95 per cent of the population at the time. They were not helped by having to compensate for tax exemptions given increasingly to landowning religious institutions and noble families. Troubled by poor crops and heavy tax demands, many peasants simply walked off their allotted land, seeking instead the security and lesser demands of working land in the private tax-free estates of the temples and nobles. In actual fact, however, life on the tax-free estates was not necessarily better for them. Private landowners could exact their own dues from those working their land, and some were harsher than the government.

Yamanoue Okura, the socially concerned
Many
sh
poet who wrote much of his poetry in the early years of the Nara period, again offers a glimpse of life for the common people. One of his poems, ‘A Dialogue on Poverty’, takes the form of a dialogue between a poor man and an even poorer one. The poorer man’s account is given below.
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Wide as they call heaven and earth,

For me they have shrunk quite small.

Bright though they call the sun and moon,

They never shine for me.

Is it the same with all men,

Or for me alone?

By rare chance I was born a man

And no meaner than my fellows,

But, wearing unwadded sleeveless clothes

In tatters, like weeds waving in the sea,

Hanging from my shoulders,

And under the sunken roof,

Within the leaning walls,

Here I lie on straw

Spread on bare earth,

With my parents at my pillow,

My wife and children at my feet,

All huddled in grief and tears.

No fire sends up smoke

At the cooking-place,

And in the cauldron

A spider spins its web.

With not a grain to cook,

We moan like the night thrush.

Then, ‘to cut’, as the saying is,

‘The ends of what is already too short’,

The village headman comes,

With rod in hand, to our sleeping place,

Growling for his dues.

Must it be so hopeless –

The way of this world?

Okura’s poems give further valuable insights into general life in those times, such as the prevalence of illness, or a cheerless Buddhist view of the impermanence of human life and material things. One surprising observation is a widespread lack of respect for the elderly. As an aged Confucianist, Okura was particularly sensitive to this deviation from Confucian principles – a deviation which again shows there was a Japanese limit to the adoption of Chinese ways. In his ‘Elegy on the Impermanence of Human Life’ he laments the passing of youth, the onset of old age, and the life of old people:
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…with staffs at their waists,

They totter along the road,

Laughed at here, and hated there.

This is the way of the world…

The greatest victim of the age, however, may have been the central government. Its overall tax revenue was dwindling. The increasing independence of
the private estates also eroded respect for central authority. No doubt aggravated by ongoing intrigues among court factions, by the end of the period there was already a certain sense of decay in the authority of central government.
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This was ironic, for the period was the heyday of the
ritsury
system, which was meant to spread central imperial authority throughout the land.

2.2   The Rise and Fall of the Court: The Heian Period (794–1185)

Emperor Kammu (r.781–806) was particularly unhappy in Nara, and in 784 he decided it was time to move the capital again. No-one quite knows why. He may have felt oppressed by the increasing number of powerful Buddhist temples in the city. Or, since there had been so many disasters in recent times, he may simply have felt it was ill-fated. In any event, he left in a hurry.

After a few years’ indecision a new capital was finally built in 794 a short distance to the north, in Heian – present-day Ky
to. Like Nara, it was built on Chinese grid-pattern lines. Unlike Nara, it was to remain the official capital for more than a thousand years.

At Heian the court was in many ways to reach its zenith. In its refinement, its artistic pursuits, and its etiquette, it rivalled courts of any time and place in the world. However, the more refined it became, the more it lost touch with reality, and that was to cost it dearly.

The Heian court gave the world some of its finest early literature. For example, around 1004 the court lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel,
Genji Monogatari
(Tale of [Prince] Genji). Many of its thousand pages reveal a life of exquisite refinement:
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It was late in the Third Month. Murasaki’s spring garden was coming ever more to life with blossoms and singing birds. Elsewhere spring had departed, said the other ladies, and why did it remain here? Genji thought it a pity that the young women should have only distant glimpses of the moss on the island, a deeper green each day. He had carpenters at work on Chinese pleasure boats, and on the day they were launched he summoned palace musicians for water music. Princes and high courtiers came crowding to hear.

The princes and courtiers had little else to do. By this stage the court had lost much of its power as a functioning government, and occupied itself instead with dilettantish pastimes.
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Nobles of the day debated the merits of flowers or seashells, or floated wine cups to each other along miniature waterways, or composed delicate verses. Their values centred not on matters of state but on the correct protocol, the proper costume, the perfect phrase.

Meanwhile, in the real world, provincial warriors – the early samurai – were growing ever more powerful. Their power grew in proportion to the loss of power by the central government.

A main cause behind this change in the power structure was the continuing increase in private land ownership. Public land allotment ceased by the tenth century, and by the end of the period about half of all land was to be privately owned.
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Much of this private land was exempt from tax, meaning a serious decrease in taxation revenue for the government.

Private land could be acquired in a number of ways, including purchase, but most importantly by the opening up of virgin land. In practice the effect of this was to make powerful families even more powerful, for usually they alone possessed the wherewithal to acquire tools and hire the necessary labour. Even those smallholders who did manage to acquire land by reclamation often commended it to more powerful persons who could ensure its protection.
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There is a need to be careful about the term ‘powerful’, for in Japan there has long been a distinction between nominal power (authority) and real power. A major noble family based in the capital may well have had sufficient wealth and ‘power’ to mobilise resources in order to reclaim land, but this did not mean it had the actual power to maintain real control of that land. That actual power was more likely to be held by a minor local noble, such as those appointed as estate-managers.

The owners of large provincial estates were invariably away at court for much or all of the time. Absentee ownership, with actual control in the hands of estate-managers or custodians, became standard practice, particularly as the period progressed.
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This separation of ownership and possession was another cause behind the rise of the local warrior at the expense of the central noble.

Even court-appointed governors of provinces also tended in time to send deputies to the provinces in their charge. In this way the court grew increasingly removed from provincial matters, and central control over people and land became ever weaker in real terms.

It was not simply a case of the court losing power relative to the provinces. Within the court itself, the emperor lost much of his personal power. There were two main reasons for this.

The first was the use of regents. This was taken to extremes by the highly influential Fujiwara family, who dominated the court for much of
the period. The family had long provided imperial consorts and empresses. Then in 858 Yoshifusa (804–72), the head of the family, arranged the enthronement of his seven year-old grandson and promptly declared himself regent. The practice of Fujiwara regency continued after him, becoming the norm till the late eleventh century despite occasional resistance from the imperial family. Typically, emperors were born of Fujiwara mothers. One famous member of the Fujiwara family, Michinaga (966–1028), achieved the distinction of having no fewer than four daughters who married emperors.

The second reason was early abdication. As with the tactic of the Fujiwara regents a junior would be enthroned, but this time he was controlled by an abdicated emperor rather than a regent. This practice (
insei
, or ‘cloister government’) was seen occasionally in earlier times, but became very common from the late eleventh century. It was used by retired emperors such as Shirakawa (1053–1129, r.1073–87) to combat the domination of the court by the Fujiwara family.
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