Istoria Japoniei - Engleza

8/8/2019 Istoria Japoniei - Engleza

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Although the Japanese do not settle Japan until the third century B.C., humans

had lived in Japan from about 30,000 B.C.. For Japan was not always an island. Duringthe Ice Ages, it was connected to the Korean peninsula by means of a land bridge. All

four main Japanese islands were connected, and the southern island of Kyushu was

connected to the Korean peninsula while the northern island of Hokkaido was connectedto Siberia. Stone Age humans crossed this land bridge in much the same way they

crossed the Bering land bridge into the Americas. We can date these humans back to

around 30,000 B.C. from the flint tools that they left behind.Then around 10,000 B.C., these original inhabitants developed a unique culture which

lasted for several thousand years: the Jomon culture. As with all preliterate people, all we

know of them comes from fragments of artifacts and the imaginative guessing of

anthropologists and archaeologists. Jomon means "cord pattern," for these peopledesigned cord patterns on their potterythe oldest of its kind in human history. Pottery,

however, is a characteristic of Neolithic peoples; the Jomon, however, were Mesolithic

peoples (Middle Stone Age). All the evidence shows that they were a hunting, gathering,

and fishing society that lived in very small tribal groups. But in addition to makingpottery, they also fashioned mysterious figurines that appear to be female. An ancient

goddess worship?

We divide the Jomon into six separate erasten thousand years, after all, is a long time

and even preliterate cultures change dramatically over time. These eras are the Incipient,

Initial, Early, Middle, Late, and Final Jomon periods.

The Incipient Jomon, which is dated from about 10,500 B.C. to 8,000 B.C. has left us

only pottery fragments. These pottery fragments were made by a people living in theKanto plain on the eastern side of Honshu, the plain on which Tokyo is located. We have

little idea what these fragments looked like when they were actually in one piece, but webelieve that they were very small, rounded pots. The Incipient Jomon pots are a majorchallenge to understanding human cultures, for they represent the very first ceramics in

human history, predating Mesopotamian ceramics by over two thousand years. The

standard anthropological line on the development of human arts asserts that pottery-making developed after agriculture and is characteristic of a more sedentary culture. The

Incipient Jomon, however, were hunter-gatherers who lived in nomadic small groups. Yet

they developed the art of pottery long before agriculture was introduced into Japanin

fact, the Incipient Jomon invented pottery-making long before any human was introducedto agriculture. The Incipient Jomon, then, demonstrate that pottery-making is a human

technology independent and distinct from agriculture.

The Initial Jomon, which lasted from 8,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. is distinguished by the

fact that we have pretty complete pots (isn't archaeology exciting?) that were used to boil

food. Like the fragments from the Initial Jomon, these aren't just plain old pots, but areinticrately decorated in the "cord-like" structure that characterizes Jomon.

The Early Jomon, from 5000 to 2500 B.C., corresponds to the single most interesting

couple thousand years in human history. At the end of the last ice age, around 14,500


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years ago, the world began to slowly warm. Between 5000 and 2500 B.C., the world

reached its warmest in the millenia following the ice ageduring this period, the average

global temperature was about four to six degrees farenheit higher than it is today. Neveragain would the world be as warm as it was in these two centuries. Here's the exciting

thing: corresponding the steady warming of the earth was the development of agriculture,

the single most important technological invention of human beings. Corresponding thewarmest period since the last ice age were tremendous innovations in human habitation.

It was in this period that human beings all over the world began to live in a more

sedentary mannerat the beginning of this period, human beings begin to live insubstantially sized villages; towards the end of this period, the very first human cities

appear. The Jomon were no exception to this world-wide phenomenon. Completely cut

off from all other humans, the Jomon also began to live in large villages in a settled

lifestyle. These villages consisted of large pit-houses; the floors of these houses are abouta foot below ground level. It seems they lived in extended family groups. The Jomon also

developed their pottery work even further: they began to fashion figurines. It's not clear

what they are, animal or human, but they are the first Japanese sculptural art.

In the Middle Jomon, from 2500-1500 B.C., the Jomon migrated from the Kanto plain

into the surrounding mountainside. While the Old Kingdom Egyptians were buildingpyramids, the Yellow River kings developing the first centralized states in China, and the

Sumerians building the very first urban centers, the Jomon, who had no awareness of

people off their island, began to live in very large villages and developed very simple

agriculture or proto-agriculture. They were no longer hunter-gatherers, but rather askilled and settled people that developed increasingly sophisticated artwork with

magnificent decorations. Their figurines now distinguish between animals and humans,

and their human figurines have tantalizing but perplexing gestures whose meaning is nowlost to us.

The Late (1500-1000) and Final (1000-300) Jomon corresponded to the neoglaciationstage in modern climactic history. The world cooled noticeably (colder than today), and

the Jomon migrated back down to the Kanto plain. At this point, the Jomon developed an

identifiable religionthey produce a remarkable number of figurines and stone circlesconstructed outside the main villages begin to appear. The figurines they produce are

largely heavy female figurines which suggests that the Jomon religion was a goddess

religion.

The Jomon culture, in essence a Mesolithic culture (although they display Neolithic

traits, such as pottery-making), thrived in Japan from the eleventh century to the third

century B.C., when it was displaced by a wave of immigrants from the mainland. Thesewere the Yayoi, and their origins lay in the north of China. Northern China was originally

a temperate and lush place full of forests, streams, and rainfall. It began to dry out,

however, a few thousand years before the common era. This dessication, which

eventually produced one of the largest deserts in the world, the Gobi, drove the original


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inhabitants south and east. These peoples pushed into Korea and displaced indigenous

populations. Eventually, these new settlers were displaced by a new wave of

immigrations from northern China and a large number of them crossed over into theJapanese islands. For this reason, the languages of the area north of China, the language

of Korea, and Japanese are all in the same family of languages according to most

linguists. Because Mongolian (spoken in the area north of China) is also part of thislanguage family and because the Mongolians conquered the world far to the west, this

means that the language family to which Japanese belongs is spoken across a

geographical region from Japan to Europe. The westernmost language in this family isMagyar, spoken in Hungary, and the easternmost language in this family is Japanese.

The Yayoi brought with them agriculture, the working of bronze and iron, and a new

religion which would eventually develop into Shinto (which wasn't given this name untilmuch, much later). While we don't know what these immigrations did to the indigenous

peoples, there are several possibilities. According to one theory, which is widely accepted

in Japan, the waves of Yayoi immigrants were very small. While they brought new

technologies with them, they were nevertheless assimilated into the native Jomon culture.By this account, Japanese culture, particularly as it is represented by the Shinto religion,

is very ancient and indigenous Japan. Some Japanese believe that the Jomon spoke anAustronesian language, that is, that the Jomon were more closely related to south Pacific

islanders and that Japanese is still largely a Pacific island language. In the West,

historians believe that the Yayoi displaced the indigenous Jomon and thus ended their

culture permanently. The Yayoi displaced the indigenous language, social patterns, andreligion of the original inhabitants. In this view, Japanese culture is a foreign import

deriving ultimately from the north of China and ancient Korea, a view that is not popular

among the modern Japanese.

Whatever the origins of Japanese culture, it is clear that the Japanese language, social

structure, and religion can be dated no farther back in Japan than the Yayoi immigrants.So for all practical purposes, the Yayoi are a new beginning in Japanese culture. The

transition was dramatic, far surpassing even the transition represented by the industrial

revolution. Japanese culture changed overnight with these new immigrants; eightthousand years of cultural placidity was dramatically hoisted into the agricultural age.

