A History of the Japanese People Part 32

The great scholar, Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura, responded with ability so conspicuous that posterity has been disposed to question the justice of the charges against him in connexion with Michizane's fate. He set out by stating that, in the early times, the national sentiment had been kind and simple; the people loyal to the Throne and obedient to parents; the taxes moderate. But, thereafter, customs had gradually deteriorated. Laws and regulations were promulgated with bewildering rapidity. Taxes and forced labour grew heavier day by day. Cultivated lands were suffered to lie fallow. Buddhism established such a hold upon men's minds that people of all cla.s.ses impoverished themselves to build places of wors.h.i.+p and to cast images. Upon the erection of the provincial temples (Kokubun-ji) five-tenths of the national taxes were expended; and in connexion with the removal of the capital to Kyoto and the building of new palaces, a further sum of three-tenths was paid out. Again, the Emperor Nimmyo's (834-850) love of luxury and display led to architectural extravagance entirely unprecedented, and involved the squandering of yet another tenth of the remaining income of the State. Thereafter, in the Jokwan era (859-876), frequent conflagrations destroyed the Imperial edifice, and its restoration cost a tenth of the remaining revenue, so that only one-twentieth was ultimately available for general expenses.

As ill.u.s.trating the state of the rural regions, the memorialist instanced the case of b.i.t.c.hu, a province on the Inland Sea, where he held an official appointment in the year 893. The local records (Fudoki) showed that a levy made there about the middle of the seventh century had produced twenty thousand able-bodied soldiers,*

whereas a century later, there were found only nineteen hundred; yet another century afterwards, only seventy; at the close of the ninth century, nine, and in the year 911, not one. To such a state of desolation had the district been reduced in the s.p.a.ce of 250 years, and its story might be taken as typical.

*The district was consequently named Nima, an abbreviation of ni (two) man (ten thousand).

Pa.s.sing to the question of religion, the memorialist declared that the s.h.i.+nto ceremonials to secure good harvests had lost all sincerity. The officials behaved as though there were no such thing as deities. They used the offerings for their own private purposes, sold the sacred horses, and recited the rituals without the least show of reverence. As for Buddhist priests, before asking them to pray for the welfare of their paris.h.i.+oners, they must be asked to purge themselves of their own sins. The priests who ministered at the provincial temples had lost all sense of shame. They had wives, built houses, cultivated lands, and engaged in trade. Was it to be supposed that heaven would hearken to the intervention of such sinners?

Meanwhile, luxury and extravagance had reached an extreme degree. On one suit of clothes a patrimony was expended, and sometimes a year's income barely sufficed for a single banquet. At funeral services all cla.s.ses launched into flagrant excesses. Feasts were prepared on such a scale that the trays of viands covered the entire floor of a temple. Thousands of pieces of gold were paid to the officiating priests, and a ceremony, begun in mourning, ended in revelry.

Corresponding disorder existed with regard to the land. The original distribution into kubunden, as we saw, had been partly for purposes of taxation. But now these allotments were illegally appropriated, so that they neither paid imposts nor furnished labourers; and while governors held worthless regions, wealthy magnates annexed great tracts of fertile land. Another abuse, prevalent according to Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura's testimony, was that accusations were falsely preferred by officials against their seniors. Provincial governors were said to have frequently indulged in this treacherous practice and to have been themselves at times the victims of similar attacks. The Court, on receipt of such charges, seldom scrutinized them closely, but at once despatched officers to deal with the incriminated persons, and in the sequel, men occupying exalted positions were obliged to plead on an equal footing with officials of low grade or even common people. Self-respecting persons chose to stand aside altogether from official life rather than to encounter such risks.

This was an almost inevitable result of the exceptional facilities given to pet.i.tioners under the Daika and Daiho systems. Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura urged that all pet.i.tioning and all resulting inquiries by specially appointed officials should be interdicted, except in matters relating to political crime, and that all offenders should be handed over to the duly const.i.tuted administrators of justice. As to these latter, he spoke very plainly. The kebiis.h.i.+, he wrote, who, being appointed to the various provinces, have to preserve law and order within their jurisdictions, should be men specially versed in law, whereas a majority of those serving in that capacity are ignorant and incompetent persons who have purchased their offices. To ill.u.s.trate further the want of discrimination shown in selecting officials, he refers to the experts appointed in the maritime provinces for manufacturing catapults, and declares that many of these so-called "experts" had never seen a catapult.

