Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 3
Chapter III
The Coming of Chinese Civilization
The peoples of northern Europe have always been conscious of their double heritage—their primitive Teutonic ancestry and the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Similarly, the Japanese have a double historical heritage—the primitive stock of early Japan and the civilization of China. As in northern Europe, true history only started for Japan when the broad stream of a highly developed civilization reached its shores and, in a new geographic setting, combined with the simple native traditions of a primitive people to form a new culture, derived directly from the old civilization but differentiated from it by new geographic and racial ingredients.
The people who formed the early Yamato state in Japan had long had some contact with Chinese civilization, as may be seen from their early use of the Chinese bronze mirror. Fresh immigrants from Korea continued to bring to Japan the arts and sciences of the continent, and some knowledge of writing probably penetrated to the Japanese from China at a relatively early date. However, the first borrowings from China were made unconsciously and very slowly. Not until the second half of the sixth century did the Japanese become fully conscious of the advantages of the superior continental civilization and the desirability of learning more about it. The result was a sudden acceleration in the rate at which elements of Chinese culture were imported into the islands and absorbed by the Japanese.
Why this spurt in the long process of learning from China should have come at just this moment in Japanese history is not easy to determine. The Japanese people may have reached a level of cultural attainment and political organization then, which for the first time permitted more rapid and more conscious learning from abroad. And the renewed vigor displayed by Chinese culture at that time may have facilitated the process.
China’s history as a highly civilized part of the world reaches back to the second millennium before Christ. Its first great period as a colossal military empire came during the period of Rome’s greatness, roughly from about 250 B.C. to 200 A.D. An era of political disunion and disruption followed, and came to an end only in the second half of the sixth century, when a new and greater Chinese empire emerged from the chaos of three centuries of civil wars and barbarian invasions. The new Chinese empire was far richer and stronger than the first. In fact, during the seventh and eighth centuries China was, with little doubt, the richest and most powerful land in the whole world. This period was known by the dynastic name of T’ang, a period of unprecedented grandeur and might, and of brilliant cultural attainments. It is small wonder that the primitive Japanese in their isolated island country felt the reflected glory of the new Chinese empire and awoke to a new awareness of the great land across the sea.
The start of the heavy flow of Chinese influence to Japan is usually dated about 552, the year when the Buddhist religion is said to have been officially introduced to the Yamato clan by a missionary from a kingdom in southern Korea. Actually, Buddhism had probably entered Japan even earlier, but this incident affords a convenient date to mark the time when the Japanese first started consciously to learn from the Chinese.
During the next few centuries Buddhism served as an important vehicle for the transmission of Chinese culture to Japan. Buddhism is by origin an Indian religion. It had slowly spread to China and had won a place of importance in Chinese culture during the troubled era between the two great empires. It was a vigorous missionary religion at that time, and missionary zeal carried it beyond China to Korea and from there to Japan. Korean, Chinese, and even occasional Indian priests came to Japan from the sixth to eighth centuries. In turn, scores of Japanese converts went to China to learn more of the new faith. Returning from the continent, these Japanese student priests, even more than foreign missionary teachers, took the lead in transmitting to Japan the new religion and many other aspects of Chinese civilization. They were the true pioneers in planting and nurturing in Japan the borrowed culture of China.
In the second half of the sixth century Buddhism and other new influences from abroad so affected the Yamato clan that clashes broke out between factions favoring the acceptance of Buddhism and other continental ideas and opposition groups which resisted the new religion and all change. The victory of the pro-Buddhist faction in about 587 cleared the way for a more rapid importation and acceptance of Chinese ideas and knowledge, and under the able leadership of the crown prince, Shotoku, many startling reforms were undertaken.
One of the most important innovations of Prince Shotoku was the sending of a large official embassy to China in the year 607. This embassy, and many others following its precedent during the next two centuries, played a vital role in the great period of learning from China. Although their immediate political significance was slight, and the economic importance of the exchange of goods carried on under their auspices was limited, the cultural influence of the embassies was tremendous. The Japanese leaders, showing extraordinary wisdom for a people only just emerging into the light of civilization, carefully chose promising young scholars and artists to accompany the embassies in order to study at the sources of knowledge in China. These young men, selected for their knowledge of Chinese literature, philosophy, history, or Buddhist theology and ritual, or for their skill in the arts of painting, poetry, or music, studied in China during the year of the embassy’s stay, and some remained in China for a decade or two between embassies. Upon their return to Japan, they became leaders in their respective fields, the men most responsible for the successful transmission to this isolated land of the science, arts, and ideals of the great continental civilization.