The Yayoi lived in clans called uji . The clans were headed by a single patriarchal

figure who served as both a war-chief and as a priest. Each clan was associated with asingle god which the head of the clan was responsible for; all the ceremonies associated

with that god were headed or performed by the head of the clan. These gods, called

kami , represented forces of nature or any other wondrous aspect of the world; the Yayoi,we believe, also had accounts of the creation of the world by gods. When one uji

conquered another, it absorbed its god into its own religious practices. In this way, the

Yayoi slowly developed a complex pantheon of kami that represented in their hierarchythe hierarchy of the uji .

The Yayoi lived primitively. They had no system of writing or money; they dressed

largely in clothes made from hemp or bark. Marriages were frequently polygamous, but


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women held a fairly prominent place in the society of the uji . It is probable that women

even served as clan-heads or priests; support for this possibility comes from the Chinese

histories that first discuss the Japanese.

The relationships between the uji were complex; slowly, territorial conflict gradually

produced what came close to small states. The first Japanese state, however, would bebuilt on the Yamato peninsula, the area into which Chinese influence began to flow in

200 AD.

peninsula, on the southwesternmost portion of the island of Honshu, has historically beenthe region through which cultural influence from the mainland has passed into Japan.

Beginning in 300 A.D., a new culture distinguished itself from Yayoi culture in the area

around Nara and Osaka in the south of Honshu. This culture built giant tomb mounds,

called kofun , many of which still exist; these tomb mounds were patterned after a similarpractice in Korea. It is from these tomb mounds that these people derive their name: the

Kofun. For two hundred years, these tombs were filled with objects that normally filled

Yayoi tombs, such as mirrors and jewels. But beginning in 500 A.D., these tombs were

filled with armor and weapons. So we know that around this time, a new wave of culturalinfluence had passed over from Korea into Japan.

The earliest Japanese state we know of was ruled over by Yamato "great kings"; the

Yamato state, which the Japanese chronicles date to 500 A.D., that is, the time when a

new wave of Korean cultural influence passed through southern Japan, was really a loose

hegemony. Yamato is the plain around Osaka; it is the richest agricultural region inJapan. The Yamato kings located their capital at Naniwa (modern day Osaka) and

enjoyed a hegemony over the surrounding aristocracies that made them powerful and

wealthy. They built for themselves magnificent tomb-mounds; like all monumentalarchitecture, these tombs represented the wealth and power of the Yamato king. The

keyhole-shaped tomb-mound of Nintoku is longer than five football fields and has twice

the volume of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.According to the Japanese chronicles, the court of the Yamato kings was based on

Korean models for the titles given to the court and regional aristocrats were drawn from

Korean titles. As in Yayoi Japan, the basic social unit was the uji ; what had been addedwas an aristocracy based on military readiness. This military aristocracy would remain

the single most powerful group in Japanese history until the Meiji restoration in 1868.

The various aristocratic families did not live peacefully together; the Yamato court

witnessed constant struggles among the aristocratic families for power.

During this period, Japan had a presence on the Korean peninsula itself. Korea was in

its most dynamic cultural and political period; the peninsula itself was divided into threegreat kingdoms: Koguryo in the north, Paekche in the east, and Silla in the west. Paekche

understood the strategic importance of Japan and so entered into alliance with the

Yamato state. This connection between the Yamato court and Paekche is culturally one ofthe most important events of early Japanese history. For the Paekche court sent to Japan

Korean craftspeople: potters, metal workers, artists, and so on. But they also imported

Chinese culture. In the fifth or sixth century, the Koreans imported Chinese writing in

order to record Japanese names. In 513, the Paekche court sent a Confucian scholar to the


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Yamato court. In 552, the Paekche sent an image of Buddha, some Buddhist scriptures,

and a Buddhist representative. These three importswriting, Confucianism, and

Buddhismwould transform Japanese culture as profoundly as the Yayoi immigrationshad done.

The most important period in early Japan occurs during the reign of Empress Suiko,who ruled from 592 to 628 A.D.. In the latter years of the 500's, the alliance between

Paekche and the Yamato state broke down; this eventually led to the loss of Japanese

holdings on the Korean peninsula. Waves of Koreans migrated to Japan, and, to makematters worse, the powerful military aristocracies of the Yamato state began to resist the

Yamato hegemony.

The Yamato court responded to these problems by adopting a Chinese-stylegovernment. In the early years of the seventh century, they sent envoys to China in order

to study Chinese government, society, and philosophy. At home, they reorganized the

court along the Chinese model, sponsored Buddhism, and adopted the Chinese calendar.

All of these changes were adminstered by Prince Shotoku (in Japanese, Shotoku Taishi,573-621) who was the regent of the Yamato court during the reign of Empress Suiko. His

most important contribution, however, was the writing and adoption of a Chinese-styleconstitution in 604 A.D.. The Seventeen Article Constitution (in Japanese, Kenpo

Jushichijo) was the earliest piece of Japanese writing and formed the overall philosophic

basis of Japanese government through much of Japanese history. This constitution is

firmly based on Confucian principles (although it has a number of Buddhist elements). Itstates the Confucian belief that the universe is composed of three realms, Heaven, Man,

and Earth, and that the Emperor is placed in authority by the will of Heaven in order to

guarantee the welfare of his subjects. The "great king" of earlier Japanese history wouldbe replaced by the Tenno, or "Heavenly Emperor." The Seventeen Article Constitution

stressed the Confucian virtues of harmony, regularity, and the importance of the moral

development of government officials.

Shotoku, however, was also a devout Buddhist. The second article of the constitution

specifically enjoins the ruler to value the Three Treasures of Buddhism. The overallConstitution, however, is overwhelmingly Confucian.

The constitution was followed by a coup against the ruling Soga clan, from which

Shotoku was derived. The new emperor, Kotoku Tenno (645-655), began an energetic

reform movement that culminated in the Taika Reform Edicts in 645 A.D.. These edictswere written and sponsored by Confucian scholars in the Yamato court and essentially

founded the Japanese imperial system. The ruler was no longer a clan leader, but

Emperor that ruled by the Decree of Heaven and exercised absolute authority. Japanwould no longer be a set of separate states, but provinces of the Emperor to be ruled by a

centralized bureaucracy. The Reform Edicts demanded that all government officials

undergo stringent reform and demonstrate some level of moral and bureaucraticcompetency. Japan, however, was still largely a Neolithic culture; it would take centuries

for the ideal of the Chinese style emperor to take root.


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Because of the thought and philosophy of the Tokugawa period in Japan (1600-1868),

nothing says "Japan" like the Shinto religion. The Tokugawa "Enlightenment" inspired a

group of thinkers who studied what they called kokugaku , which can be roughlytranslated "nativism," "Japanese Studies," or "Native Studies." Kokugaku was no dry-as-

dust academic discipline as the term "Japanese Studies" seems to imply; it was a

concerted philosophical, literary and academic effort to recover the essential "Japanesecharacter" as it existed before the early influences of foreigners, especially the Chinese,

"corrupted" Japanese culture. Recovering the essential Japanese character meant in the

end distinguishing what was Japanese from what is not and purging from the Japaneseculture various foreign influences including Confucianism (Chinese), Taoism (Chinese),

Buddhism (Indian and Chinese), and Christianity (Western European). The kokugakushu

("nativists") focussed most of their efforts on recovering the Shinto religion, the native

Japanese religion, from fragmentary texts and isolated and unrelated popular religiouspractices.