ENGRAVING: FAMILY LIFE OF n.o.bLES, HEIAN EPOCH, A.D. 782-1192

It is against the Buddhist priests and the soldiers of the six guards that he inveighs most vehemently, however. He calls them "vicious and ferocious," Those who take the tonsure, he says, number from two to three thousand yearly, and about one-half of that total are wicked men--low fellows who, desiring to evade taxation and forced labour, have shaved their heads and donned priests vestments, aggregate two-thirds of the population. They marry, eat animal food, practise robbery, and carry on coining operations without any fear of punishment. If a provincial governor attempts to restrain them, they flock together and have recourse to violence. It was by bandits under the command of wicked priests that Fujiwara Tokiyos.h.i.+, governor of Aki, and Tachibana Kinkado, governor of Kii, were waylaid and plundered.

As for the soldiers of the guards, instead of taking their monthly term of duty at the palace, they are scattered over the country, and being strong and audacious, they treat the people violently and the provincial governors with contumacy, sometimes even forming leagues to rob the latter and escaping to the capital when they are hard pressed. (These guardsmen had arms and horses of their own and called themselves bus.h.i.+, a term destined to have wide vogue in j.a.pan.) It is interesting to note that they make their historical debut thus unfavourably introduced. Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura says that instead of being "metropolitan tigers" to guard the palace, they were "rural wolves"

to despoil the provinces.

APPRECIATIONS OF THE MIYOs.h.i.+ MEMORIAL

This celebrated doc.u.ment consisted of twelve articles and contained five thousand ideographs, so that nothing was wanting in the matter of voluminousness. The writer did not confine himself to enumerating abuses: he also suggested remedies. Thus he urged that no man, having become an equerry (toneri) of the six corps of guards, should be allowed to return to his province during his term of service; that the spurious priests should be all unfrocked and punished; that the office of kebiis.h.i.+ should be restricted to men having legal knowledge; that the upper cla.s.ses should set an example of economy in costumes and observances; that the ranks of the Buddhist priesthood should be purged of open violators of the laws of their creed, and so forth. Historians have justly eulogized the courage of a memorialist who thus openly attacked wide-spread and powerful abuses. But they have also noted that the doc.u.ment shows some reservations. For generations the Fujiwara family had virtually usurped the governing power; had dethroned Emperors and chosen Empresses; had consulted their own will alone in the administrations of justice and in the appointment and removal of officials. Yet of these things Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura says nothing whatever. The sole hope of their redress lay in Michizane; but instead of supporting that ill-starred statesman, Miyos.h.i.+ had contributed to his downfall. Could a reformer with such a record be regarded as altogether sincere?

ADMINISTRATION OF THE EMPEROR DAIGO

The Emperor Daigo, who ruled thirty-two years--from 898 to 930--is brought very close to us by the statement of a contemporary historian that he was "wise, intelligent, and kind-hearted," and that he always wore a smiling face, his own explanation of the latter habit being that he found it much easier to converse with men familiarly than solemnly. A celebrated incident of his career is that one winter's night he took off his wadded silk garment to evince sympathy with the poor who possessed no such protection against the cold. Partly because of his debonair manner and charitable impulses he is popularly remembered as "the wise Emperor of the Engi era." But close readers of the annals do not fully endorse that tribute. They note that Daigo's treatment of his father, Uda, on the celebrated occasion of the latter's visit to the palace to intercede for Michizane, was markedly unfilial; that his Majesty believed and acted upon slanders which touched the honour of his father no less than that of his well-proved servant, and that he made no resolute effort to correct the abuses of his time, even when they had been clearly pointed out by Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura. The usurpations of the Fujiwara; the prost.i.tution of Buddhism to evil ends; the growth of luxurious and dissipated habits, and the subordination of practical ability to pedantic scholars.h.i.+p--these four malignant growths upon the national life found no healing treatment at Daigo's hands.

