Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 5
Chapter V
The Development of a Feudal Society
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Fujiwara held the spotlight on the stage of Japanese history, but, despite the brilliance of the literary and artistic accomplishments of the court they dominated, others off stage were preparing the next acts in the drama. The capital aristocrats had transformed the borrowed civilization of China into a native culture, but they had lost control over the political and economic life of the country.
While the courtiers were going through the forms and ceremonies of little more than a sham government, and devoting their energies more to the arts of poetry-writing and love-making than to governing, the provincial aristocrats were gaining practical experience, managing their estates and ruling the peasants on these estates with hardly any control or direction from the capital. The decadent, effeminate courtiers at Kyoto were producing a literature and an art that future generations were to look back to with pride, but their less sophisticated and hardier country cousins were laying the foundations for an entirely new Japan.
The gradual decline of Chinese political institutions at the capital and the weakening of the central government’s control over the provinces have made the period of Fujiwara supremacy appear to be one of unmitigated political decline. In reality the political decay at court was more than offset by the rapid growth of the once backward provincials in political experience and in general sophistication. During the height of the Chinese period they had participated but little in the brilliant culture transplanted from T’ang to the capital district, and they had been completely overshadowed by the noble families at court, but at the same time they were slowly absorbing much of the basic knowledge and many of the essential skills of the continental civilization. By the tenth and eleventh centuries they had reached a stage of cultural development which permitted them to start laying the broad foundations of a new society and a new political structure, entirely independent of the old patterns established by the court.
The central figure in this new society, as in the earlier clan society of the provinces, was the aristocratic fighting man on horseback. In ancient times he had been the soldier leader of the clan. Now he was the manager of a tax-free estate, defending his lands from marauders by his skill as a horseman and his prowess with the bow and sword. He had become a knight, resembling to a surprising degree his counterpart in the early feudal society of Europe.
Individual knights usually owed allegiance to court families or central monasteries which were the nominal owners of their estates, but this relationship, which had been the outgrowth of an early need for protection from the tax collectors of the central government, afforded them no protection from their local enemies. For this, they needed the aid of other fighting men, the knights on other local estates. Quite naturally these warrior aristocrats began to form small local cliques for their mutual protection.
These cliques were held together by common interest, ties of marriage and of old friendships, and sometimes the qualities of leadership displayed by a local warrior hero. Particularly in the eastland did such associations of knights flourish, possibly because the greatest concentration of estates in the whole land was to be found on the Kanto Plain around the modern city of Tokyo, and also because the continuing campaigns against the retreating Ainu in northern Honshu made the need for such associations all the more evident.
The tenth and eleventh centuries saw many clashes and small wars between different groups of knights in the provinces. These contests are often described in histories as revolts against imperial authority, for one faction would resist domination by another faction which enjoyed the backing of the central government. The provincial knights, however, for the most part showed little desire to assume the governmental prerogatives of the Kyoto court. They were content to leave the central government undisturbed as long as they themselves could continue to rule the peasants on their own estates and to organize their cliques for local defense without interference from the capital.
The court aristocrats, rather than the knights themselves, eventually brought these provincial warriors onto the capital stage. The courtiers, lacking all knowledge of the arts of war themselves, would from time to time bring knights from their provincial estates to the capital to help protect their interests or to overawe their enemies. Sometimes the knights were used to defend the court from the great local monasteries, which often attempted to force their will upon the effete courtiers by a joint display of Buddhist relics and armed might drawn from the warriors of the monastery estates. At other times, the knights were brought in to settle, by a show of force or by actual conflict, factional disputes over the imperial succession and the headship of the Fujiwara family.
In the middle of the twelfth century disputes of the latter type led to fairly large scale clashes between the two strongest warrior cliques of the time in support of two quarreling court factions. The warrior cliques centered around two great provincial families, the Taira and the Minamoto, both of whom claimed descent from cadet branches of the imperial family which, because of declining income, had been forced to seek their fortunes in the provinces. There they had merged with the local aristocrats and had risen to leadership among them because of their prestige as descendants of emperors.
As a result of two small wars in 1156 and 1160, one of the court factions won out over the other. A far more significant outcome was the sudden realization on the part of Taira Kiyomori, leader of the victorious Taira clique of warriors, that he and his band now formed the paramount military force in the land and that the emperor and his court were powerless in his hands. To the consternation of the courtiers, Kiyomori and his leading knights settled down in Kyoto and took over control of the court, Kiyomori taking for himself the title of Prime Minister and adopting the old Fujiwara trick of marrying his own daughter to the emperor and putting her son on the throne.
