 |
|
Buddhism may have arrived in Japan earlier, but the commonly believed time of its arrival in Japan was around the mid-500s, when the Korean king of Paekche was fighting the king of neighboring Silla and wished to ally himself with Japan. The king of Paekche presented Japan's emperor with an image of the Buddha and some sacred Buddhist writings, and he described Buddhism as the religion of the civilized world. The leader of the aristocratic clan called the Mononobe, who led the emperor's military, opposed joining Paekche against Silla. So too did the clan whose leader was in charge of religious ritual - the Nakatomi. Both of them were opposed to the importation of Buddhism, believing that Buddhism would be an affront to the traditional gods of the emperor. It was the duty of the Nakatomi to perform religious rituals, known as Shintoism, at court. And if Buddha had powers superior to all other deities as the head of the Nakatomi family believed that Buddhists claimed, then Buddhism contradicted his authority.
Japan's emperor sent no troops to Korea, and in 562 Japan was forced from its possession in Korea that it called Mimana. The emperor had his doubts about the wisdom of adopting Buddhism, but he allowed the leader of the Soga clan to worship the Buddha privately as a trial. The Soga clan had been rising in influence, including marrying their daughters into the ruling Yamato family, and the Soga clan leader believed what the king of Paekche had said: that Buddhism was the religion of the most civilized. And he believed that Japan, therefore, should have it.
The Mononobe and Nakatomi succeeded in spreading hostility against Buddhism when, following the arrival of a Buddhist statue, disease spread among the Japanese. The epidemic was spoken of as a sign of the anger of the Shinto gods. The Soga temple at the palace was burned down. But this was followed by the epidemic becoming worse, which was taken as a sign of the anger and power of the Buddha. The Soga were allowed to maintain their adherence to Buddhism, and a few Buddhist monks arrrived from Korea, adding to a small Buddhist community at the capital.
The new emperor, Yomei, who had taken power during the conflict and pestilence was impressed by Buddhism and accepted it, but he died in 587, after only a year on the throne. That year, the Soga clan fought a civil war against the Mononobe and Nakatomi over who should succeed Yomei. The Soga won, and the head of the Soga family, Umako, made his nephew, Sujun, emperor.
Eventually Sujun wanted to be rid of his benefactor, Umako, but Umako struck first and, in 592, he had Sujun murdered. Then he placed his thirty-nine year-old daughter, Suiko, on the throne and made her twenty-nine year-old nephew, Shotoku, her regent. Shotoku became Crown Prince. He converted Suiko to Buddhism. Buddhist monks acquired high positions in government. Buddhism became the state religion, and its powers were called upon to protect the Japanese nation. Impressed with things Chinese he imported Confucianist learning. Also more Buddhist monasteries were built -- while Buddhism remained limited to a few aristocrats around the capital.
The Nakatomi family continued to serve as the state's Shinto high priest. The Nakatomi were forced to tolerate Buddhism, and Shinto continued to be a part official state functions. Buddhist doctrine and Shinto began influencing each other. The Buddha, represented by the statue at Nara, became identified with the Sun Goddess of Shinto worship, and Buddhist ceremonies were woven into traditional court ritual.
The Soga family protected itself well with an army of bodyguards. They inspired rebellion against themselves by failing to maintain good relations or accommodating others around the palace, and by their arrogance and posturing. Leading the rebellion was the head of the Nakatomi family, Nakatomi Kamatari. In 645 the Soga were put to the sword, as fearful Soga guards abandoned their post. Nakatomi Kamatari demanded an oath of loyalty from other officials, and outside of the palace the Nakatomi wiped away all those who showed opposition to their rule.
Having become the most influential family, the Nakatomi began selecting who among the Yamato family would be emperor -- still adhering to their belief that the Yamato family was directly descended from the original king, Jimmu and Jimmu's ancestor, the Sun Goddess. The Nakatomi family continued to run daily court ceremonies. They served as the power behind the throne and occasionally as regent. They ran government ministries and married their daughters into the Yamato family. And under Nakatomi influence the actual power of the Yamato emperor declined generally, with emperors occasionally trying to re-assert Yamato control.
Japan, during these developments, had been growing economically, the Japanese using better tools and fertilizer, more draft animals in agriculture, and better tools in the crafts. Better roads and a fleet of ships facilitated trade. Horses and fighting equipment continued to pour into Japan from the Asian continent. Japan was growing also in population, and they were expanding against indigenous people, including the Ainu, who, on the main island, Honshu, were overrun and pushed farther north.
The capital moved from what is now Osaka to Nara, the new emperor moving to a new palace in order to avoid the pollution of his predecessor's death. Nara was a city of about 200,000 and modeled after China's great city, Chang'an, but without Chang'an's great walls -- Japan being an island nation and less worried about invading armies. At the imperial court in Nara, factionalism continued while the Nakatomi remained dominant. Various aristocrat families and Buddhist monks contended for influence under Nakatomi domination -- while about about 10,000 persons in Nara worked at government jobs.
From 710 to 784 was a time of reforms. The whole of Japan (excluding areas where aborigines still lived) came under the discipline of the government in the capital. People paid taxes to the palace in the form of a percentage of what they grew, or in textiles, labor or military service. Roads linked Nara to provincial cities, and taxes were collected more efficiently. And land reform was created designed to help the common farmer.
But the land reforms were circumvented or postponed. Aristocratic families were growing in wealth and buying more land. Buddhist temples were also amassing wealth and buying more land. Land reclamation favored the wealthy, who could afford the costs involved. Less land was available to the common farmer -- repeating what had occurred in Han China. And tax exemptions were given to the most influential families.
Good works, however, were done by the Buddhists. Dedicated to serving common people, Buddhists initiated public works such as the founding charity hospitals, free clinics, free lodging houses, orphanages, and old people's homes. Perhaps the spirit of good deeds played a small role in inspiring government projects such as building bridges, excavating canals, improving irrigation, and building harbors. And Buddhism was viewed with awe for its inspiring good deeds and for its powers of magic in warding off calamity.
The Buddhists in Japan continued to see the material world as illusory, holding that reality was one's own consciousness and harmony under the Universal Buddha. But, of course, they continued to make accommodations with the material world. Buddhist monasteries had their own armies and were unscrupulous in making alliances. As readers of Chinese, some Buddhist monks became expert in administration and technical matters, such as engineering, and these monks served Japan much as the Latin reading clergy served in medieval Europe.
For common peasants calamity was, however, an overwhelming reality. Common peasants went into debt and if they could not repay their debts they were held in bondage or as slaves. Some peasants escaped to frontier areas. Some became vagrants, and some joined other peasants in working on great estates. The one-tenth or so of the population that became slaves were the possession of government bureaucrats, landlords and temples. The main concern of the court nobility, meanwhile, was ritual and ceremony. There, orchestras with string and percussion instruments played. People danced and wore brilliant costumes and fanciful masks.
An emperor's daughter, succeeded to power in 749 and became known as the Empress Koken. She brought Buddhist priests into court and then abdicated in 758 on the advice of her cousin, Fujiwara Nakamaro, and she was succeeded by the emperor Junnin. Junnin was murdered, and in 764 the Empress Koken re-ascended the throne, with a new name: Empress Shotoku. She appears to have fallen in love with a Buddhist monk, Kokyo -- with whom she was rumored to share the same pillow. Empress Shotoku promoted Kokyo as her chief minister. She commissioned the printing of one million prayer charms and may have wanted to make Kokyo emperor. Nara society was shocked. The Fujiwara family stepped in and by 770 she was out of power. Soon she was dead. Henceforth women were to be exempted from imperial succession. And Buddhist monks were removed from the offices they held.
The new emperor, Kammu, wished to be free of influence from the Buddhist monasteries around Nara. In 784 he moved his court thirty-five miles northwest to Nagaoka, a new palace and royal court built there in five months by 300,000 men. To defray the expense of the move, taxes were increased, a burden felt by the peasantry.
Bad omens appeared at the new capital in the form of frequent epidemics and the death of the heir, and it was believed that his spirit had to be placated. So in 794, after only ten years at Nagaoka, the capital was moved again, to Heian-kyo -- which means "Capital of Peace and Tranquility." It was another city modeled after Chang'an. Eventually, in the eleventh century, accompanying the failure of peace and tranquility, the capital was to be renamed Kyoto (pronounced KYOH-toe rather than Key-oh-toe) -- which means "capital city."
While cutting ties with Buddhism, the emperor Kammu restored the system of government laws called the Ritsu Ryo. Buddhism was now forbidden to interfere in secular government matters, but its religious functions were encouraged. Kammu ended military conscription of peasants, and he left court appointed aristocrats as leaders of his army. His army responded to raids by Ainu against Japanese incursions and it warred against the Ainu north of Sendai. The war lasted from 780 to 803. In the eyes of the Japanese, the aristocrat leader of the army, Sakanoue Tamuramaro, became the hero of that war, and he became the first who wore the title of Shogun.
Garrisons were established in Mutsu province to keep the Ainu in their place, and for the next 150 years Japan had no more wars, the emperor's army seeing little action and declining as a force. But in the early 800s, after the emperor Kammu passed from the scene, bloody fights erupted between rival cliques as to who should rule as emperor.
In 806 the new emperor was Heizei. He was apparently influenced by Confucianism and announced that good government depended on literature and that progress depended on learning. But after Heizei it was the study of Buddhism that was taking hold among the emperors. They became more interested in the inner peace and prolonged study of Buddhism than in ruling. And rather than create anything that could be called good government, they began a tradition of ruling as figureheads confined to the duties of religious ritual and various innocuous works. The government continued to be run by the Nakatomi family, which continued to benefit from its ties with the Yamato family, and the Nakatomi changed their name to Fujiwara. Occasionally the head of the imperial family would try to reassert his family's power. In the late 800s the emperor Uda, who was not born to a Fujiwara mother, tried. But the Fujiwara's remained dominant. The head of the Fujiwara family ruled as a regent, or as a prime minister after they created the office of kampaku -- regent for an adult emperor. And the Fujiwara maintained their monopoly on daily government routines and religious rituals.
The Fujiwara period in Japan's history is said to have begun in 858 and to have continued to 1160. At the emperor's court life was gay and there was devotion to the arts -- while the capital's aristocrats were losing political and economic control over the rest of the country. Japan had been slowly changing economically since the 700s. Trade was increasing. In the capital, paper makers, weavers, scroll painters, smiths and other specialists were developing their skills. Competition for land and resources between the aristocratic families was on the rise. Clans were expanding their estates and defying central authority - much as the owners of estates in France were defying the authority of France's monarchs. And little defiance was necessary, as Japan's monarchy was inclined to leave the great landowning families alone.
In the 900s more wealthy landholders had freed themselves from paying taxes. The government was low on revenues and soon gave up supporting a national army. In the countryside, the hardier aristocratic relatives of those in the capital were consolidating their various lands into single administrative units.
Province governors were marrying daughters of local aristocratic landowners and becoming a part of the local power elite. They were not governing in the interest of the people as a whole. They collected taxes and used their authority to put peasants to work on projects that they benefited from. Their hired agents over-estimated the size of peasant lands to justify increased taxation. The governor-aristocrats depended upon violence to suppress peasant outrage.
Without a functional central authority the economy was suffering. By the year 1000, money was disappearing. People bartered and paid for services with objects. Thieves were free to prey on travelers.
Rural aristocrats were recruiting disenchanted peasants, workers and soldiers and maintaining their own armed force to protect themselves against lawlessness. The men making up the armed forces on these independent lands came to be known as samurai (men who serve), or bushi (warriors). And the now militarized aristocracy began to take over in the provinces -- the carrying of swords not to be outlawed by the central government until the nineteenth century.
The militarized aristocracy had improved military technology -- horses, armor, more powerful bows and better swords. A new, medieval Japan was in the making, its central figure a local warlord on horseback, leading his men with his bow and sword and wearing steel armor. And eventually these great landholders did what warlords and princes had done in China, what independent states had done for millennia and what nobles were doing in Europe: they were in competition with each other, an elite jealous of one another. They feared each other. They were concerned with their honor as well as power and ability to commit violence, while the common people and slaves who labored at creating food, and tried to survive, suffered. Centralized power had not been concerned with justice for common people, and having failed to control its rural elites resulted in power-competition and war.
Buddhist monasteries were also large landholders, and they were expanding in size as Buddhist temples were expanding in wealth. Buddhist estates had their own armies -- armed monks called acuso. And occasionally they fought against each other, against some other expanding estate, or against the government in Kyoto.
Kyoto was the capital over territory that did not include Hokkaido to the north or the Ryukyu Islands to the south. There was no other city comparable in size. Towns along trade routes had at most several hundred inhabitants. All was sparsely populated and rural outside Kyoto, especially in mountainous areas. People in the far north of the main island, Honshu, were considered under Kyoto rule and also considered half-barbarian. Rough estimates or guesswork put the population under Kyoto rule around 7 million or less (around one-eighteenth Japan's population in 2008). People on the eastern half of Honshu spoke a different dialect than was spoken in Kyoto. There, writes the scholar Pierre François Souyri, people "loved to gallop through open space and hunt with bows and arrows." And with their cultural differences came distrust.
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
to navigation links at the top
Copyright © 2000-2008 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/h07japan.htm