Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 4
Chapter IV
The Growth of a Native Culture
The period of greatest learning from China lasted from the late sixth century until the early ninth century, when a subtle change began to take place in the attitude of the Japanese toward China. The prestige of all things Chinese remained great, but the ninth century Japanese were no longer so anxious to learn from China or so ready to admit the superiority of all phases of Chinese civilization over their own.
One reason for this slowly changing attitude toward Chinese culture was the political decay of T’ang, which became marked as the ninth century progressed. Perhaps even more fundamental was the intellectual growth of the Japanese themselves, resulting in a gradual reassertion of a spirit of cultural independence. Three centuries of assiduous learning from the Chinese had created, at least in the capital district, a cultured society with its own political and social institutions, patterned of course after Chinese models but changed and adapted to fit Japanese needs by over two centuries of conscious experimentation and slow unconscious modification. The Japanese were no longer a primitive people, overawed by the vastly superior continental civilization and eager to imitate blindly anything Chinese. Japan was reaching a state of intellectual maturity and was ready to develop a culture of its own.
One sign of the changing attitude in Japan was the ending of official contacts with China. The last of the great embassies left Japan for T’ang in 838 and returned the next year. Later embassies were proposed but were argued down by courtiers who felt their value no longer warranted the decided risks of the trip across the East China Sea. Some private traders and student monks continued to travel between the two lands, but for the most part Japan lapsed into its earlier state of virtual isolation from the continent, and this isolation in turn made the Japanizing of imported Chinese civilization all the more inevitable and rapid.
The slow rise of native Japanese culture is perhaps best observed in the development of an adequate means of writing the native tongue. This writing system was developed slowly during the ninth and tenth centuries by the process of using certain Chinese characters in greatly abbreviated form as simple phonetic symbols devoid of any specific meaning in themselves. Since the Chinese characters each represented one monosyllabic word or word-root, the phonetic symbols derived from them normally stood for a whole syllable, such as ka, se, or mo. The result was a syllabary and not an alphabet, such as our own system of writing.
The Japanese syllabary, or kana as it is called, was at first a confused affair. For one thing, the Chinese characters used were abbreviated in two different ways. In one system, called hiragana, the whole character was written in a very stylized or cursive form. Thus, the Chinese character 奴 meaning “slave” became the hiragana symbol ぬ standing for the sound nu. In the other system, called katakana, some element of the character was chosen to represent the phonetic value of the whole. Thus, this same Chinese character for “slave” became the katakana symbol ヌ also standing for nu. Another complexity was that the choice of characters for abbreviation as kana was at first quite haphazard, and usually several were used for any one syllable. In fact, both hiragana and katakana have only been standardized in recent decades, and variant kana forms are still commonly used in every day correspondence.
The Japanese syllabaries formed more clumsy systems of writing than alphabets, but they were, nevertheless, reasonably efficient systems for writing Japanese, and with their development appeared a growing literature in the native tongue. As stated previously, poems had been composed in Japanese even at the height of the Chinese period, and had been laboriously written down by the use of unabbreviated Chinese characters to represent each syllable phonetically; but these poems were usually extremely brief, following a strict pattern of thirty-one syllables, merely enough to suggest a scene or an emotion. The classical Japanese poem was delicate and beautiful within its narrow bounds, but it was distinctly limited as a literary form.
The kana syllabaries made possible more extensive literary work in Japanese, and in the tenth century stories, travel diaries, and essays appeared, written in Japanese which sometimes achieved considerable literary distinction. For the most part educated men, much like their counterparts in medieval Europe, scorned the use of their own tongue for any serious literary purpose and continued to write histories, essays, and various official documents in Chinese; but the women of the imperial court, who usually had insufficient education to write in Chinese, had no other medium for literary expression than their own language. As a result, while the men of the period were pompously writing bad Chinese, their ladies consoled themselves for their lack of education by writing good Japanese, and created, incidentally, Japan’s first great prose literature.
The golden period of the first flowering of Japanese prose was in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Most of the writers were court ladies living in ease and indolence, and their commonest form of literary expression was the diary, liberally sprinkled with poems of thirty-one syllables to commemorate moments of deep emotional feeling. Some of the diaries told of travels, but more often they concerned the luxurious life and constant flirtation and love-making which characterized the court at this time.
The outstanding work of the period, however, was not a diary but a lengthy novel—the Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki early in the eleventh century. This is an account of the love adventures of an imaginary Prince Genji, made slightly tedious to a modern reader by the similarity of his many experiences, but unquestionably a distinguished piece of writing and one of Japan’s outstanding contributions to world literature.