By settling in Kyoto and becoming in effect a new group of courtiers, Kiyomori and his henchmen weakened their hold over the knights of their clique who remained on their estates in the provinces and who tended to resent the position and pretensions of the court aristocracy. Meanwhile the remnants of the Minamoto family slowly recouped their fortune in their old family stronghold in eastern Japan. Eventually the Minamoto felt themselves strong enough again to challenge Taira supremacy, and in a bitterly fought war between 1180 and 1185 they completely crushed the Taira faction. The Taira leaders either were killed or committed suicide, and the new boy emperor who was the grandson of Kiyomori perished with his Taira relatives in the final battle of the war.
Minamoto Yoritomo, the leader of the triumphant Minamoto faction, profiting from the mistakes of the Taira, left Kyoto and the court alone and settled down at the small seaside town of Kamakura, near the estates of his relatives and his partisans in the Kanto region of eastern Japan. In typically Japanese fashion, he decided to permit the emperors and Fujiwara to continue their sham civil government unmolested. He took for himself only the title of Shogun, a term perhaps best translated as “Generalissimo,” and he rewarded his men not with government posts but with the more lucrative positions of estate managers in manors formerly 
Japan in the feudal period
The administration which Yoritomo and his successors set up at Kamakura was not in theory or in outward form a national government. It was merely a simple but efficient organization designed to control the relatively small band of knights that owed personal allegiance to the Minamoto. It was, in fact, nothing more than a “family” government, not of a single clan as had been customary in ancient times, but of a loose association of knights held together by bonds of family relationship or by long-standing ties of friendship and traditions of mutual support.
Under the Shogun, three small offices were created as the chief organs of this “family” government—an office to watch over and control the affairs of the individual knight members of the clique, an administrative board, and a final court of appeal, making legal decisions based upon the customary law which had gradually developed among the provincial warrior aristocrats during the preceding two centuries and which the Kamakura administration issued in codified form. The provincial organization of this government was even simpler than its central administration. It consisted only of the individual knights themselves, free to manage their individual estates as each saw best, but organized for mutual defense under a constable in each province.
The whole “family” government of the Minamoto may have been designed simply to control the private affairs of the clique and not to administer the nation as a whole, but by controlling the members of this group, who had now been spread throughout the whole land as the key class of estate managers and local knights, the government at Kamakura effectively controlled all classes of society throughout Japan. Its member knights ruled the peasants, who were serfs on their estates, and they also controlled the purse strings of the court aristocracy, which derived its income from these same estates. Although it maintained the fiction of being a private organization, the Kamakura regime had become the most effective central government Japan had yet known; and the people of all classes, realizing that Kamakura alone had the power to enforce its decisions, went there rather than to Kyoto for justice and looked to the Shogun’s administration rather than to the emperor’s court for leadership.
An ambitious retired emperor in 1221 dared challenge this indirect and unannounced control of national life by Kamakura, but found himself overwhelmed by the Minamoto cohorts. The incident revealed conclusively that imperial rule was at an end. The imperial family and the noble families around it continued to receive their income from the estates they nominally owned, but as far as political realities were concerned, the emperor and his court had become anachronistic survivals of an earlier age, with no valid place in the political order of feudalism. Yet the prestige of the imperial line and its continuing religious functions kept alive the fiction of imperial rule during the following six centuries of feudalism, until new conditions made possible its reappearance as a significant element in the political life of the nation.
The Kamakura system centered around the Shogun, the leader of the clique, and in theory the only unifying force was the personal loyalty of each individual knight to the Shogun. In practice, however, the person of the Shogun soon became an unimportant factor, and the system proved to have amazing strength of itself.
Yoritomo, the first Shogun, jealously rid himself of his hero brother and other leading members of his family. After the death of Yoritomo factional strife among his descendants, fostered by his wife’s relatives, who had the family name of Hojo, soon led to the elimination of his heirs. In 1219 an assassination ended the Minamoto line, and thereafter the Hojo, who in typical Japanese fashion contented themselves with the title of “Regent,” ruled through a puppet Shogun, first chosen from the Fujiwara family and then from the imperial family.
Thus, one finds in thirteenth century Japan an emperor who was a mere puppet in the hands of a retired emperor and of a great court family, the Fujiwara, who together controlled a government which was in fact merely a sham government, completely dominated by the private government of the Shogun—who in turn was a puppet in the hands of a Hojo regent. The man behind the throne had become a series of men, each one in turn controlled by the man behind himself.
The rise of the provincial warrior class to a position of dominance produced a new culture as well as a new political system. The literature and art of the tenth and eleventh centuries had been an expression of the culture of the narrow court society under Fujiwara leadership. The new culture naturally inherited much from this glorious period, but the most significant and, in time, dominant elements in it came from the warrior class of the provinces.
