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The domination of Japan from the imperial capital of Kyoto was coming to an end. Rule had been by emperors and their regents, appointed by the most influential families at court. In 1156 two noble families, each related to the Yamato royal family, began fighting. They were giving birth to a new era, to be called the Age of the Warriors -- later to be called medieval Japan.
One of two noble families at war was the Taira, centered by the Inland Sea. The other was the Minamoto, which had been allied with the Fujiwara family. These were on-again, off-again wars across thirty years. The dispute was over who would be the next figurehead emperor. The Taira family won a big round in the war. The Fujiwara were eclipsed for the time being. From the capital, Kyoto, the head of the Taira family ruled for ten years, appointing which Yamato family member was to be emperor. His army grabbed more land, some of it from the Buddhists. He had members of the Minamoto family hunted down and killed. But, demonstrating confidence in his power, he spared the sons of his former Minamoto rival, keeping the eldest of them hostage at the small fishing village of Kamakura.
This eldest son, Minamoto no Yorimoto, was a prisoner among relatives of the Taira family ruler, and Yorimoto married into the ruler's extended family. Yorimoto took advantage of a new conflict over succession to organize an army of dissatisfied men, and five more years of war ensued: the Genpei War. Minamoto no Yorimoto seized Kyoto and drove the Taira back to their stronghold by the Inland Sea. In a sea battle between Honshu and Kyushu islands, the battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185, the Minamoto clan fleet defeated the Taira clan fleet. Yorimoto was given the title of the emperor's military deputy: shogun. He had the entire Taira family hunted down and slaughtered. And rather than stay at the capital, he returned to his base at Kamakura, from which he appeared to be in control of all Japan.
Minamoto Yorimoto's subordinates collected taxes. He held other local powers in subordination. He passed laws and appointed some men to imperial positions - while the emperor, in Kyoto, remained a figurehead, giving Yorimoto sanction for his moves while Yorimoto remained his shogun. Among Yorimoto's descendants, and in the imperial bureaucracy, sons continued to inherit their father's offices.
Government by murder survived in the succession disputes that followed Yorimoto's death in 1199. Two of Yorimoto's sons and a grandson were assassinated by another of his sons. A way to power other than violence was also manifest, with the usual assistance from the sword. Yorimoto's thirty-two year old widow, Hojo Masako, had retired to a Buddhist nunnery, but then she took power and became known as the "nun-shogun." She ruled, made and unmade emperors, and presided over the expansion of the land of her family (the Hojo). The Minamoto and even Imperial Princes became puppets and hostages of Hojo family rule.
Religious ferment had accompanied the rise and wars. Buddhism spread from aristocrats to common people, and among the Buddhists rival schools of thought contended with each other. Many Buddhists were appalled by the violence, including the violence of their fellow Buddhists who had adopted the credo of kill or be killed. Some saw the violence as having gotten so bad that too much evil existed for the possibility of attaining salvation. Some fled to China in search of enlightenment and went to extraordinary efforts at seeking salvation.
From a Buddhist movement in China, Japanese took what they called Pure Land Buddhism. Pure Land Buddhists held that they were living in a degenerate age, that salvation could be attained in a place called "the Pure Land of the West," where they could live in serenity and work on the karma of their past lives. Pure Land Buddhism taught that in heaven were good spirits who helped people, and foremost among these good spirits was The Buddha, who went by the name of Amitabha and vowed salvation for all living creatures. It was a salvation that could be achieved merely by faith and by chanting "hail to the Buddha Amida.” Pure Land Buddhism was open to all -- women and men -- and eventually it would become Japan's largest Buddhist sect.
Another form of Buddhism from China, called Chuan, developed in Japan and was called Zen. Like Pure Land Buddhism, Chuan demanded no intellectual effort. Chuan Buddhists saw reality as nothing more than the immediate present. For them there was no past or future -- an ignoring of causation. Chuan supported themselves by menial labor and sought salvation and enlightenment through the immediacy of mystical inspiration. In Japan, Zen Buddhists rejected the ritualism and scholasticism that had been adopted by mainstream Buddhism. Zen followers sought enlightenment (satori) through spiritual and physical discipline. This included meditation and a study of insoluble problems as a way of cleansing one of a desire for theological intellectuality. Zen encouraged focus on nothingness to allow "inner truth" to surface. The hand cannot grasp itself, argued Zen masters.