Despite this optimism, Shinto is probably not a native religion of Japan (since the

Japanese were not the original "natives" of Japan), and seems to be an agglomeration of amultitude of diverse and unrelated religions and mythologies. There really is no one thing

that can be called "Shinto," since there are a multitude of religious cults that gatherbeneath this category. The name itself is a bit misleading, for "Shinto" is a combination

of two Chinese words meaning "the way of the gods" (shen : "spiritual power, divinity";

tao : "the way or path") and was first used at the beginning of the early modern period.

The Japanese word is kannagara: "the way of the kami ." Calling the religion of the earlyJapanese "Shinto" is a gross and unsupportable anachronism.

Despite the difficulty in pinning down the form and nature of early Shinto, severalgeneral assertions can be drawn about it. First, early Shinto was a tribal religion, not a

state one. Individual tribes or clans, which originally crossed over to Japan from Korea,

generally held onto their Shinto beliefs even after they were organized into coherent andcentralized states.

Second, all Shinto cults believe in kami , which generally refers to the "divine."

Individual clans (uji ), which were simultaneously political, military, and religious units,worshipped a single kami in particular which was regarded as the founder or principal

ancestor of the clan. As a clan spread out, it took its worship of a particular kami with it;

should a clan conquer another clan, the defeated clan was subsumed into the worship of

the victorious clan's kami . What the kami consists of is hard to pin down. Kami first ofall refers to the gods of heaven, earth, and the underworld, of whom the most important

are creator godsall Shinto cults, even the earliest, seem to have had an extremely

developed creation mythology. But kami also are all those things that have divinity inthem to some degree: the ghosts of ancestors, living human beings, particular regions or

villages, animals, plants, landscapein fact, most of creation, anything that might be

considered wondrous, magnificent, or affecting human life. This meant that the earlyJapanese felt themselves to be under the control not only of the clan's principal kami , but

by an innumerable crowd of ancestors, spiritual beings, and divine natural forces. As an

example of the potential for divinity: there is a story of an emperor who, while travelling

in a rainstorm encountered a cat on a porch that waved a greeting to him. Intrigued by


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this extraordinary phenomenon, the emperor dismounted and approached the porch. As

soon as he reached the porch, a bolt of lightning crashed down on the spot his horse was

standing and killed it instantly. From that point on, cats were, in Shinto, worshipped asbeneficent and protective kami ; if you walk into a Japanese restaurant, you are sure to

find a porcelain statue of the waving cat which protects the establishment from harm.

Third, all Shinto involves some sort of shrine worship, the most important was the

Izumo Shrine on the coast of the Japan Sea. Originally, these shrines were either a piece

of unpolluted land surrounded by trees (himorogi ) or a piece of unpolluted groundsurrounded by stones (iwasaka ). Shinto shrines are usually a single room (or miniature

room), raised from the ground, with objects placed inside. One worshipped the kami

inside the shrine. Outside the shrine was placed a wash-basin, called a torii , where one

cleaned one's hands and sometimes one's face before entering the shrine. This procedureof washing, called the misogi , is one of the principal rituals of Shinto, which also

included prayer and spells. One worships a Shinto shrine by "attending" it, that is,

devoting oneself to the object worshipped, and by giving offerings to it: anything from

vegetables to great riches. Shinto prayer (Norito ) is based on koto-dama , the belief thatspoken words have a spiritual power; if spoken correctly, the Norito would bring about

favorable results.

Unfortunately, we know almost nothing at all about early Shinto, since nobody wrote

about it. Early Shinto may, in fact, be a myth; what is called early Shinto may simply be a

large number of unrelated local religions that began to combine with the advent ofcentralized states. History has accreted an enormous amount of non-Shinto ideas into this

original religion: Buddhism, Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism have all significantly

changed the religion.

The two great texts of Shinto belief and mythology, the Kojiki (The Records of Ancient

Matters ) and the Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan ), were written down around 700 A.D.,two centuries after Buddhism had been declared the state religion of Japan. Although

these texts contain the only versions of Shinto mythology, including Shinto creation

stories, both of these texts are heavily influenced by both Buddhism and Confucianismand the stories of the kami had been deeply corrupted by Chinese and Korean thought

long before.

The most profound change in Japanese government was the adoption of Chinese, particularly Confucian, models of government in Prince Shotoku's Seventeen Article

Constitution . The reforms undertaken by Shotoku not only addressed the internal

problems the Yamato court was faced with, they also dramatically changed Japanesehistory.

The various Japanese states are named for the regions in which the capital was located.

In 710, the capital was moved north to Nara. It was a carefully planned city laid out on arigorous grid after the Chinese capital of Chang-an. Meant to be a permanent capital, it

was moved again only eighty years later.


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Japan during the Nara period, however, was primarily an agricultural and village-based

society. Most Japanese lived in pit houses and worshipped the kami of natural forces and

ancestors. Building a capital city on the model of a Chinese capital produced a dramaticalienation of Japanese aristocracy from the Japanese population. In this region of villages,

pit-houses, and kami -worship, grew up a city of palaces, silks, wealth, Chinese writing

and Chinese thought, and Buddhism. The Nara capital represents the definitive break ofthe Japanese aristocracy from their roots in the uji .

The most influential cultural development in the Nara was the flowering of Buddhism.Several schools of Buddhist thought imported from T'ang China made their way to the

capital city. For the most part, Buddhism was a phenomenon of the capital city well into

the Heian period. However, the vitality of Buddhism at this time led to a closer

integration of Buddhism with Japanese government. The Nara emperors in particulardeeply reverenced a Buddhist teaching called the Sutra of Golden Light ; in it, Buddha is

established not only as a historical human being but also as the Law or Truth of the

universe. Each human has reason, prajna , with which to distinguish good from bad. The

life of reason, then, is the beginning of a proper Buddhist life. Politically, the sutraclaimed that all human law must reflect the Ultimate Law of the universe; however, since

law was a phenomenon of the material world, it was subject to change. This gaveJapanese monarchs a moral basis for their rule and a justification for adapting rules and

laws to changing circumstances.

The devoutness that the Nara emperors held for Buddhism guaranteed its rapid anddramatic expansion into Japanese culture. Although Buddhism entered Japan in 518, it

was during the Nara period that it became a solid presence in Japanese culture.

The Heian period (794-1192) was one of those amazing periods in Japanese history,equaled only by the later Tokugawa period in pre-modern Japan, in which an

unprecedented peace and security passed over the land under the powerful rule of the

Heian dynasty. Japanese culture during the Heian flourished as it never had before; sucha cultural efflorescence would only occur again during the long Tokugawa peace. For this

reason, Heian Japan along with Nara Japan (710-794) is called "Classical" Japan.

The Nara period was marked by struggles over the throne and which of the clans wouldcontrol that throne. In order to quiet these disturbances, the capital was moved in 795 to

modern-day Kyoto, which at that time was give the name "Heian-kyo," or city of peace

and tranquility. The struggles for the throne ceased, but Japan still did not completely

unite under a central government. What happened instead was that power accumulatedunder a single family, the Fujiwara, who managed to skillfully manipulate and hold onto

their power in the face of changes and rivalry for over three centuries. With such

stability, the Heian imperial court at thrived.