The knight brought with him his own concepts and attitudes, which were in some respect similar to those of his counterpart in medieval Europe. In contrast to the effete courtier at Kyoto, he gloried in a life of warfare, in the Spartan virtues, and in the ascetic practices of self-discipline and physical and mental toughening. He made a cult of his sword, and this cult, revived in recent years, accounts for the extraordinary pride of the modern Japanese officer in his old-fashioned, long, curved sword. The warrior reemphasized personal loyalties and the importance of family ties, and his two outstanding virtues, Spartan indifference to suffering or death and a great capacity for unswerving personal loyalty, became characteristics of the Japanese people as a whole.
The warrior’s tastes in literature produced a whole new type of prose writing—the heroic tale of warfare, quite different from the diaries and novels of the court ladies. These martial tales usually centered around the conflicts between the Taira and Minamoto factions, which became the central themes of much of later Japanese literature.
The successive triumphs of the Taira and Minamoto marked the commencement of 700 years of unbroken rule by warrior aristocrats. Small wonder that the impress of feudalism lies so heavily upon the nation and that the attitudes and ideals of the feudal warriors have sunk so deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese people. Accustomed for so long to rule by wearers of the sword, even in recent times the Japanese have looked instinctively to their military men for leadership and have been prone to assume that military men per se were always honest and sincere. Seven centuries of domination by the feudal military class has left patterns of thought and behavior which have not been easy to discard in recent times and which will not be easily erased even today.
Accompanying the political transformation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a great religious awakening. Significant new currents appeared in Japanese Buddhism, and these currents became the main flow of Buddhism as it has existed in Japan ever since. The appearance of new trends in religion at this time was unquestionably connected with the increasing spread of culture and knowledge to classes outside of the old court aristocracy—to the provincial gentry, the townspeople, and even to the peasantry; and the rapid triumph of the new Buddhism over older forms of the religion was certainly in part the result of the rise of new classes to prominence in national life.
The Buddhist awakening of early feudal times was also partly the outgrowth of new influences from China, as contacts with the continent, fostered by a growing international trade in Far Eastern waters, became more frequent and increasingly significant. Buddhist monasteries themselves led in establishing these new contacts with China, sponsoring trading ventures overseas with a view to obtaining funds for the erection of new buildings. Many fine thirteenth and fourteenth century temples were to some extent paid for by such trading ventures, as was also the beautiful “Great Buddha” at Kamakura, erected in the second half of the thirteenth century and said still to be the largest bronze statue in the world.
Buddhism came to China as a highly intellectualized philosophy with rich and colorful religious ceremonials that appealed to the upper classes, but during the T’ang and post-T’ang periods a growing emphasis on the less austere and more popular philosophic concepts of Buddhism led to a general philosophic reorientation and popularization which made it increasingly a religion of the people.
Early Indian Buddhism stressed the evil and vanity of human existence. It held out little hope for improving man’s lot in this world but centered its interest primarily on what it called “release from the cycle of rebirth.” The Buddhists accepted the common Indian belief that the individual is born again and again into this world. He may be born into a better state or a worse one, depending on the sort of life he lives in each successive rebirth. This process goes on endlessly unless the individual realizes that his own desire for things that cannot really satisfy him brings about his repeated rebirth into an incurably evil world: the only way to escape “the cycle of rebirth” is to overcome all desire. One who has done this has attained nirvana, a state of mind in which one is indifferent to life’s trials and the individual ego loses its identity in the cosmos, much as a single drop of water loses its identity in the vastness of the ocean.
Such a pessimistic attitude toward life had little appeal for the Chinese and other East Asiatic peoples, who have always tended to regard human life as essentially good. When Buddhism first came to China, the beautiful art, sacred literature, colorful ceremonies, broad learning, and peaceful monastic life, which had all become integral parts of the Buddhist religion, recommended it to the Chinese as much, if not more, than the type of philosophy embodied in original Buddhism. In fact, Buddhism could have had no broad philosophic appeal to the masses in China and Japan until a philosophic reemphasis and reorientation had taken place.
Perhaps the most startling development in this reorientation was the change in the concept of nirvana itself. For the common believer it became a Paradise where the individual soul went for an after-life of bliss, while innumerable hells, rivaling Dante’s creations, became the deserts of the wicked. Arguing that the degenerate age in which they lived made enlightenment and salvation by one’s own efforts impossible, popular preachers of the time put forth the doctrine that salvation now was possible by the grace of another—through the intervention of one of the host of gods and demi-gods with which the Buddhist pantheon had become peopled. Belief, not philosophic enlightenment or exemplary conduct, became the chief emphasis, and calling on the name of Buddha became the most meaningful act of faith.