Zen encouraged living without anxiety and with self-reliance. Zen focused on the individual and saw nothing of value in institutions or philanthropy. It emphasized strong character and action, however meaningless the world. Zen mixed with samurai values in a way that became alien to Chuan Buddhism. Zen appealed to the rough and uneducated samurai. Its emphasis on focusing the mind and physical discipline was similar to the discipline used in the martial arts. The Zen warrior viewed life as an illusion. Killing, they told them-selves, was no worse than other activities, and dying was nothing. Samurai warriors in combat did not escape from the horror of slaughter, but after this horror they found in Zen what they believed was a cleansing of the mind.
The samurai joined to their Buddhism elements of Taoism and Shinto and called it the "Way of the Warrior" – Bushido – seeing the only worthy truth as a true warrior's honor. This honor included being honest, sincere, frugal, stoic, and loyal to one's landlord-commander. Femininity was shameful and women counted for little. Love for a woman was inferior to the pure love one was supposed to have for one's comrade-in-arms. The greatest honor was to seek death in the service of one's landlord-commander.
Not all samurai lived up to the Bushido ideal. The samurai remained as human as others, pursuing their personal interests, indulging their egos and paranoia, and when it served their personal interest, some samurai abandoned their landlord-commander.
By 1230, the men around the shogun had adopted Confucian principles and believed that it suited their position to be familiar with the Chinese classics. They had an idea of what good government should be -- something other than just rule by the sword. They were interested in law and order.
A part of the new law and order was taming unruly warriors. Penalties were imposed on those who were abusive or started fights. Samurai who started fights could lose their estates.
The shogun's constables gained greater civil powers, and the court a Kyoto was obliged to seek Kamakura's approval for all of its actions. While legal practices in Kyoto were still based on 500-year-old Confucian principles, the new code under Hojo rule was a highly legalistic document that stressed the duties of stewards and constables, provided means for settling land disputes, and established rules governing inheritances. It was clear and concise, stipulated punishments for violators of its conditions, and was to remain in effect for the next 635 years.
Order meant preserving privileges. As with other class societies, including Hammurabi's at Babylon more then 2,000 years earlier, penalties were in accord with one's social status.
About half of all the land that was Japan was in the hands of aristocrat-governors under appointment by the emperor's court in Kyoto. The rest of was cultivated by wealthy peasants (myoshu) or low-ranking warriors who were responsible for collecting rents and drafting poor people for unpaid labor on "public" projects (called in Europe the corvée, where exploitation of the poor had also been common).
The poor lived scattered in small dark cabins and had a pot, a few bowls and tools such as spades, hoes and sickles. The myoshu lived in a house with a few rooms, with thatch roofs and owned a few cows, maybe a horse and had more tools. These wealthier peasants rented land to tenant farmers and had farmhands, servants or slaves working for them. They associated their privileged position to the gods and organized Shinto festivals and feasts. The poor were not allowed to organize such gatherings, but they were invited to the festivals.
In mid-1200s, agriculture was advancing in Japan -- as it was during the favorable climate the Europe was enjoying. Peasants developed a two-crop system. They flooded their fields in late May or early June to plant rice, which they harvested in October. Then they drained their fields and planted grains. The lords were interested in taxing rice, which was the prestige crop, and more-or-less ignored the grain crop, leaving greater wealth for the peasants. The peasants were also making better use of fertilizer. With more of a surplus they took part in an increase in trade. Local markets sprang up, near a local lord's manor, perhaps at the gate to a Buddhist temple, or at a crossroads. Poorer peasants began selling some soybeans, sesame seeds or string beans and maybe hemp. Better-off peasants sold rice and barley.
With the rise in agricultural productivity and the rise in commerce came a rise in population and growth in the number and size of towns. Traveling merchants joined in, and more craft persons were beginning to produce for common people. Common people were trading their produce for goods such as pottery, farm tools, pots and pans. Craft persons were making umbrellas, leather, saddles, copper products, roof tiles and weaving fabrics. Artisans and merchants traveled more. The number of market days in a locale typically increased from six a year at the beginning of the 1200s to perhaps twenty-one by the end of the century. Rice, lumber, fish, salt, sesame, dyes and other products were being transported about Japan, most of the transportation on waterways.
The use of money was growing. At mid-century, forty or fifty Japanese ships a year arrived at southern China -- during the reign of the Southern Song -- and exchanged lumber, sulfur and other products for China's copper coins. In the port area where the trade took place, copper coins might vanish for awhile following the departure of the Japanese. Alarmed, the Song government responded with a decree forbidding the trading of its coins with the Japanese. It was a part of the naiveté of those times about economics. The decree had little effect. Inspectors at China's port took bribes, and coins continued to pass to the Japanese. In Japan the naiveté about money expressed itself in people talking about the new "coin sickness," while authorities in Japan apparently failed to see the benefit in Japan minting its own coins. It was China's money that was respected, along with other things from China.
Good harvests came and went, and those who became destitute sold themselves to slave traders in order to survive. And the slave traders sold them in regions were there was demand for their labor. How easy it was for those who sold themselves into slavery to buy back their freedom is unknown.
The high-ranking lords demanded services from their vassals, who were rewarded with fiefs of their own. The fief holders exercised local military rule, and the lords continued to receive rents from the middle class farmers, the myoshu. The myoshu were themselves lords or sorts, lower in status while perhaps belonging also to the samurai class.
The myoshu differed from those who ranked above them in that they worked in the fields alongside others. Some who worked myoshu lands continued to be tenant farmers and farmhands, and it is a point of disputation among historians whether they lacked freedom of movement and could therefore be called serfs.
Before the 1200s, there were those who fished on the sea, settled on a beach and then moved on. In the 1200s they began to settle in one coastal area, to build houses and create a village. Their communities tended to be egalitarian, with fishing zones equitably distributed and families heads sharing salt-making ovens. The seashore villages grew into towns, with inns built to house merchants and other itinerants. Two such towns were Tsunuga and Obama (Little Beach), on the northern shore in Western Japan. The independence of such towns ended as the powerful lords or monasteries moved in to claim jurisdiction and the right to tax. The towns accepted their power and in return received armed protection against trouble from neighboring communities.
Moving through these and other towns were blacksmiths, pot makers, sellers of oil, mats, sake and other goods, itinerants who traveled under a freedom accorded them by the imperial court in exchange for their having supplied the court with goods. There were also itinerant dancers and musicians, people who lived by entertaining. Among the dancers and musicians some had a secondary form of entertaining: prostitution. They enjoying a somewhat elevated status and had the same right to travel as the craftsmen and merchants.
Along major roads one might find a public bath, first built in the 1200s by monks in association with monasteries. Bathing was associated with purification anyone could bathe there: commoners, warriors or nobles, men, women or children. The baths were considered places of peace and asylum.
In 1274 the Mongols, backed by Koreans and Chinese, landed on the coast of Kyushu. They attacked the Samurai with explosive devises and poisoned arrows and gained advantage, but a storm arose in the evening and they were forced to abandon their invasion and withdraw from Japan.
Japan's ruler, Hojo Tokimune (r. 1268-84), was known for leading the Japanese forces against the invasion and for having spread Zen Buddhism and Bushido among the warrior class. In the wake of the invasion he extended his power, appointing nine new governors in western Japan, six of them members of the Hojo or allied clans.
In 1281, the Mongols with their Korean and Chinese troopers returned to Kyushu. Samurai kept the Mongol cavalry from deploying. After a week of fierce fighting the Mongols had established only a small beachhead. The Mongols were forced to retreat to small islands they held. A storm arose that wrecked the Mongol armada. The Samurai attacked and slaughtered the 30,000 Mongol, Koreans and Chinese trapped on the small islands.
As with the first invasion, Shinto priests described the storm that smashed the Mongol invasion as divine intervention -- as a god (kami) wind (kaze). Japan's victory over the Mongols gave its military sense of superiority that would remain to 1945. And among the Samurai it reinforced the notion that the shogunate was the right form of government.
Japan was now more defense conscious, and new taxes were levied to maintain defensive preparations for the future. A new discontent arose against the Hojo shogunate, some of it from those who had expected more compensation for their help in defeating the Mongol. Rule by the Hojo family was weakened by discontent. Officials of the Hojo shogunate had created two contending imperial lines to alternate on the throne. In 1318 a new emperor Go-Daigo, ascended the throne. When it was his turn to step down, instead he raised an army in an attempt to overthrow the shogunate. In 1332 a shogunate army won. The shogunate exiled Go-Daigo and placed another emperor on the throne. In 1333, Go-Daigo escaped and won enough allies to his side while the Hojo shogunate was abandoned by some its crucial backers. The result was a military victory for Go-Daigo. Rule by the Hojo clan and rule from Kamakura was over. An attempt to re-establish rule by the emperor -- the so-called Kemmu Restoration -- had begun.
Recommended Books
The History of Japan, by Louis B Perez, Greenwood Press, 1998
Japan: the Story of a Nation, by Edwin, by Edwin O Reichauer, Fourth Edition, Alfred A Knopf, 1989
The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol 3, editors Kazo Yamamura et al, Cambridge University Press, 1990
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Copyright © 2000 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
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