THE CLa.s.sICAL AGE OF LITERATURE

The Engi era and the intervals of three or four decades before and after it may be regarded as the cla.s.sical age of literature in j.a.pan.

Prose composition of a certain cla.s.s was wholly in Chinese. All works of a historical, scientific, legal, or theological nature were in that language, and it cannot be said that they reached a very high level. Yet their authors had much honour. During the reigns of Uda and Daigo (888-930), Sugawara Michizane, Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura, Ki no Haseo, and Koze no Fumio, formed a quartet of famous masters of Chinese literature. From one point of view, Michizane's overthrow by Fujiwara Tokihira may be regarded as a collision between the Confucian doctrines which informed the polity of the Daika epoch and the power of aristocratic heredity. Kibi no Makibi and Sugawara no Michizane were the only two j.a.panese subjects that attained to be ministers of State solely in recognition of their learning, but several litterateurs reached high office, as chief chamberlain, councillor of State, minister of Education, and so forth. Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura ranks next to Michizane among the scholars of that age. He was profoundly versed in jurisprudence, mathematics (such as they were at the time), the Chinese cla.s.sics, and history. But whereas Michizane bequeathed to posterity ten volumes of poems and two hundred volumes of a valuable historical work, no production of Kiyotsura's pen has survived except his celebrated memorial referred to above. He received the post of minister of the Household in 917 and died in the following year.

It must be understood that the work of these scholars appealed to only a very limited number of their countrymen. The ako incident (pp.

239-240) ill.u.s.trates this; the rescript penned by Tachibana no Hiromi was not clearly comprehended outside a narrow circle of scholars.

Official notices and enactments were intelligible by few men of the trading cla.s.ses and by no women. But a different record is found in the realm of high literature. Here there is much wealth. The Nara epoch gave to j.a.pan the famous Manyo-shu (Myriad Leaves), and the Engi era gave her the scarcely less celebrated Kokin-shu, an anthology of over eleven hundred poems, ancient and modern. As between the two books, the advantage is with the former, though not by any means in a marked degree, but in the abundance and excellence of its prose writings--pure j.a.panese writings apart from the Chinese works referred to above--"the Heian epoch leaves the Nara far behind.

The language had now attained to its full development. With its rich system of terminations and particles it was a pliant instrument in the writer's hands, and the vocabulary was varied and copious to a degree which is astonis.h.i.+ng when we remember that it was drawn almost exclusively from native sources. The few words of Chinese origin which it contains seem to have found their way in through the spoken language and are not taken straight from Chinese books, as at a later stage when j.a.panese authors loaded their periods with alien vocables."

This Heian literature "reflects the pleasure-loving and effeminate, but cultured and refined, character of the cla.s.s of j.a.panese who produced it. It has no serious masculine qualities and may be described in one word as belles-lettres--poetry, fiction, diaries, and essays of a desultory kind. The lower cla.s.ses of the people had no share in the literary activity of the time. Culture had not as yet penetrated beyond a very narrow circle. Both writers and readers belonged exclusively to the official caste. It is remarkable that a very large and important part of the best literature which j.a.pan has produced was written by women. A good share of the Nara poetry is of feminine authors.h.i.+p, and, in the Heian period, women took a still more conspicuous part in maintaining the honour of the native literature. The two greatest works which have come down from Heian time are both by women.* This was no doubt partly due to the absorption of the masculine intellect in Chinese studies. But there was a still more effective cause. The position of women in ancient j.a.pan was very different from what it afterwards became when Chinese ideals were in the ascendant. The j.a.panese of this early period did not share the feeling common to most Eastern countries that women should be kept in subjection and as far as possible in seclusion.

Though the morality which the Heian literature reveals is anything but strait-laced, the language is uniformly refined and decent, in this respect resembling the best literature of China."**

*The Genji Monogatari by Murasaki s.h.i.+kibu, and the Makura Sos.h.i.+ by Sei Shonagon.