The diaries and novels by court ladies were clear evidence of the existence of a true native Japanese culture. They had no clear prototypes in Chinese literature. Everything about them was distinctly Japanese. The transplanted Chinese civilization had flowered into a new culture, and the Japanese, a people but recently introduced to the art of writing, had produced a great literature of their own.
One may wonder why Japanese writing is still burdened with Chinese characters, if a thousand years ago the Japanese had already developed a phonetic script which was satisfactory for writing their language. The only explanation is the continued prestige of the Chinese language, and still more of the Chinese characters themselves. Learned writers inevitably tended to slip Chinese characters standing for individual uninflected words, such as nouns, into a Japanese text written in kana. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, this became standard procedure, and eventually it became customary to write as many uninflected words and the roots of as many inflected words as possible with characters, leaving for kana only the tag ends of words, such as inflections which could not be represented conveniently by characters.
The natural complexities of such a mixed system of writing were increased by two other factors. Since thousands of Chinese words were gradually incorporated into the Japanese language, most of the characters stood not only for the Japanese version of the original Chinese word, but also for the corresponding Japanese word. It is as if the Chinese character for “water,” 水, were to be used in English to represent the word “water” in “water wheel” and also to represent the element aqua in “aquatic.”
The second factor was that many Chinese characters stood for Chinese words which corresponded in meaning to several different Japanese words. For example, the Chinese word shang, written by the character 上, has Japanese equivalents variously read as ue, kami, agaru, ageru, and noboru, to list the commonest, just as it has such English equivalents as “on,” “above,” “upper,” “to mount,” and “to present.” This multiplicity of Japanese readings for many characters and the coexistence of both Japanese and Chinese readings for most of them means that every line of modern Japanese presents a series of little problems in reading and interpretation. The result is a writing system of almost unparalleled difficulty and cumbersomeness, which has been a serious impediment to the intellectual and technical development of modern Japan.
The obvious cure for this situation would be to abandon the use of Chinese characters and to return to the pure phonetic writing as it existed around the year 1,000—or, still better, to adopt the Latin alphabet. But this would be no easy task. In modern times tens of thousands of technical and scientific words have been borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan by joining two or more Chinese characters and pronouncing the resulting compound in the Chinese way. Unfortunately, Chinese type words in the Japanese vocabulary run very strongly to homophones. A standard dictionary lists no less than twenty distinct words, mostly of Chinese type, pronounced kōkō, and an exhaustive list of more specialized scientific terminology would probably add several dozen more. Because of these homophones, many, if not most, modern scientific terms, to be understood, must be seen as they are written in characters. Consequently, the dropping of Chinese characters from modern written Japanese would entail a wholesale modification of the technical and scientific vocabulary. Thousands of Chinese type words would have to be dropped, and new ones based on native Japanese roots or on words from Western languages would have to be substituted for them. It would be a tremendous undertaking, but in the long run probably well worth the attempt.
Although the appearance by the tenth and eleventh centuries of a new and distinctive Japanese culture was perhaps best seen in the literature of the time, it was evident in other fields also. The arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture all showed definite and sometimes marked signs of Japanese characteristics quite distinct from the original Chinese patterns, and political and social institutions changed so radically as to bear little resemblance to the Chinese prototypes.
The key figure of the Chinese political system was the bureaucrat, the scholar-civil servant who operated the complicated central government and went out to the provinces to collect taxes and maintain order. Thousands of these bureaucrats were required, and the recruiting of wise and capable men for the higher posts was a matter of crucial importance to the whole state. For this purpose, the Chinese had developed a system of civil service examinations. It centered around the great central university at Ch’ang-an where periodic examinations were given on classical subjects. Candidates who succeeded best in the examinations went directly to high government posts. In this way, men of scholarly talents from all walks of life could reach positions of responsibility, and among the educated classes a vital tradition of public service was built up.
The Japanese borrowed only the outward forms of this system. With their strong traditions of clan loyalty and hereditary rights, they could not bring themselves to accept its spirit. They created a central university where the Chinese classics were studied and examinations were held, but only in rare cases did scholars with little family backing attain positions of much responsibility. In the provinces, political authority remained in the hands of local aristocrats masquerading as civil servants appointed by the central administration, while at the capital courtiers of noble lineage held most posts of importance, leaving to the scholar bureaucrats the humbler clerical jobs.
In China, the central government was constantly kept busy fighting the natural tendency for the tax-paying peasants and their lands to gravitate into the hands of powerful families with sufficient influence at court to protect their holdings from the encroachments of tax collectors. In Japan, this tendency was even stronger, for there was no powerful civil servant class to protect the interests of the state, and local aristocrats, in key positions as provincial officers, joined with court nobles in despoiling the public domain.