Early routes between Japan and China
With the glory of China before their eyes, it was little wonder that the Japanese made this attempt. Other petty states in Korea, Manchuria, and on the southwestern borders of China, dazzled by the grandeur and might of T’ang, were making the same attempt. Truly amazing, however, were the zeal and energy with which the Japanese approached the problem, displaying an enthusiasm for learning which promised great things for their remote and backward land.
Under the influence of Chinese ideas, the Japanese for the first time conceived the idea of the Yamato state as an empire, and at that, an empire on an equal footing with China. Prince Shotoku even dared to phrase a letter to the Chinese emperor as coming from the Emperor of the Rising Sun to the Emperor of the Setting Sun. With the new imperial concept, the ruler of the Yamato state for the first time assumed the dignity and majesty of an emperor. The priest-chief of the clan became in theory all-powerful, an absolute monarch in the Chinese tradition. But he did not lose his original role as high priest. He retained a dual position. Even today the Japanese emperor is in theory the Shinto high priest of ancient Yamato tradition, and at the same time the all-powerful secular ruler of Chinese tradition.
Possibly also under the influence of Chinese social concepts and of the Chinese prejudice against ruling empresses, the ancient custom of rule by women came to a definite end in Japan in the first half of the eighth century, after an unfortunate incident between a ruling empress and a Buddhist priest. Only many centuries later, long after the imperial line had become politically insignificant, did women again appear on the throne. Japanese women, who in the earliest times had enjoyed a position of social and political dominance over men, gradually sank to a status of complete subservience to them. Their rights and influence in early feudal society seem still to have been considerable, but in time even these rights were lost, as the women of Japan became socially and intellectually mere handmaids of the dominant male population.
Below the emperor the Japanese created a complex central government patterned after the tremendous centralized administration of T’ang China, one of the most highly developed and complex governments the world has ever seen. Under a Supreme Council of State, with its Prime Minister and Ministers of the Left and Right, were eight ministries, in concept not unlike the departments of our own government. Under the ministries in turn came scores of bureaus and other offices.
This organization was fantastically over developed for the needs of a small and loosely organized state, still close to a primitive clan society. Naturally much of the central government was little more than a paper organization which functioned, if at all, far differently from the Chinese prototypes. But the wonder is not that the Japanese fell short of complete success in creating a Chinese type of central government in Yamato. The surprising thing is that they had the ambition and energy to undertake such a gigantic and grandiose task, and that they already had sufficient understanding of the principles and mastery of the mechanism of Chinese government to create a fair semblance of its complex central administration.
One gains some idea of the scope of the undertaking and the degree of success achieved by considering the capital cities founded by the Japanese as part of their attempt to transform Japan into a little T’ang. In earlier ages there had been no cities, towns, nor even any semi-permanent buildings. Now the Japanese attempted to build a capital city comparable to Ch’ang-an, the great capital of T’ang, a metropolis of close to one million population and very probably the greatest city in the world at that time.
Ch’ang-an was a great rectangle in shape, some five miles by six miles, surrounded by massive walls. A magnificent palace stood at the northern end of the city and broad straight thoroughfares divided it neatly in checkerboard fashion. The first Japanese imitation of Ch’ang-an was undertaken in the year 710 near the modern town of Nara in the Yamato plain. The Japanese naturally reduced the scale, allowing the new capital an area of some two and a half by three miles. They failed to build the customary Chinese city wall, and the population of the capital was so far short of the goal that the western half of the city was never built up at all; but broad thoroughfares were laid out, and stately tile-roofed Buddhist temples and probably imposing palaces and residences were constructed. Even today several of these Buddhist temples still stand, the oldest wooden structures in the world and the finest remaining examples of Far Eastern architecture of the T’ang epoch.