The Japanese at the Heian court began to develop a culture independent of the Chinese

culture that had formed the cultural life of imperial Japan up until that point. First, theybegan to develop their own system of writing, since Chinese writing was adopted to an

entirely different language and world view. Second, they developed a court culture with

values and concepts uniquely Japanese rather than derived from imperial China, values

such as miyabi, "courtliness," makoto , or "simplicity," and aware, or "sensitivity,


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sorrow." This culture was forged largely among the women's communities at court and

reached their pinnacle in the book considered to be the greatest classic of Japanese

literature, the Genji monogatari (Tales of the Genji) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu.

Heian government solidified the reforms of the late Yamoto and Nara periods.

At the top of the official hierarchy was the Tenno, or "Divine Emperor." The Emperorwas both Confucian and Shinto; he ruled by virtue of the Mandate of Heaven and by

legitimate descent from the Shinto Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. Because of this, the

imperial line of descent has remained unbroken in Japanese history from the late Yamatoperiod.

The government hierarchy beneath the Emperor was built along Chinese lines. The

Japanese borrowed the T'ang Council of the State, which held most of the power inJapan. The most powerful clans vied for the position as Council of State, for from that

seat they could control the emperor and the entire government itself. Like T'ang

government, there were several ministries (eight instead of six). There was, however, a

profound difference between T'ang China and Heian Japan. China was a country of somesixty-five million people; Japan was a loose confederacy of some five million people.

The Chinese lived relatively prosperously, and T'ang China had by and large become anurban and an industrial culture. Japan, on the other hand, was still very backward when

one left the capital city of Heian-kyo. Uji bonds were still felt, and outlying areas still

exercised a degree of autonomy. The result for court government was very simple: most

of court government concerned the court alone. There were six thousand employees ofthe imperial government; four thousand administered the imperial house. So the Heian

court was not overly involved in the day to day governing of outlying provinces, which

numbered sixty-six.

In both the Nara period and the Heian period, regional chiefs were replaced by court-

appointed governors of the provinces. This was a demotion for the traditional aristocracy;it did not mean, however, that Heian government exercised a great deal of control over

these regional governors who ran their provinces more or less autonomously.

The Heian period, though, was one of remarkable stability. There was little dissension

or disagreement in the government itself or between the government and provincial

governors. The only problems were conflicts between uji either vying for territory or for

influence at the court.

In the earliest periods in Japan, warfare was largely confined to battles between

separate uji , or clans. The clans would go into battle under a war-chief; there was noseparate class of soldiers. At the emergence of the Yamato state, new techniques of larger

scale warfare seem to have been adopted including new technologies such as swords and

armor. The Nara government, faced with a country of sixty-six provinces of competingclans, tried to change the Japanese military system by conscripting soldiers. By the end of

the Nara period, in 792, the idea was given up as a failure.


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Instead, the Heian government established a military system based on local militias

composed of mounted horsemen. These professional soldiers were spread throughout the

country and owed their loyalty to the emperor. They were "servants," or samurai. Animportant change occurred, however, in the middle of the Heian period. Originally the

samurai were servants of the Emperor; they gradually became private armies attached to

local aristocracy. From the middle Heian period onwards, for almost a thousand years,the Japanese military would consist of professional soldiers in numberless private armies

owing their loyalty to local aristocracy and warlords. The early samurai were not the

noble or acculturated soldiers of Japanese bushido , or "way of the warrior." Bushido wasan invention of the Tokugawa period (1601-1868) when the samurai had nothing to do

because of the Tokugawa enforced peace. The samurai of early and medieval Japan were

drawn from the lower classes. They made their living primarily as farmers; their only

function as samurai was to kill the samurai of opposing armies. They were generallyilliterate and held in contempt by the aristocracy.

Buddhism developed profoundly during the Heian period as well. Situated nearthe capital on Mt. Hiei, the monks of the Hiei monastery developed new forms of esoteric

Buddhism. The great genius of Japanese Buddhism of the time, however, was Kukai

(774-835), who established in Japan a form of Buddhism called the True Words (in

Japanese: Shingon) at his monastery at Mount Koya. The three mysteries of Buddhismare body, speech, and mind; each and every human being possesses each of these three

faculties. Each of these faculties contain all the secrets of the universe, so that one can

attain Buddhahood through any one of these three. Mysteries of the body apply to variousways of positioning the body in meditation; mysteries of the mind apply to ways of

perceiving truth; mysteries of speech are the true words. In Shingon, these mysteries are

passed on in the form of speech (true words) from teacher to student; none of these truewords are written down or available to anyone outside this line of transmission (hence the

term Esoteric Buddhism). Despite this extraordinarily rigid esotericism, the Shingon

Buddhism of Mt. Hiei became a vital force in Japanese culture. Kukai believed that theTrue Words transcended speech, so he encouraged the cultivation of artistic skills:

painting, music, and gesture. Anything that had beauty revealed the truth of the Buddha;

as a result, the art of the Hiei monks made the religion profoundly popular at the Heian

court and deeply influenced the development of Japanese culture that was being forged atthat court. It is not unfair to say that Japanese poetic and visual art begin with the

Buddhist monks of Mount Hiei and Mount Koya.

In the late Heian period, private families began to accrue vast amounts ofproperty (shoen ) and began to support large standing armies, mainly because the Heian

government began to rely more on these private armies than on their own weak forces.

The result was an exponential growth in the power of the two greatest warrior clans, theTaira (or the Heike) and the Minamoto (or the Genji). The Genji controlled most of

eastern Japan; the Heike had power in both eastern and western Japan.


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As the powers of these two increased, the clan of the Fujiwara began to control the

Emperor closelya shrewd move since the Taika reform theoretically gave all final

power to the emperor. From 856 until 1086, the Fujiwara were, for all practical purposes,the government of Japan. In 1155, however, the succession to the throne fell vacant, and

the naming of Go-Shirakawa as Emperor set off a small revolution, called the Hogen

Disturbance, which was quelled by the clans of the Taira and the Minamoto. This was aturning point in Japanese history, for the power to determine the affairs of the state had

clearly passed to the warrior clans and their massive private armies.

After the accession of Go-Shirakawa and later his successor Nijo, a lesser lord of the

Taira, a dissolute, ambitious and shrewd man named Kiyimori, began to slowly accrue

massive power for himself in the Emperor's court. Seeing this, it became apparent that the

power of the Taira had to be diminished in some way, so the retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa attempted to lay a military trap for Kiyimori with the aid of a minor Genji

lord, Yukitsuna. The plot failed and opened an irreparable breach between the Heike and

the retired Emperor and the Genji. In 1179, the head of the Taira, Shigemori, died; his

forceful and ruthless leadership had propelled the Taira into the forefront. He wasreplaced by his brother Munemori, a coward and poor strategist. Go-Shirakawa, seeing he

now had an advantage, began to dismiss Taira in the capital, and Kiyimori fired severalcourt officials and marched on the capital, forcing the new Emperor Takakura off the

throne by installing his own one-year old grandson, Antoku, as the Emperor. Takakura

enlisted the aid of the Genji and the great civil war began, ushering in the feudal age of

Japan.

Nara Budhism

In 552, the emperor of the Korean Paekche sent to Japan an image of Buddha along with

some Buddhist scriptures. The Emperor of Japan, Kimmei, was pleased with the gift and

the head of the most powerful clan in Japan, the Soga, urged that Buddhism be embracedas the new religion of Japan. For Buddhism was the religion of the civilized west and

Japan had just begun actively importing the culture of China and Korea.

Outside of the Emperor and the Soga, the reception given Buddhism was less than

enthusiastic. Each of the clans worshipped their own kami , or gods; the chief of these

gods, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, was the creator of the world. Japan was the center of

creation and the Japanese a select people. Buddha, on the other hand, was a foreign god,one that did not create the universe or have any central role in the pantheon of gods. Was

it worth angering one's native gods? What did Buddha have to offer that the powerful

gods of the native Japanese religion couldn't?

