Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 6
Chapter VI
Growth and Change in the Feudal System
The Kamakura system, however well it worked at its inception, was peculiarly susceptible to the ravages of time and change. It was effective as long as its member knights remained a small and well-knit group, loyal to each other, but as the generations passed, loyalties based on family friendships and comradeship in half-forgotten campaigns wore thin. Scattered as they now were through the estates of the whole land, the descendants of the old band of knights from the Kanto region, who had won control of Japan in 1185, felt less and less the oneness of spirit of the original clique or the old sense of personal loyalty to Kamakura.
Another factor in the dissolution of the clique was its growth in numbers. The class of knights grew rapidly with each generation, but the number of positions as estate managers could not increase correspondingly. The natural tendency was for each knight to divide his feudal income from the estate he managed among all his sons. As a result of this process, many a knight in the latter part of the thirteenth century received so small an income that he had difficulty in maintaining his status as a mounted warrior, able to answer the call of his lord fully equipped with horse, armor, and weapons.
Despite these weakening factors, the Kamakura system lasted a century and a half. During this time it withstood the most dangerous threat of aggression from abroad that Japan was to experience prior to recent years. This threat was the attempted Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281.
The Mongols, a nomadic people of the steppe lands north of China, in the first half of the thirteenth century conquered all of Central Asia, southern Russia, and much of the Near East, and their armies penetrated to Silesia and through Hungary to the Adriatic Sea. At the eastern end of this vast empire, they completed the subjugation of Korea in 1259 and crushed the last organized resistance in China itself in 1276.
In the east only Japan remained free of their rule, and the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, probably looking for more worlds to conquer, sent emissaries to Japan, demanding the capitulation of the island kingdom. The terrified courtiers of Kyoto were ready to accede, but the staunch warriors of Kamakura refused, making their stand unmistakably clear by beheading some of the emissaries.
Such a direct affront could not go unpunished, and in 1274 a strong Mongol force set out on Korean ships to subdue Japan. Certain small islands were seized and a landing was made at Hakata Bay in northern Kyushu, but before any decisive engagement had been fought, the Mongols decided to withdraw to the continent because of the threat to their fleet of inclement weather. That they would return was a foregone conclusion. For the next several years Kamakura kept many of its knights from the western part of the country on guard in northern Kyushu, busy constructing a wall around Hakata Bay to contain the vaunted Mongol cavalry in the event of a second landing there.
The Mongols came again in 1281, this time on a great joint armada of Korean and Chinese ships, and again a landing was made at Hakata Bay. The invasion forces numbered some 150,000 men, the greatest overseas expedition the world had as yet seen. The Mongols were accustomed to large scale cavalry tactics which had met no match anywhere in the world, and they had superior weapons at their disposal, such as the gunpowder bomb hurled by a catapult.
Against this overwhelming force, the Japanese had a mere handful of knights, accustomed only to single combat. But the Mongols were slowed by the wall the Japanese had built and by the attacks of smaller, more mobile Japanese boats in the narrow waters of the bay. Before they could deploy their full forces ashore, a typhoon descended upon the fleet and destroyed it, bringing the invasion to a spectacular and disastrous conclusion. To the Japanese the typhoon was the kamikaze, the “Divine Wind,” protecting the land of the gods from foreign invaders. The incident has of course loomed large in Japanese historical tradition and has contributed much to the irrational conviction of most Japanese that their land was sacred and inviolate.
The danger to Japan was past, but dissatisfaction and unrest on the part of the warrior class of western Japan remained as an aftermath of the invasions. Many knights had become impoverished during the long months and years away from home in the service of Kamakura, and there were no spoils to divide among the victors. The wavering loyalty of the knights had suffered a serious blow; yet the Kamakura system was strong enough to survive another fifty years.
The final blow came from a new and surprising source, a retired emperor who is known by his posthumous name of Daigo II. This ex-emperor was an historical misfit who had the antiquated idea that the imperial line should really rule. Gathering a force of discontented warriors from the capital district and soldiers from local monastery estates, he led a revolt against Kamakura in the year 1331. The revolt in itself would have meant little if the whole Kamakura system had not been ripe for dissolution. The warriors of western Japan for the most part declared for the imperial cause, and Ashikaga Takauji, the general sent from eastern Japan to subdue the uprising, suddenly switched sides in 1333. A second force was raised in the Kanto region, but this time the general in command did not even march on Kyoto. Instead he seized Kamakura itself, destroyed the Hojo family, and thus brought to an end a century and a half of centralized rule.
