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