**j.a.panese Literature, by W. G. Aston.

With the Heian epoch is connected the wide use of the phonetic script known as kana, which may be described as a syllabary of forty-seven symbols formed from abbreviated Chinese ideographs. There are two varieties of the kana--the kata-kana and the hiragana* The former is said to have been devised by Makibi, the latter by Kobo Dais.h.i.+ (Kukai), but doubts have been cast on the accuracy of that record, and nothing can be certainly affirmed except that both were known before the close of the ninth century, though they do not seem to have been largely used until the Heian epoch, and even then almost entirely by women.

*Katakana means "side kana" because its symbols are fragments (sides) of Chinese forms of whole ideographs.

ENGRAVING: MURASAKI s.h.i.+KIBU (COURT LADY AND POETESS)

"Much of the poetry of this time was the outcome of poetical tournaments at which themes were proposed to the compet.i.tors by judges who examined each phrase and word with the minutest critical care before p.r.o.nouncing their verdict. As might be expected, the poetry produced in those circ.u.mstances is of a more or less artificial type, and is wanting in the spontaneous vigour of the earlier essays of the j.a.panese muse. Conceits, acrostics, and untranslatable word-plays hold much too prominent a place, but for perfection of form the poems of this time are unrivalled. It is no doubt to this quality that the great popularity of the Kokin-shu is due. Sei Shonagon, writing in the early years of the eleventh century, sums up a young lady's education as consisting of writing, music, and the twenty volumes of the Kokin-shu."*

*j.a.panese Literature, by W. G. Aston.

The first notable specimen of prose in j.a.panese style (wabun) was the preface to the Kokin-shu, written by Ki no Tsurayuki, who contended, and his own composition proved, that the introduction of Chinese words might well be dispensed with in writing j.a.panese. But what may be called the cla.s.sical form of j.a.panese prose was fixed by the Taketori Monogatari,* an anonymous work which appeared at the beginning of the Engi era (901),** and was quickly followed by others. Still, the honour in which the ideograph was held never diminished. When Tsurayuki composed the Tosa Nikki (Tosa Diary), he gave it out as the work of a woman, so reluctant was he to identify himself with a book written in the kana syllabary; and the Emperor Saga, Kobo Dais.h.i.+, and Tachibana Hayanari will be remembered forever in j.a.pan as the "Three Calligraphists" (Sampitsu).

*The expression "monogatari" finds its nearest English equivalent in "narrative."

**An excellent translation of this has been made by Mr. F. V. d.i.c.kins in the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society," Jan., 1887.

In short, an extraordinary love of literature and of all that pertained to it swayed the minds of j.a.pan throughout the Nara and the Heian epochs. The ninth and tenth centuries produced such poets as Ariwara no Yukihira and his younger brother, Narihira; Otomo no Kuronus.h.i.+, Ochikochi no Mitsune, Sojo Henjo, and the poetess Ono no Komachi; gave us three anthologies (Sandai-shu), the Kokin-shu, the Gosen-shu, and the Shui-shu, as well as five of the Six National Histories (Roku Kokus.h.i.+), the Zoku Nihonki, the Nihon Koki, the Zoku Nihon Koki, the Montoku Jitsuroku, and the Sandai Jitsuroku; and saw a bureau of poetry (W aka-dokoro) established in Kyoto. Fine art also was cultivated, and it is significant that calligraphy and painting were coupled together in the current expression (shogwa) for products of pictorial art. Kudara no Kawanari and Koze no Kanaoka, the first j.a.panese painters to achieve great renown, flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries, as did also a famous architect, Hida no Tak.u.mi.

INTERVAL BETWEEN THE CAPITAL AND THE PROVINCES

Thus, in the capital, Kyoto, where the Fujiwara family const.i.tuted the power behind the Throne, refinements and luxury were constantly developed, and men as well as women amused themselves composing Chinese and j.a.panese poems, playing on musical instruments, dancing, and making picnics to view the blossoms of the four seasons. But in the provincial districts very different conditions existed. There, men, being virtually without any knowledge of the ideographic script, found the literature and the laws of the capital a sealed book to them, and as for paying periodical visits to Kyoto, what that involved may be gathered from the fact that the poet Tsurayuki's return to the capital from the province of Tosa, where he had served as acting governor, occupied one hundred days, as shown in his Tosa Nikki (Diary of a Journey from Tosa), and that thirteen days were needed to get from the mouth of the Yodo to the city. The pageant of metropolitan civilization and magnificence never presented itself to provincial eyes.