Toward the end of the eighth century, the Japanese court, possibly with a view to escaping the increasing influence of the great Buddhist temples which ringed the Nara capital, decided to abandon this first city and
Plan of ancient Kyoto
build a new capital. In 794 this second city was laid out at Kyoto, a few miles north of Nara. Again the scale was grandiose, a rectangle some three by three and a half miles, and again the Chinese city wall and the western half of the city never materialized. But this second capital never disappeared, as did the first. It survived the vicissitudes of the ages, remaining the imperial capital of Japan until 1868, and the checkerboard pattern of the principal streets of Kyoto today still reflects accurately the Chinese-style city laid out over 1,000 years ago.
The creation of a central government in Japan based on Chinese models was an easier task than the creation of the Chinese type of provincial administration. Clan spirit and clan autonomy were still too strong to tolerate the direct rule of all parts of the land by a bureaucracy dispatched to the provincial centers from the court. But the Japanese at least created the outward forms of the Chinese provincial system. The land was divided into prefectures and sub-prefectures, and over these were placed officials with high-sounding titles. Since most of these provincial posts, however, were given to local aristocrats, control from the central government remained vague and probably subject to the tolerance of local leaders.
Perhaps the most daring step taken by the Japanese was an attempt to adopt the Chinese system of land ownership and taxation. In early T’ang China, agricultural land was in theory nationalized and distributed equally among the peasants, so that each adult tax-paying male could carry an equal share of the taxes. This he paid partly in produce and partly in labor, or in military service, which was considered a form of labor for the state.
Even in well-organized China, with its highly trained bureaucracy, this cumbersome system worked imperfectly, tending to break down completely every few decades. The Japanese wrote the system into elaborate law codes drawn up on Chinese models. To put it into practice in clan-ridden Japan was a different matter. For a century or so, the system did operate after a fashion in the capital area and in localities held directly by the Yamato clan, but in more remote parts of the country it was a dead letter from the start.
Closely connected with the Chinese tax system was the huge peasant conscript army it provided. China, with its long frontiers and warlike nomad neighbors to the north, needed such large levies, but they were quite meaningless in isolated Japan. A so-called army was created from peasant conscripts of the capital areas where the tax system was in force, but these peasant soldiers never constituted anything more than labor gangs. Despite the creation on paper of a foot-soldier army, the aristocrat on horseback remained the true Japanese fighting man.
The process of learning and borrowing from China was of course not limited to the political field. In fact, what the Japanese were learning at this time in cultural and intellectual fields had much more prolonged influence in Japan than did the borrowed political institutions. The latter for the most part decayed rapidly, and eventually disappeared in all but name, but many of the religious concepts, artistic skills, and literary forms learned during these centuries, far from losing their original vigor, developed and helped form the basic cultural patterns of later ages.
After the triumph of the pro-Buddhist faction at the Yamato court in the second half of the sixth century, this continental religion enjoyed the uninterrupted favor of the central government. Splendid temples were erected at government expense; impressive Buddhist ceremonies were sponsored by the court and the noble families. Many a Japanese emperor retired from the heavy burdens of his dual secular and religious role to the more peaceful life of the Buddhist monk. As was the case with so much else in the newly imported continental culture, the influence of Buddhism was still weak in the provinces, but in the capital district the new religion was supreme, and enjoyed official favor far greater than that afforded even the native cults of Shinto.
With Buddhism came many of the arts and crafts of China. The Buddhist temples were themselves great architectural achievements, and housed beautiful and deeply spiritual bronze and wooden statues of Buddhist divinities, exquisite religious paintings, and other magnificent works of art. Some had been brought from the continent. Others of equal beauty and artistic merit were produced in Japan, showing how readily the Japanese acquired the artistic skills developed during the centuries by the Chinese.
Several temple halls and store rooms dating from the seventh and eighth centuries still stand, filled with the artistic achievements of that age. They attest to the amazing success with which the Japanese transplanted much of the best in Chinese artistic tradition and indicate the early development of a happy combination of artistic taste and superb craftsmanship which ever since has characterized the Japanese.
In art, the Japanese could have had no better teachers than the Chinese, but in the field of writing Chinese influence was less happy. Japanese is a language of simple phonetic structure and highly inflected words. Hence it can be easily written by phonetic symbols, and these are necessary to represent the language properly. The Chinese writing system, on the other hand, leaves little possibility for phonetic transcription or for the representation of inflections. Since Chinese lacks inflection and since in ancient Chinese the words tended to be monosyllabic, the Chinese found it possible to use a writing system in which each monosyllabic word or word-root is represented by a special symbol, called a character or ideograph. These characters range from a simple line, 一 to represent “one,” to more complex characters, such as the monstrosity in twenty-five strokes 灣 representing the word “bay.”
The Chinese student has always been faced with the grim necessity of mastering several thousand of these characters before he could be considered literate. The ancient Japanese were faced with this and with the added difficulty that the Chinese writing system was not suitable to the writing of Japanese. Had Japan been the neighbor of some Western country using a phonetic script, such as our own alphabet, the Japanese would have quickly learned to write their native tongue with efficiency and ease. Unfortunately geographic accident decreed otherwise, and the Japanese were burdened with the crushing weight of the most cumbersome of writing systems. Like the youth of China, the youth of Japan was sentenced generation after generation to years of mentally numbing memory work, simply in order to learn the rudiments of writing.
Because of the difficulties involved and also because of the tremendous prestige of all things Chinese, the ancient Japanese made little effort to write their own language. Proper names and brief poems in Japanese were spelled out laboriously with one Chinese character used phonetically for each syllable, but little else was attempted. Instead the Japanese wrote in pure and often reasonably good classical Chinese. Using Chinese much as medieval Europeans used Latin, they wrote their histories, geographies, law books, and official documents of all sorts. They even attempted to imitate Chinese literary forms, and men of education prided themselves on their ability to compose poems in Chinese.
The most interesting and significant form of literary endeavor at this time was history writing. This was to be expected in a cultural daughter of China, for the Chinese have always been historically minded, prone to take the historical approach to any subject or situation. The writing of history was always an important function of government in China, and as a result the Chinese were inveterate and extremely good historians.
Since Japan was in its own eyes an empire on the Chinese model, obviously she too needed an official history. Several early efforts to write one resulted in two extant works, the Nihon Shoki, a great official history compiled in 720, and a smaller work called the Kojiki, which is said to have appeared in 712, and may have been one of the preliminary drafts on which the Nihon Shoki was based. Both are extremely important works, for they are fairly reliable historical accounts for the period from about A.D. 400 on, and they contain much naïve mythology and historical tradition from earlier eras which throw a great deal of light on primitive Japanese beliefs and social institutions before they were submerged under the flood of more advanced ideas and institutions from China.
However, the statesmen and historians of the time were not satisfied with a simple, uncolored presentation of the mythology and historical traditions of the Yamato clan as transmitted orally by professional court reciters. They were determined to prove by their work that the rulers of Yamato were and always had been true emperors, unique rulers of Japan, and that Japan was a great and old country, worthy of standing beside China. Strengthening their mythology and scanty historical traditions with elements from Chinese philosophy and history, they wove the whole into an impressive pseudo-history. The Sun Goddess, one of the chief objects of worship by the ancient Yamato clan, was cast in the role of progenitress of the imperial line. Her grandson was described as descending to Japan from heaven, his grandson, in turn, as becoming the first emperor, ascending the throne in 660 B.C. This date, like so much else of this pseudo-history, is of course pure fantasy, possibly arrived at in the early seventh century simply by counting back 1,260 years, a major time cycle according to Chinese reckoning.
The place of the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki in the historiography of Japan is fundamental, but unfortunately that is not their only claim to fame. They were to be lifted from comparative obscurity many centuries later by narrow-minded patriots and ultra-nationalists seeking in the primitive pre-Chinese periods of Japanese history native virtues which would justify their own belief in the superiority of Japan. Despite the extraordinary naïveté and occasional indecency, according to Western standards, of the early mythology preserved in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the modern Japanese have in a sense made these two books into bibles of ultra-nationalism; and in recent years official policy has even forced upon the Japanese people the acceptance of their historical absurdities as sober facts.