These doctrines found vigorous expression in Japan in the tenth and eleventh centuries and eventually resulted in the development of new sects of Japanese Buddhism, quite different from the earlier sects established in Japan in the eighth and ninth centuries, which had emphasized for the most part fine points of metaphysics and theology. The first of the new popular sects in Japan was founded by the monk Honen in 1175. It quite understandably took the name of Pure Land Sect, for the Pure Land was a term for Paradise. In true reforming fashion, Shinran, one of the disciples of Honen, split away from his teacher, and in 1224 founded the True Pure Land Sect. This sect in time outstripped in popularity all other Japanese Buddhist sects. Even today it is the largest and strongest Buddhist group within Japan and the only one with a significant missionary movement abroad.
Both of these Pure Land Sects were definitely expressions of the religious feelings of the lower classes, which were assuming importance for the first time in the intellectual life of the nation. These sects taught a simpler way to salvation for less sophisticated minds, and from the start they won much of their strength by direct street-corner preaching to the poor.
Shinran showed his opposition to the intellectual aristocracy of the earlier monastic sects by at first forbidding the founding of monasteries, and he preached the “equality of all in Buddhism.” In an effort to bring the clergy closer to the people and nearer every day life, he permitted his priests to marry, a custom which gradually spread to most types of the clergy in all sects. One of Shinran’s successors started a movement to translate into Japanese certain of the Buddhist scriptures, which had been transmitted to Japan in classical and often very difficult Chinese. This same priest also founded discussion groups among the lay believers, which in time evolved into large, influential lay congregations.
These congregations were perhaps the chief organs of intellectual life for the lower classes during the feudal period. In time some even became the agencies through which the people asserted themslves in politics. Congregations of the True Pure Land Sect killed their feudal leaders in two west coast provinces of Japan in 1488 and thereafter controlled this area themselves. During the sixteenth century the great temple-castle of the sect, located in a town which later became the commercial city of Osaka, was able to defy siege by the strongest feudal faction in Japan for a period of ten years.
Side by side with the two Pure Land Sects, there soon developed a third popular sect, founded in 1253 by the priest Nichiren and usually known by his name. Basically much like the other two, it relied even more on street-corner preaching, but differed radically from them in its religious fanaticism, which was the legacy of its dynamic but bellicose founder. Nichiren, in sharp contrast to the pacifistic, tolerant, and all-embracing spirit which Buddhism had always shown, was an intolerant fighting man of religion, who openly attacked other Buddhist sects as leading men only to damnation. His sect became a fighting church, often engaging in acts of open warfare with the members of other sects during the turbulent feudal period. Nichiren, again in contrast to the dominant international spirit of Buddhism, was himself a narrow nationalist, a forerunner of the nationalistic movement of modern times. To him Japan was the land of the gods and the center of the universe, and Japanese Buddhism was the only true Buddhism.
It is, indeed, a curious fact that the popular Buddhism of feudal Japan had in many ways come to resemble Christianity more than historic Buddhism. Reversing the basic pessimism of the early faith, it had come to stress a real after-life and salvation through faith. And the early feudal religious reformers, in their translations of the scriptures, their creation of lay congregations, their marriage of the clergy, their militant sectarianism, and their nascent nationalism, resembled to a surprising degree the Protestant reformers of Europe. These religious trends, coupled with the development of a feudal system which found much closer parallels in medieval Europe than in East Asia, make the early feudal period in Japan a time for startling comparisons with Europe and strong contrasts with other countries in the Far East.
While the lower classes were turning to the popular Buddhist sects for religious and intellectual expression, the warrior caste found a different answer to its religious and philosophic needs in still another Buddhist sect brought to Japan in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by Japanese monks returning to their homeland from study in China. This sect was known as Zen, a word meaning “meditation,” and it derived perhaps as much from native Chinese schools of mysticism as from the early Buddhist emphasis on meditation.
In Zen the emphasis was on being in harmony with the cosmos—on achieving oneness with nature. Zen was anti-scholastic and anti-rational. Its adherents sought sudden intuitive insight as a result of extreme physical discipline and mental concentration, rather than wisdom through book learning or through logical thought. As a means of training in Zen, the master would pose a seemingly trivial or irrational problem, such as the nature of the sound caused by a clapping motion made with only one hand instead of with two. The student would meditate upon this problem for days, but any answer describing the nature of sound or the reasons for the absence of sound would not be tolerated by the master. The train of meditation started by this problem was intended to result in a flash of sudden enlightenment regarding the nature of the Buddha, the oneness of the universe, or other problems equally profound.
The anti-scholasticism, the mental discipline—still more the strict physical discipline of the adherents of Zen, which kept their lives very close to nature—all appealed to the warrior caste, with its predilection for the Spartan life. Zen rapidly became the philosophy of the military men of feudal Japan, giving them a philosophical foundation on which to base their lives. With their support, it rose to a position of wide influence and great prestige. Zen contributed much to the development of a toughness of inner fiber and a strength of character which typified the warrior of feudal Japan; and Zen has continued to play its role in recent years by giving spiritual strength and firmness to many members of the officer caste.