Daigo II, who naïvely assumed that the way was now open for the resumption of imperial rule as it had existed five or six centuries earlier, was in for a rude awakening. Ashikaga Takauji was a realist who knew where power lay, and he soon deserted Daigo II, driving the unhappy monarch from Kyoto in 1336 and putting a member of a collateral line of the imperial family on the throne. Daigo II and his followers withdrew to the mountain fastnesses south of the Nara Plain and there set up a rival imperial court. From this vantage point they and their successors continued the hopeless struggle against the Ashikaga family for almost sixty years. In the year 1392, they were induced to give up and were lured back to Kyoto by the promise that the line of Daigo II would alternate on the throne with the line set up by Takauji. No one who had observed the Ashikaga family’s past record of treachery could have been surprised that they did not live up to their agreement. No member of the line of Daigo II ever sat on the throne again.
Daigo II had failed completely in his fantastic attempt to restore imperial rule in feudal Japan, but Ashikaga Takauji, who had had himself appointed Shogun in 1338, was little more successful in his attempt to recreate the unity of Kamakura. He set up a line of Ashikaga Shogun at Kyoto who managed to retain the title until 1573, but no Ashikaga Shogun ever exercised effective control over all the military leaders and powerful Buddhist monasteries of the land. During a large part of these two and a half centuries, the government of the Shogun was almost as much of a political sham as the imperial court itself. The third Ashikaga Shogun came as close as any member of his family to ruling the whole country for a brief period after the surrender of the imperial faction of Daigo II in 1392, but Ashikaga power declined rapidly thereafter. From 1467 on, civil wars were chronic throughout Japan. Strong feudal lords drove Ashikaga Shogun out of Kyoto and set up puppet Shogun in much the same way that the earlier Shogun had done these same things to the imperial family.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries presented a picture of increasing political disruption and confusion, as all central control slowly disappeared. The basic cause for the growing political disunity was that the warrior class had grown so fast during the Kamakura period that a united government based simply on ties of personal loyalty was no longer possible. New forms of political organization were necessary before unity could be restored.
The restoration of unity proved to be a slow process. The first step actually was the creation of new feudal units smaller than the old nation-wide warrior clique. The constables, who in the early feudal age had acted as leaders for the defense of each province, gradually assumed the role of local feudal lords in the late Kamakura period. In the wars that marked the end of the Kamakura regime it became evident that the individual knight felt a primary sense of loyalty to his local lord and not to the Hojo and their puppet Shogun. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the dominant figure in the political system was more and more the feudal lord, not the individual knight, as the land became divided into a large number of virtually independent feudal domains.
As the feudal lord, or Daimyo rose to power, the knight began to sink into insignificance and finally disappeared from the scene. One reason for this was that the old estates gradually lost their identity in the domains of the various Daimyo, and the position of estate manager became a thing of the past. Also, large bodies of foot soldiers began to replace the individual knight as the backbone of the fighting forces of Japan. Thus the knight lost his favored place both as a military man and as a key figure in the political and economic order.
Some descendants of the old warrior families became themselves Daimyo. Others became part of a new petty aristocracy of military and administrative officials serving in the domains of the Daimyo and supported by fixed salaries or by the income from small tracts of land assigned to them by the Daimyo. But there was no longer a clear-cut line between these knights as fighting men and the peasantry, who were as capable of serving as foot soldiers as the best of the warrior class. For this reason the congregations of the True Pure Land Sect could challenge the supremacy of the feudal leaders. Peasants in time of war were now soldiers, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many men of very humble origin unquestionably pushed their way into the upper ranks of the new feudal aristocracy, while many members of the old warrior class sank to the status of peasants.
The gradual disappearance of the estates into the domains of the Daimyo was an unfortunate development for the imperial family and the old court aristocracy at Kyoto, which had for centuries derived their income from these estates. Revenues from this source had been dwindling, and finally they ceased altogether. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the imperial line, various branches of the Fujiwara, and other old court families eked out a miserable and precarious existence; but they managed to survive, earning their living by serving as patrons of trade and manufacturing guilds in Kyoto and by exploiting the few arts and aptitudes permitted them by aristocratic tradition.
One emperor was even reduced to selling his calligraphy on the streets of the city, writing out in his beautiful hand a poem or motto requested by some patron and receiving in exchange a small gift. Lack of funds to pay for proper funeral services or coronation ceremonies forced the imperial family to get along without a properly invested emperor during three different periods in the sixteenth century. At one time there was no duly enthroned emperor for a period of twenty-one years. The fortunes of the imperial line had indeed sunk low. Only the force of historical tradition kept it and its satellite court aristocracy from disappearing entirely.
The political chaos of the Ashikaga period and the sad state of the imperial court have left behind a traditional picture of these two and a half centuries as a dark age in Japanese history. This picture is far from accurate, for the political confusion was but a sign of rapid growth, and in the turmoil the Japanese as a whole were making great strides forward culturally and economically.
With the financial eclipse of the court aristocracy, cultural leadership in the capital city of Kyoto naturally passed to the Shogun’s court. In fact, some of the Ashikaga Shogun are far better known to history as patrons of art than as political leaders. Gathering about them some of the finest artists and literary men of the day, they at times presided over a culturally brilliant if politically ineffective court.
As was to be expected in this turbulent age, the artists and men of letters usually were Buddhist priests and monks, and the great monasteries more than ever became the repositories of learning and the centers of creative art. The Zen monks in particular dominated the cultural life of the time. This was not so much because they received official patronage as because they were in much closer contact with China than any other group and were consequently the first to learn of new cultural trends on the continent. Actually, the predominantly Zen culture of the Ashikaga period was a rich blending of the native culture with many new cultural elements from the continent.
Despite their traditional anti-scholasticism, the Zen monks reintroduced the use of pure Chinese as an important literary medium, and at the same time they led in the development of Japan’s first true dramatic form, the so-called Nō drama. The major purpose of Nō was to teach concepts of Buddhism. Since it had evolved originally from early religious dances, symbolic dances quite naturally remained one of its most important features. But perhaps the greatest merit of the Nō was the fine poetic recitations chanted by the actors and an accompanying chorus. The texts of the Nō drama still remain one of the great literary expressions of the Japanese people, and a small band of devotees even today keep the Nō alive as a highly formalized and completely outmoded dramatic form.
In the field of architecture, fresh influences from China made for significant new forms, but the Zen culture of the Ashikaga period found its fullest expression in painting. Zen monks, living simple lives close to nature, took with enthusiasm to the Chinese style of monochrome landscape painting, often rivaling the skill and depth of feeling of the Chinese masters. The richness of the artistic work of the time is seen in the fact that side by side with this Chinese school of painting existed a vigorous native school specializing in picture scrolls portraying the history of some temple or the incidents of a famous campaign, such as that against the Mongols.
The medieval Zen monks also brought from China three other arts which became so characteristic of Japanese culture that they are now considered to be typically Japanese. One was landscape gardening, which the Japanese developed to a perfection unexcelled in any other land. The second was flower arrangement, which started with the placing of floral offerings before representations of Buddhist deities but eventually became a fine art which is now part of the training of every well-bred Japanese girl. The third was the tea ceremony, an aesthetic spiritual ritual in which a beautiful but simple setting, a few fine pieces of old pottery, a slow, formalized, extremely graceful ritual for preparing and serving the tea, and a spirit of complete tranquillity all combine to express the love of beauty, the devotion to simplicity, and the search for spiritual calm which characterize the best in Zen.
Increased trade contacts with the continent, which had brought many new cultural impulses from China, also served as an impetus to an unprecedented and rapid expansion of Japanese trade and industry. Another impetus may have been the decline and disappearance of the estates. As long as these had existed, they tended to be self-contained economic units, but their going allowed a wider exchange of goods and greater specialization in production by localities or by groups within each locality. Because of the need for protection from the many restrictions and fees in a feudal society, this new economic specialization usually resulted in the formation of guilds of merchants dealing in certain commodities and guilds of manufacturers producing various types of wares.
Under the guilds, trade and manufacture expanded steadily, and centers of paper-making, metal-working, weaving, and the like grew up all over the land. Small market places developed into little trading towns. Kyoto remained the largest city of Japan, but gradually a rival city of purely commercial and industrial origin grew up at the eastern end of the Inland Sea. This town, later to be called Osaka, was until the late sixteenth century a type of free city outside the domains of the feudal lords, dominated only by the local merchants and the great temple-castle of the True Pure Land Sect.
The true measure of the economic growth of Japan during the feudal period is perhaps best seen in foreign trade. There had been some trade with the continent ever since Prince Shotoku sent the first official embassy to China, but overseas trade began to assume significant proportions only in the late twelfth century. From that time on, it grew steadily until by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was a tremendous factor in the economic life of Japan.
The Japanese imported from the continent tropical products, which had originally come from Southeast Asia or even from India, and manufactured goods from China, such as silks, porcelains, books, manuscripts, paintings, and copper cash. The last loomed largest in bulk and value, because from the thirteenth century on, money increasingly replaced rice and cloth as the chief medium for exchange in Japan, and the Japanese depended almost entirely on China as the source for their currency.
In the early feudal period, Japanese exports were limited for the most part to raw goods, such as sulphur, lumber, gold, pearls, mercury, and mother of pearl. However, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Japan itself was exporting large quantities of manufactured goods to China and the continent. Chief among these were swords and painted folding fans and screens. Folding fans and screens apparently were inventions of either the Koreans or the Japanese and were highly prized in China. The curved swords of medieval Japan, made of the finest laminated steel and unexcelled even by the famous blades of Damascus or Toledo, were in great demand throughout East Asia and were exported by the thousands.
In the early days, the Koreans were the chief mariners and traders in the waters between Japan and the continent, but slowly the Japanese themselves took to the sea. In the late eleventh century, Japanese traders were crossing to Korea; in the twelfth, some were venturing as far as China; and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they were beginning to dominate the shipping and commerce of the whole East China Sea.
Various groups in Japan participated in this lucrative trade with the continent. As mentioned previously, many Buddhist monasteries sponsored trading ventures in order to raise funds, as did various families of feudal lords, including the Ashikaga themselves. In fact, the Ashikaga, in order to secure some of the profits of this trade for their shaky regime, accepted the Chinese theory that international trade was simply the bringing of tribute to the Chinese court by barbarian peoples and the beneficent bestowal of gifts upon the barbarians by the court in return. To fit this pattern, some of the Ashikaga Shogun, with complete disregard of the theory of imperial rule, permitted themselves to be invested as “Kings of Japan” by the emperors of the Ming dynasty of China and then sold credentials to private Japanese traders, to give them legal and official status in their trading ventures in China.
Despite the interest in foreign trade on the part of the monasteries and the Shogun in central Japan, leadership in overseas trading was taken primarily by the small feudal lords, the ordinary warriors, and the merchants of western Japan, who merged to form a class of adventurous and hardy mariners. Like their counterparts in Europe, these men of the sea were primarily traders, but they were not averse to piracy when opportunity offered. Credentials from the Ashikaga or trading permits from the Chinese court meant little to them. Already in the thirteenth century piratical acts by Japanese warrior-merchants had become frequent in Korean waters, and during the fourteenth century, Japanese pirates became a menace to the very existence of the kingdom of Korea. Emboldened by their successes in Korean waters, they shifted their activities more and more to the coast of China. As the Ming dynasty declined in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Japanese pirates ravaged the great coastal cities of China almost at will, contributing greatly to the final collapse of the dynasty during the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
The so-called Japanese pirates of the sixteenth century were not always pirates, however, nor were they always Japanese. Many Chinese joined them in preying on the coastal trade and cities of China. One of the most important elements in this mixed group of Chinese and Japanese, who were both traders and pirates, was furnished by the natives of the Ryukyu Islands. Closely related to the Japanese and speaking a variant form of the language, they owed a dual allegiance in the seventeenth century to China and to the great Daimyo domain of Satsuma in southern Kyushu.
When the European merchant-adventurers rounded the Malay Peninsula and entered Far Eastern waters early in the sixteenth century, they found the seas dominated more by Japanese than by Chinese. In the course of the century, thousands of Japanese established themselves as traders and adventurers in the towns and colonies of Southeast Asia; and the Spanish and Portuguese, recognizing the martial traditions and fine fighting qualities of the Japanese, frequently employed them as mercenaries in their campaigns and wars in the Far East. In a typical colonial city like Manila, the Japanese community grew large and strong, and in the early seventeenth century, Japanese adventurers were influential enough at the Siamese capital to engineer a successful revolution there and to put a friendly faction in power.
During the “dark ages” of political confusion in Japan, the people had developed industrially to a point where they equalled or even excelled their Chinese teachers in many fields of manufacturing. Despite the feudal political framework, they had built up a far stronger commercial system than they had achieved in previous ages; and in a burst of new physical power and vitality, their warrior-traders had come to dominate the waters of East Asia. Japan entered the feudal period in the twelfth century, a small, weak, economically backward land on the fringes of the civilized world. It emerged in the sixteenth century from a prolonged period of feudal anarchy, an economically advanced nation, able in many ways to compete on terms of equality with the newly encountered peoples of Europe and even with the Chinese.