The conservative reaction against Buddhism was overwhelming. The Soga set up a

shrine for the image of Buddha and began to venerate it, but when an epidemic spreadacross Japan, the conservative aristocracy demanded that the Emperor destroy the image.

The Buddha image was cast into a moat and the Soga were forced to burn their shrine.


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A few decades later, Buddhism made its way back to Japan in 584. Again, the Soga

clan was instrumental in its arrival. When a member of the Soga clan was given two

images of Buddha, he then set up a temple for them and had a girl ordained as a Buddhistnun in order to attend to the shrine. As before, an epidemic swept through Japan and the

images were destroyed. But Korea had begun to send Buddhist monks and priests and

managed to convince Prince Shotoku, the regent who composed the JapaneseConstitution, to convert to the religion. Shotoku, in fact, became a fervent Buddhist; the

establishment of Buddhism in the royal court certified its permanence.

The Nara period (709-795 AD) saw the flowering of Buddhism in Japan; it was

limited, however, to the capital and the royal court. For the bulk of Japan was culturally

unaffected by the adoption of Chinese urban culture and Chinese Buddhism.

Nevertheless, the earliest stages of Nara Buddhism were dominated by Korean andChinese monks and priests. They brought with them Buddhist rituals, clothing,

architecture, art, and books; the Nara period represents the most active period of cultural

imports into Japan. Not only did the Buddhist priests and monks flooding Japan bring

cultural artifacts, they also brought non-Buddhist ideas, such as the Chinese schools ofTaoism, Confucianism, and the Yin-Yang physical theories.

Because the bulk of Japanese Buddhists in the Nara period were Korean and Chinese,

Nara Buddhism was essentially identical with Chinese Buddhism of the same period

(T'ang China). Three main schools dominated Chinese and Japanese Buddhism at the

time: the "Three Treatises" school (in Japanese, Sanron ), the Dharma Character school(in Japanese, Hosso ), and the "Flower Wreath" school (in Japanese, Kegon ). Each of

these schools, like all Chinese Buddhism, were branches of Mahayana Buddhism which

had arisen in India in the second century AD. All three schools believed that the universewas in constant flux and constant change. All external reality and all perceptions change

as well, so there is no certainty in things. The goal is to attain the Ultimate Truth, which

is equivalent to the overall principle of the universe; this Ultimate Truth can only beattained if one frees oneself from the external world and deceptive sense perception. At

the same time, all three schools were overwhelmingly moral in their outlook. Like most

forms of Mahayana Buddhism, they did not expect full participation by everyone. Forthose who could not dedicate themselves to the monastic life, there still remained the

possibility of starting down the road towards enlightenment by behaving in an altruistic

manner in the current life. The Kegon school, for instance, taught that all beings are

interrelated as if they were part of a large wreath of flowers; they emphasizedcommunion and friendliness.

The ultimate Buddhist ideal, however, was rule by a priest of Buddha; such a sovereign

would create a Buddha-Land here on earth. In 766, Japan came very close to realizingthis ideal when the Empress Shotoku tried to abdicate her throne in favor of the master of

the Hosso, Dokyo. The conservative aristocracy, however, rebelled and Japan failed to

become the first Buddha-Land.


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In 788 a Chinese Buddhist priest named Saicho (767-822) founded an unpretentious, tiny

Buddhist temple on the slopes of Mount Hiei near Kyoto. As small as its beginnings

were, Mount Hiei would quickly become the cultural, religious, and artistic center ofJapan until it was destroyed by Oda Nobunaga in 1571. At the time Saicho founded his

monastery, the area around the mountain was unproductive marsh-lands. All this changed

in six years when the Emperor Kammu moved the capital from Nara to the area aroundMount Hiei. It was one of those strange practical jokes of history: Kammu, a devoted

Confucian, originally moved the capital in order to get away from the Buddhists. The

move, however, would make the Buddhists of Mount Hiei the most powerful politicalforce in early and medieval Japanese history.

Kammu took a liking to the young priest, though, and sent him to China in 804 to

further his training as a Buddhist priest. While in China, Saicho became a follower of the

T'ien T'ai school; on his return, he converted the Hiei temple to Tendai, the Japanesename for T'ien T'ai. The Tendai school was based on the Lotus Sutra, which was the

foundational text of all Mahayana Buddhism. The Lotus Sutra claims to be the last

definitive teaching of Buddha. In it, the Buddha reveals the "Greater Vehicle" (in

Sanskrit, Mahayana ) which allows for salvation for a larger number of people.Buddhahood is open to all people rather than to a few; the teaching of Buddhist law, then,

is of paramount importance. This law was taught by bodhisattvas, or "beings in Truth."

The monastery that Saicho set up on Mount Hiei, then, was dedicated to the production

of bodhisattvas. Each monk had to live in the monastery for twelve years where he

learned the Mahayana scriptures and also learned "Concentration," or shikan . Unlike theNara Buddhists, however, the Hiei Buddhists did not exercise control over its followers

in the court. In particular, while the best students remained in the monastery, the others

would graduate into positions in the government or in the court. As a result, the Hieimonastery, which was officially titled, "Center for the Protection of the Nation," became

the most influential institution in the country. By the time it was burned to the ground by

Oda Nobunaga in 1571, it was a sprawling complex and university of over three thousandbuildings.

Although Hiei Mount was the most significant Buddhist monastery in early Japanese

history, Kukai (774-835) is perhaps the most significant individual in the history of Heian

Buddhism. Unlike Saicho, Kukai was native Japanese; he came from an aristocraticfamily. He was a brilliant and creative man, and as a young man he began by studying

Confucianism, but soon mastered Taoism and Buddhism as well.

The Emperor Kammu sent Kukai to China along with Saicho in 804. At the great T'angcapital of Chang-an, he became the disciple of Hui-kuo (746-805), one of the most

significant Buddhist teachers in China at the time. When he returned to Japan, he

established a monastery on Mount Koya and thus began the history of Shingon Buddhismin Japan.


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Shingon in Japanese means "True Words," a translation of the Sanskrit Mantrayana.

The "True Words" school believed that there were three mysteries of Buddhism: the

body, speech, and mind. Each and every human being possesses these three faculties.Each of these faculties contain all the secrets of the universe, so that one can attain

Buddhahood through the use of any one of these three. Mysteries of the body apply to

various ways of positioning the body in meditation; mysteries of the mind apply to waysof apprehending truth; finally, the mysteries of speech are the true words which were

secretly spoken by Buddha. In Shingon, these mysteries are passed on in the form of

speech (true words) from teacher to student; none of these true words are written down oravailable to anyone outside this line of transmission (hence the term Esoteric Buddhism).

Despite this extraordinarily rigid esotericism, the Shingon Buddhism of Mt. Hiei

became a vital force in Japanese culture. Kukai believed that the True Words transcendedspeech, so he encouraged the cultivation of artistic skills: painting, music, and gesture.

Anything that had beauty revealed the truth of the Buddha; as a result, the art of the Hiei

monks made the religion profoundly popular at the Heian court and deeply influenced the

development of Japanese culture that was being forged at that court. For this reason,although the monks of Mount Hiei became the most powerful Buddhists at court, esoteric

Shingon Buddhism was the most important religion of the Heian period and the earlyfeudal period.