ORIGIN OF THE SHOEN

Much has already been said on the subject of land tenure; but as this problem is responsible for some cardinal phases of j.a.panese history, a brief resume will be useful here. There were four chief causes for the existence of shoen, or manors. The first was reclamation. In the year 723, it was decreed that persons who reclaimed land should acquire a de facto t.i.tle of tenure for three generations, and, twenty years later, the tenure of t.i.tle was made perpetual, limits of area being fixed, however--1250 acres for princes and n.o.bles of the first rank, and thereafter by various gradations, to twenty-five acres for a commoner. But these limits were not enforced, and in the year 767 it became necessary to issue a decree prohibiting further reclamation, which was followed, seventeen years later, by a rescript forbidding provincial governors to exact forced labour for tilling their manors.

That this did not check the evil is proved by an official record, compiled in 797, from which it appears that princes and influential n.o.bles possessed manors of great extent; that they appointed intendants to manage them; that these intendants themselves engaged in operations of reclamation; that they abused their power by despoiling the peasants, and that dishonest farmers made a practice of evading taxes and tribute by settling within the bounds of a manor. These abuses reached their acme during the reigns of Uda and Daigo (888-930), when people living in the vicinity of a manor were ruthlessly robbed and plundered by the intendant and his servants, and when it became habitual to elude the payment of taxes by making spurious a.s.signments of lands to influential officials in the capital. In vain was the owners.h.i.+p of lands by powerful n.o.bles interdicted, and in vain its purchase by provincial governors: the metropolis had no power to enforce its vetoes in the provinces, and the provincials ignored them. Thus the shoen grew in number and extent.

The second factor which contributed to the extension of manors was the bestowal of estates in perpetuity on persons of conspicuous ability, and afterwards on men who enjoyed Imperial favour. Land thus granted was called s.h.i.+den and enjoyed immunity from taxation. Then there were tracts given in recognition of public merit. These koden were originally of limited tenure, but that condition soon ceased to be observed, and the koden fell into the same category with manors (shoen).

Finally we have the jiden, or temple lands. These, too, were at the outset granted for fixed terms, but when Buddhism became powerful the limitation ceased to be operative, and moreover, in defiance of the law, private persons presented tracts, large or small, to the temples where the mortuary tablets of their families were preserved, and the temples, oh their own account, acquired estates by purchase or by reclamation. The jiden, like the other three kinds of land enumerated above, were exempt from taxation. Owned by powerful n.o.bles or influential families, the shoen were largely cultivated by forced labour, and as in many cases it paid the farmers better to rent such land; and thus escape all fiscal obligations, than to till their own fields, the latter were deserted pan pa.s.su with the development of the manor system, and thus the State revenues suffered dual reduction.

During the last quarter of the tenth century peremptory edicts were issued to check this state of affairs, but the power of the Court to exact obedience had then dwindled almost to cipher. History records that during the Ho-en era (1135-1140), the regent Fujiwara Tadamichi's manor of s.h.i.+mazu comprised one-fourth of the province of Osumi. On these great manors, alike of n.o.bles and of temples, armed forces soon began to be maintained for purposes nominally of police protection but ultimately of military aggression. This was especially the case on the shoen of the puissant families of Taira and Minamoto.

Thus, Minamoto Yos.h.i.+tomo came to own fifteen of the eastern provinces, and in the tumult of the Heiji era (1159-1160), he lost all these to Taira no Kiyomori, who, supplementing them with his own already large manors and with the shoen of many other n.o.bles and temples, became owner of five hundred districts comprising about one-half of the empire. Subsequently, when the Minamoto crushed the Taira (1185), the whole of the latter's estates were distributed by the former among the n.o.bles who had fought under the Minamoto standard.

In that age the holders of manors were variously called ryoshu, ryoke, shoya, or honjo, and the intendants were termed shocho, shoji, kengyo, betto, or yoryudo, a diversity of nomenclature that is often very perplexing. In many cases reclaimed lands went by the name of the person who had reclaimed them. Such manors were spoken of as myoden (name-land), and those owning large tracts were designated daimyo (great name), while smaller holders were termed shomyo. Yet another term for the intendants of these lands was na.n.u.s.h.i.+-shoku.