The nationalized land system had probably been a dead letter from the start in more remote parts of the country. During the late eighth and ninth centuries it decayed rapidly even in the capital district. Local men of influence slowly built up tax-free estates, usually by illegal means, and court aristocrats acquired in their own names large tracts of land as rewards for their services or through political manipulations of a less honorable nature.
On the one hand, the local gentry needed protection for their holdings from the tax collectors of the central government. On the other hand, powerful court families and great monasteries were acquiring large tax-free estates, and needed local men to represent their interests on these lands. From these reciprocal needs a pattern of land-holding gradually developed in which provincial manors and estates were controlled and operated by local aristocrats but were owned, at least in theory, by influential court families or monasteries. The peasant, who came to have definite proprietary rights to his own little tract of land, gave to the local aristocrat, acting as estate manager, a generous portion of his produce; and the estate manager, in turn, passed on to the noble court family or great monastery a share of his income in payment for protection from the central government.
Tax-free manors grew and expanded during the eighth and ninth centuries until, by the tenth, the national domain had virtually disappeared. With its disappearance, the income of the state from taxes, the economic basis for the Chinese form of centralized government, dwindled to almost nothing. As a result, provincial governmental agencies, which had never been strong, withered away almost completely, leaving behind imposing but meaningless administrative titles, such as Governor or Vice-Governor. Even the central administration became largely an empty shell, a great paper organization with court nobles sporting high titles but with little working personnel, scanty funds, and greatly reduced functions of government. The complex system of rule through eight ministries was for all practical purposes abandoned, and new and simplified organs of government were developed to handle what few political duties the central government still had.
The net result of all this was that centralized government ceased to exist for most parts of Japan. Each estate, freed from encroachment by tax collectors and other state agents, became a small autonomous domain, a semi-independent economic and political unit. The contacts it had with the outside world were not with any government agency but with the great court family or monastery which exercised a loose and distant control over it.
The noble court families and monasteries became, in a sense, multiple successors of the old centralized state. Any centralizing forces in the economic and political life of Japan were represented largely by them and not by the bureaus of the central government. These families and monasteries became to a certain degree states within the hollow framework of the old imperial government, each supported by the income from its own estates and, through family government or monastery administration, exercising many of the functions of government in its widely scattered manors throughout the land.
The imperial family, though retaining great prestige because of its past political role and its continuing position as leader in the Shinto cults, became in fact simply one among these central economic and political units. It exercised a theoretical rule over a shadow government, but in reality it controlled only its own estates and lived on the income from them, and not from government taxes. In time, even control over its own private affairs was lost, as one of the court families, the Fujiwara, gradually won complete mastery over the imperial family by intrigue and skillful political manipulations.
The Fujiwara were a prolific family of many branches, descended from a courtier who had taken the lead in the pro-Chinese coup d’état of 645. The family had come to control many estates throughout the land and thus enjoyed an income probably greater than that of any other family, not excluding the imperial family itself. Its method of winning unchallenged dominance at the capital was to gain direct control over the imperial family through intermarriage. A daughter of the head of the family would be married to a young emperor, and the emperor, bored with the endless ceremonies required by his double role as secular and religious leader, would be easily persuaded to abdicate and retire to a simpler, freer life as soon as the son the Fujiwara girl had borne him was old enough to sit through these ceremonies in his place. This would leave a Fujiwara girl as empress dowager, and her father, the powerful head of a large and rich court family, as the grandfather of the new child emperor.
By such tactics the Fujiwara gained complete control over the imperial family during the middle decades of the ninth century. From that time on, it became customary for the head of the Fujiwara family, instead of an imperial prince, to act as regent for a child emperor or to occupy the new post of Civil Dictator when an adult was on the throne. During the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, appointment to these two alternating posts, as well as to that of Prime Minister and to most of the other high offices in the central administration, became the hereditary right of members of the Fujiwara family, and the successive family heads completely overshadowed the emperors not only as the real holders of the reins of government but also as the openly recognized arbiters of taste and fashion at court.
In later centuries, the dominant role in the dwindling court aristocracy was from time to time regained by strong emperors, and the various official posts of the Fujiwara in time became almost meaningless, as all political power slipped away from the imperial court. However, the Fujiwara and offshoots of this great family retained their virtual monopoly of all high court posts almost without interruption from the late ninth century until the early nineteenth century.
In another country such a long and almost complete dominance exercised by one family over the imperial family would probably have resulted in a usurpation of the throne. Not so in Japan. Hereditary authority was so strong a force that outright usurpation was not to be contemplated. Instead, the Fujiwara set the time honored Japanese pattern of control from behind the scenes through a figurehead. Throughout most of Japanese history, it has probably been the rule rather than the exception for the man or group in nominal political control to be in reality the pawn of some other man or group. This factor has in recent times tended to conceal the realities of Japanese politics, and has often confused and baffled the casual observer of the Japanese scene.