As with all other languages, the Japanese language can be understood formally as a set oflingusitic characteristics or subjectively as a way of experiencing and ordering the world.However, unlike other languages, Japanese is unique to both linguists and to the people

speaking the language. The Japanese by and large believe their language to be a highly

unique languagesome believe it to be unlike any other language in existence. Westernlinguists believe that Japanese is a language clearly related to other, Northern Asian

languages, but there is a fair amount of disagreement among them. Suffice it to say that

Japanese is the only human language where we can't quite decide where it came from orwhat other languages it's related to.

From the point of view of the Japanese, the experience of this language is based on two,

widely held beliefs about the language. First, the Japanese believe that the language issomehow highly uniquealmost a language unto itself. Second, the Japanese believe that

their language is extremely difficult for non-Japanese to read or understand. In fact, the

Japanese have a name for non-Japanese who can speak and understand the language: hengaijin , or "crazy foreigners." So the "experience" of Japanese as a language is an

exclusive experience, a sense that one is participating in a language that no others can

share or penetrate.


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From a Western perspective, Japanese is not an overly difficult language to learn

(Chinese and Old Irish are considerably more difficult) nor is it a unique language. There,

however, the agreement ends. For it's uncertain exactly what language family Japanesecomes from. There are three main theories about the origin of the Japanese language

among both Western and Japanese linguists:

1. Japanese is an Altaic language related to Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish.2. Japanese is an Austronesian language related to Papuan, Malayan and other Pacific

languages.

3. Japanese is a Souteast Asian language related to Vietnamese, Tibetan, Burmese or, inone school of thought, the Tamil languages of southern India and Ceylon.

Almost all linguists believe that Japanese is an Altaic language, which makes a certain

amount of sense considering the fact that the Yayoi people seem to have migrated from

Korea. A fair number of Japanese linguists, however, believe that Japanese is anAustronesian language. These alternative views have given rise to three theories

concerning the origin of Japanese:

1. In the Western model, Japanese was derived from a language spoken in northern Asia

that would split off into several languages, such as Mongolian, Korean, and Turkish. Theearliest peoples of Japan probably spoke this language, but eh Yayoi certainly spoke this

language. By the end of the Yayoi period (300 A.D., this Altaic language was thedominate language on the islands. This language was in part influenced by the Pacific

Island languages (the Austronesian languages) that surrounded the islands of Japan and

thus formed an Austronesian substratum in Japanese.

2. The Jomon spoke an Austronesian language and the Yayoi introduced an Altaiclanguage. This Altaic language combined with the Austronesian languages spoken on the

islands to form a unique hybrid, Japanese, which became the dominant language in Japan.

In this model, there are two possibilities: Japanese is an Altaic language with anAustronesian substratum or Japanese is an Austronesian language with an Altaic

substratum. Take your pick.

3. Japanese was originally a language related to Tibetan or a language related to Tamilthat was introduced into Japan during the great migrations of Southeast Asian peoples

four or five thousand years ago. This language combined with, you guessed it, an Altaic

and an Austronesian language to form the contemporary language.This is quite a quagmire to wade through. It doesn't help that Western linguists and

Japanese linguists are in basic disagreement over much that has to do with Japaneseas

is the case with linguists the world over, their debate is largely conducted on the level of

name-calling with Western linguists accusing the Japanese of being stupid and Japaneselinguists exercising similar restraint!

At this present moment, however, this is the standard line on the history of Japanese.

The Yayoi were originally migrants from the Korean peninsula and brought with them

an Altaic language. This language combined with a language already spoken in theislands which may or may not have been Altaicat some level, however, the Japanese

were influenced by Pacific Island languages. Because of their relative isolation, the

Japanese language became very different from the languages it was related to. Adding to

this, when Chinese culture was introduced, the Chinese language changed Japanese


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profoundly as it introduced new ways of thinking and new ways of expressing that

thought.

In fact, most Japanese words are derived from Chineseover sixty percent, to be

precise. The situation is similar to English in which some sixty percent of English words

are derived from Latin derived languages and only a minority of English words comefrom original English. For the most part, however, Japanese grammar did not

significantly change.

Since the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), Japanese has been greatly influenced by

Western languages. Technology in particular has introduced a host of new words and

expressions. In the realm of grammar, some writers, such as Yukio Mishima, have

written Japanese in such a way to make translation into English easier. As a result,they've significantly changed some grammatical constructions to fit in more closely with

European languages.

What is apanese like as a language? In many ways, it's completely unlike the experience

of English or any other European language. Unlike English, Japanese constructssentences in a sentence-object-verb structure (called an SOV languageEnglish

constructs sentences as subject-verb-object, or SVO). While this is familiar to peoplewho've studied other languages, it expresses a relationship between the subject and object

that is far more intimate than that expressed in English.

Most apparent to a first-time learner of Japanese is that it is a di-syllabic language(most words are formed from two syllables) in which each syllable consists only of a

consonant and a vowel (called a CV syllabic system). These syllables, however, are

different than English syllables. Called mora in Japanese, all syllables are consonant-vowelno syllables can be consonant-vowel-consonant. If a consonant is not followed

by a vowel, it's counted as a single syllable. The word, shinbun, has four mora or

syllables (shi-n-bu-n) and is equivalent to futomaki , which also has four syllables. Youshould remember this when studying Japanese poetryall Japanese poetry is based on

counting syllables, but you can never produce the same syllabic effect in English or any

other European language. In addition, it is the mora system which renders most Englishwords incomprehensible when they're adopted into Japanese. By far the majority of non-

Chinese foreign words in Japanese are derived from English; when the Japanese use these

words on English speakers, however, they're met with confusion. This is because every

syllable must be in the form "consonant-vowel" in Japanese: in "besaboru" (baseball), forinstance, when a batter swings and misses a pitch, it's a "seturoku," not a "strike" (a

worker initiated work stoppage is a "seturoki").

The most startling difference that an English speaking person encounters with Japanese

is to find out that it is not a heavily inflected language, that is, it does not define various

uses of a verb or noun by adding a host of suffixes, but rather employs particles, whichare independent words (like our prepositions) that indicate the nature of a noun or verb.

In some ways, this makes it easy to learn Japanese. These particles, however, don't

correspond to categories that we have in English or other European languages.


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The most startlingly disconcerting of these particles is the difference between ga and

wa, a distinction that leaves many an undergraduate crying over their Japanese language

textbook. Both of these particles are used with nouns in much the same way that we addan -s to a noun to indicate a plural. But ga and wa do not indicate pluralsrather they

indicate the distinction between a subject and a topic.

This is a difficult distinction to really understand. Almost all languages are of one of

two types: they express things as subjects or they express things as topics. Japanese is the

only human language that is neither a subject language nor a topic language but ratherboth. Here's the difference: I can say, "the snow is white," in two different ways in

Japanese:

"Yuki ga siroi" (the snow is white)

"Yuki wa siroi" (the snow is white)These are, despite the English translation, two entirely different sentences. The first

would be used if you're referring to a particular bunch of snow, say, if you walk out the

door and you're surprised at the whiteness of the snow: "Boy, the snow is white!" You're

referring to a particular bunch of snow (snow is the subject). If, however, you're making ajudgement about a general state of affairs, that is, if you're talking about snow as if it

were a topic to be judged or described, then you'd the second statement. Unlike English,then, most Japanese sentences have to distinguish between a pure description (subject

based) or a judgement (topic based).

The Japanese understanding of time is far different in their verb forms than the Westernview of time. While English and other European languages organize actions largely on

the basis of their time relations, Japanese verbs express far different ideas in their tenses.

A Japanese verb can express a.) a non-past continuing action, but not necessarily one

that has occured in the past, present, or future (this is commonly and inaccurately called

the "present tense" in Western grammars); b.) a tense that describes an action that hasbeen completed and occurred in the past; and c.), a "tentative" action, that is, an action

that hasn't been carried out (commonly called the future). This latter verb form would be

best translated in English as "it might happen" or "it might be happening." This latterform is also used in formal speech as a form of deference to the listener. If, for instance, a

Japanese speaker is trying to be respectful or highly polite, he or she will use the tentative

tense: "I might be eating dinner with you" rather than "I'm eating dinner with you."

Japanese also includes an elaborate grammatical and lexical system of "honorifics," or

rules of language to show respect according to your rank and the rank of those you're

speaking to. These honorifics include adding suffixes to nouns and verbs and were a wayof both marking your rank and the rank of the person above you. In Japanese, this

elaborate system begins in the Heian period and develops to its fullest in the Tokugawa

period (1603-1868) with its codifcation of social class. In modern Japan, this elaboratelinguistic system has simplified; one cannot, however, learn to speak Japanese without

learning the language forms, including syntax and grammar, for defining one's social

place. This is a difficult concept to communicate to English speakers, but through most of

Japanese history, the experience of language meant experiencing and reinforcing the


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social differences that ordered society. From the Heian period to the Meiji Restoration in

1868, you literally could not say a sentence without defining one's own social class and

the social class of the person you were speaking to. In addition, the system of honorificsis a gendered system. One not only defined social class in one's speech, but one's sex.

Women's speech in Japanese tends to be filled with honorifics and with the "tentative"

tense as a deference to male auditors. Part of the experience of Japanese through most ofits histroy, then, is to encounter every day language usage that always put women in a

subordinate position to men.

Writing was introduced in Japan in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Like so much else

in early Japanese culture, it was a direct import from China. Since the Japanese had no

native writing system, the introduction of literacy involved writing first in Chinese using

Chinese characters. However, since knowledge of Chinese was limited, the Japanese soonadapted the Chinese style of writing to the Japanese languageby the seventh century

AD, the Japanese were writing Japanese using the Chinese style of writing. Japanese,

however, was an exponentially different language than Chinese they are not even in the

same language familyso the development of Japanese writing involved ingenious butcomplex reconfigurations of Chinese writing.

Chinese writing is in part a ideogrammatic writing system and partly a syllabic writing

system. The earliest Chinese characters were pictures of the object being denoted, as in

the earliest Mesopotamian writing. Like Mesopotamian writing, this pictographic writing

eventually developed into a more simple, cursive way of drawing the characters ratherthan drawing the objects. In Mesopotamia this led to the development of cuneiform, in

China this led to ideograms, which are halfway between being a picture of the object and

being an abstract representation. In addition to ideogrammatic characters, some Chinesecharacters simply represent syllables. When the Japanese exported Chinese writing, they

first exported Chinese writing phonetically. That is, if you needed to write the word,

"onna," meaning woman, early Japanese writing would write first a Chinese characterthat in Chinese represents the word "on" or something close to it and then another

Chinese ideogram that translates into the Chinese word "na." After a while, the Japanese

began to use the characters ideogrammatically, that is, they'd use the character thatcorresponded not to the sound but to the meaning of the Chinese word with which it was

associated. So, in later Japanese writing, when one wanted to write the word "onna," one

would use the Chinese character for "woman." This style of writing, which characterized

all Japanese writing until the late seventh century, is called kanji. By the seventh century,both methods were used whenever one wrote Japanese using Chinese characters.

Kanji , as anyone who has studied it knows, was highly limited. The problem is

particularly acute when there are no Chinese equivalents for Japanese words. In somecases they used Chinese words in their pictographic meaningfor instance, the Chinese

character for "mountain" (shang ) could serve as the Japanese character for mountain,

which is "yama" in Japanese. However, when the Japanese came to unique Japanese

names or concepts, they had no Chinese characters for these names or concepts. In these


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cases, they used the Chinese characters phonetically. So, if one is writing "Yamaguchi" in

kana , you would use the Chinese character for "mountain" to write the first two syllables

of the name, since "mountain" in Japanese is "yama.". In the earliest Japanese writing,however, there were no formal rules for phonetic spelling, so the first two syllables of

"Yamaguchi" could also be spelled by using the character (there are several) for "ya" and

the character (there are several) for "ma." So, just like Chinese, kana is both anideogrammatic and a syllabic writing system, only the syllables are Japanese rather than

Chinese syllables. The rules for phonetic spelling, however, were very loose. One could

spell phonetically according to Japanese words or to Chinese words; since a singlesyllable could be rendered with several different Chinese characters, one could spell the

same word several different ways.

In the history of Japanese writing, the syllabic characters used in the Manyoshu , acollection of poetry from the eigth century, is a cornerstone in the history of writing in

Japan. It's use of certain characters to represent syllables (rather than the free-for-all in

normal Japanese writing) was known as the Manyo kana , the "Manyoshu borrowed

words," and became the basis for formal rules of writing syllables in kana . After theManyoshu , writing Japanese became much more stable.

In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Japanese invented another writing technology

based on Chinese characters called kana , which means "borrowed words." There are two

types of kana , hiragana (which the early Japanese called onna-de , or "women's

writing"), and katakana . The most important innovation in Japanese writing occurredwith the introduction of hiragana or completely syllabic writing in the Heian period. In

Japanese historiography, hiragana was introduced by the Buddhist, Kobo Daishi, who had

studied Sanskrit, a phonetic alphabet, in India. The alphabet that he invented was asyllabic alphabetin part based on Chinese writing, hiragana is made of simple, cursive

strokes in which each character represents a single syllable. Not only is hiragana easier

and faster to write, it also doesn't require a knowledge of Chinese characters. In the Heianperiod, hiragana was called onna-de , or "women's writing" and made possible the great

works of Japanese literature composed by women such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei

Shonagon. Through these works and the court culture produced by women'scommunities, hiragana eventually became the dominant writing system in Japan.

A little later, Buddhists developed yet one more writing system, katakana . Like

hiragana , katakana is a syllabic alphabet derived from Chinese characters. Hiragana ,however, was produced by drawing Chinese characters in quick, cursive, fluid strokes

they are curvy and simple renditions of the Chinese characters from which they were

derived. Katakana , however, takes Chinese characters and draws only one part of thecharacter, a kind of shorthand. In the example below, both the hiragana and the katakana

characters are derived from the same Chinese character which stands for "woman" (in

Japanese, "onna"):

Reading Japanese, then, requires that the ability to move between three distinct writing

systems. Often a work will be written using a combination of both kanji and kana ; after


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the introduction of the European alphabet, a fourth method of writing Japanese came to

be introduced side by side with the other three.

This complex state of affairs resulted from ingenious technological solutions in a rapid

adoption of literacy. There are several problems that the Japanese had to overcome when

they adopted Chinese writing: first, they had to adapt a non-phonetic method of writing toa completely different language. Second, they had to develop methods of writing to speed

up the writing process, since not only was kanji time-consuming to write out, it also

presupposed a knowledge of Chinese. Like so many other writing systems, the solution tothese problems lay in the development of a phonetic or syllabic writing technologya

pattern that repeats itself independently across cultures and across time.