It will be readily seen that in the presence of such a system the lands paying taxes to the Central Government became steadily less and less. Thus, in the reign of the Emperor Toba (1108-1123), the State domains administered by the provincial governors are recorded to have been only one per cent, of the area of the provinces. In these circ.u.mstances, the governors deemed it unnecessary to proceed themselves to their posts; they remained in Kyoto and despatched deputies to the provinces, a course which conspired to reduce the authority of the Crown.

For the sake of intelligent sequence of ideas, the above synopsis makes some departure from the chronological order of these pages.

Returning to the early part of the tenth century, the historian may affirm that the salient features of the era were virtual abrogation of the Daiho laws imposing restrictions upon the area and period of land-owners.h.i.+p; rapid growth of tax-free manors and consequent impoverishment of the Court in Kyoto; the appearance of provincial magnates who yielded scant obedience to the Crown, and the organization of military cla.s.ses which acknowledged the authority of their own leaders only.

REVOLT OF TAIRA NO MASAKADO

The above state of affairs soon bore practical fruit. In the year 930, the Emperor Daigo died and was succeeded by his son Shujaku, a child of eight, whose mother was a daughter of Fujiwara Mototsune. In accordance with the system now fully established, Fujiwara Tadahira became regent. History depicts this Tadahira as an effeminate dilettante, one of whose foibles was to have a cuckoo painted on his fan and to imitate the cry of the bird whenever he opened it. But as representative of the chief aristocratic family in an age when to be a Fujiwara was to possess a t.i.tle superior to that conferred by ability in any form and however conspicuous, his right to administer the government in the capacity of regent obtained universal recognition.

It had become the custom at that time for the provincial magnates to send their sons to Kyoto, where they served in the corps of guards, became acquainted with refined life, and established relations of friends.h.i.+p with the Taira and the Minamoto, the former descended from the Emperor Kwammu, the latter from the Emperor Seiwa. Thus, at the time of Daigo's death, a scion of the Taira, by name Masakado, was serving under Tadahira in the capital. Believing himself endowed with high military capacity, Masakado aspired to be appointed kebiis.h.i.+ of his native province, s.h.i.+mosa. But his archery, his horsemans.h.i.+p, and his fencing elicited no applause in Kyoto, whereas a relative, Sadab.u.mi, attracted admiration by a licentious life.

Masakado finally retired to s.h.i.+mosa in an angry mood. At first, however, the idea of revolt does not seem to have occurred to him. On the contrary, the evidence is against such a hypothesis. For his military career began with family feuds, and after he had killed one of his uncles on account of a dispute about the boundaries of a manor, and sacked the residence of another in consequence of a trouble about a woman, he did not hesitate to obey a summons to Kyoto to answer for his acts of violence. Such quarrels were indeed of not uncommon occurrence in the provinces, as is shown by the memorial of Miyos.h.i.+ Kiyotsura, and the capital appears to have left them severely alone, so far as practical interference was concerned, though the pretence of jurisdiction might be preserved. Thus, Masakado was acquitted after the formality of investigation had been satisfied.

Naturally this judgment did not prove a deterrent; on the contrary, it amounted to a mandate.

On his return to Kwanto, Masakado was soon found once more in the arena. The details of his campaign have little interest except as indicating that the provincial officials followed the example of Kyoto in suffering local disturbances to settle themselves, and that the abuses catalogued in the Miyos.h.i.+ memorial were true to fact. A raid that Masakado made into Musas.h.i.+ province is memorable as the occasion of the first collision between the Taira and the Minamoto,*

which great families were destined ultimately to convert all j.a.pan into a battlefield. Finally, Masakado carried his raids so far that he allowed himself to be persuaded of the hopelessness of pardon. It was then that he resolved to revolt. Overrunning the whole eight provinces of the Kwanto, he appointed his own partisans to all posts of importance and set up a court after the Kyoto model. A letter written by him at this time to the regent Tadahira affords an interesting guide to the ethics of the era: