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POWER and CLASS IN JAPAN, 500 to 1333 (4 of 7)

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. 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 monarchical governments were 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.

No other city compared in size to Kyoto. 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.