The history of women in ancient Japan is, like so much else in early Japanese history,filled with missing parts. We know very little about Japan before the advent of writing, so

piecing together women's lives and contributions to early Japanese history is as difficult

as piecing together the lives and histories of the early Japanese. In the Nara and Heianperiods, we are fortunate to have a well-developed, thriving, literate community of

women both surrounding the court of the emperor as well as in the lesser courts of

regional governors. This picture, however, is as distorted as our picture of Japanesesociety during the Heian period: we are limited entirely to the upper classes, their lives,and their values. The experience and values of women and women's communities for the

vast majority of ancient Japanese is simply unavailable to us; just as we can barely figure

out the culture and world views of the everyday ancient Japanese, so we cannot evenguess the nature of women's communities and the roles that women played in rural and

village communities and economies.

In the first mention of Japan in Chinese historythe Chinese called Japan,

"Wa"there is a fairly brief discussion of Japanese women. The Chinese writers claim

that there is no social distinction between men and women and remarks that there have

even been women rulers in Japan. The history also claims that women served as religiousshamans and regularly participated in ceremonials. Its difficult, however, to extrapolate

from this Chinese history to the reality that the Chinese encountered. First, the Chinese

are attempting in their description of "Wa" to define the Japanese as backward; in thissame history, they talk about Japanese lack of decorum. Is their discussion of women an

accurate representation or is it simply a fiction designed to show that the Japanese are

less socially stratifiedand hence less civilizedthan the Chinese? For instance, in thesame history, the writers claim that the Japanese also practice polygyny, or the marriage


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of more than one wife. Nobility, they claim, marry upwards of five women while

commoners typically have two or three wives. Is polygyny compatible with female

equality? Does a culture that allows men to marry more than one woman, but not viceversa, a culture which does not stratify people based on gender? Does a woman who is a

second, third, or fourth wife feel that she is equal to her husband? Besides this, all

evidence we have indicates that the individual clans, or uji , were ruled by men.

The Shinto religion provides some clues to early Japanese society, but they are fleeting

and somewhat hallucinatory. Because so much foreign material, particularly South Asianand Chinese religious practices, have accumulated on top of Shinto, its difficult to sort

out original Shinto from its hybrid descendants. The cult of Amaterasu, the creator

goddess, suggests that Shinto before Buddhism was a strongly matriarchal relgion in a

strongly patriarchal culture. While most religions, including Hebraism and Chinesereligions, have their origins in goddess religions, Shinto is one of the few religions in a

patriarchal culture that did not abandon the overall form of a matriarchal religion. This

suggests that female shamanism was highly likely in Japan before the advent of

Buddhism, although there is no physical evidence for it (nor is there evidence for maleshamanism, eitherthere is only evidence for Shinto shamanism).

One can conclude little or nothing about the status of women in early Japan from the

haniwa figurines from the tumuli period. The only distinguishing feature between most

figurines labelled as male and those labelled as female are that the male figurines

represent some economic function while the "female" figurines are more abstract. Theseare more likely modern impositions; figurines representing hunters or othe economic

functions could very well be female figurines, though we naturally assume, from our own

modern perspective, that they're male.

In the early centuries AD, the Japanese ruling classes became powerful enough to build

large tomb-mounds, called tumuli (this is Latin, in Japanese, they're called kofun ). Thebest picture we have of early Japanese life is afforded by the small clay figurines, called

haniwa that were deposited in these tumuli. Their nature or purpose is unknown. Are they

magic? Departing gifts? Needless to say, they provide a valuable picture of earlyJapanese life, particularly the haniwa of houses. The figurines also represent men and

women, and the earliest haniwa do not make a clear distinction between men and women.

However, as haniwa artists developed their art, the human figurines became more

differentiated and far more male figurines are produced than female figurines. The malefigurines are highly differentiatedmany of them represent clear occupations, such as

farmer, hunters, or farmers. The female haniwa , however, tend to remain

undifferentiated, which implies that in the early Japanese imagination, women do notoccupy a range of economic activities. This was probably not the reality. In all cultures,

women occupy a huge variety of economic functions but are often culturally imagined as

occupying a small range of occupations or existing outside the economic sphere. Thedevelopment of haniwa suggest that the early Japanese did not strongly differentiate men

from women in the earliest AD centuries, but slowly developed a cultural imagination

that configured men in a variety of concrete social functions while limiting women to

abstract or socially non-representational roles.


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By the Nara period, writing in Japan had become common in the upper classes,

but writing and literature was largely in Chinese and dominated by men. In the earlyeighth century, the emperor's court ordered a series of fudoki , or geographical

descriptions, to be drawn up describing each region. These fudoki give us a tremendous

picture of the overall layout of early Japan, but contain little or nothing about everydaylife or about women. The only pictures we have, however, of Japanese not in the upper

classes are from these fudoki and the portrait they draw implies that economic functions

were divided among everyday Japanese according to gender but that the family was moreor less egalitarian.

Court life, however, seemed a different matter. While the Chinese histories talk about

an Empress Himiko in the second century A.D., the only comparable figure in the Naraperiod or slightly before was Empress Suiko (reigned 592-628 A.D.) a few decades

before the Nara period. Even so, she handed the business of running the government over

to her son, Prince Mumayado, who took the title Shotoku. Still, she made important

decisions, such as declaring war against Silla, a kingdom in Korea.

While we know little of early Shinto and women's roles in the religion, the introductionof Buddhism certainly introduced a pervasive and dramatic gender inequality in religious

life. In the Buddhism imported from China, women were deeply mistrusted; many

Buddhists believed that salvation was out of the question for women. The Buddhist

monastic communities were entirely male and Buddhist monks only accepted males astheir students. The only Buddhist life available to women was that of seclusion as a nun;

such a life, however, deprived the female aspirant of the human community that is the

cornerstone of Buddhist life and philosophy. We don't know how women specificallyresponded to Buddhism and its pronounced gender inequality; the women of the Heian

period, however, would forge a distinctly separate Buddhist community and

understanding.Literary activity in the late Yamato and Nara periods is overwhelmingly dominated by

men. Even though the late Heian and medieval Japanese colllections of poetry would be

significantly represented, if not dominated outright, by women, the Manyoshu isdepressingly bare of female poets. This, for the kokugakushu (Japanese or Nativist

scholars) of the Tokugawa period, would be the sterling highlight of the Manyoshu

collection. For the Tokugawa kokugakushu , the poetry of the Manyoshu represented a

poetic style they called "manly" (masuraoburi ) as opposed to the "femininity"(tawayameburi ) of the later collections, such as the Heian Kokinshu ). This opinion came

to be adopted in Japanese literary history from the Tokugawa period onwards and was

inherited by Western literary scholars as well. To this day, most Japanese and Westernliterary scholars consider the Manyoshu to be Japan's greatest collection of poetry.

However, through most of Japanese literary history, the "feminine" collections of poetry

were considered the great literature of Japan.

In magnificent opposition to the paucity of material on Nara women, the Heian

period represents a virtual window into the lives, both material and interior, of the court

women of ancient Japan. Not only are women discussed extensively in literature and


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history, but they overwhelmingly own the literary landscape of the Heian period. While

there are significant and magnificent male writers, the great literature of the Heian period

was written by women: poetry, tales, and literary diaries. More importantly than anythingelse, these literary works focus ruthlessly on the interior life of their characters, whether

they're male of female. Because of the relentless interior focus, we have a better idea

about the subjective life of women and the subjective experience of gender by both menand women in ancient Japan than we do any other culture before the modern period.

Despite this, we know little of women's lives outside the upper classes. At most, only acouple thousand individuals belonged to the upper classes in some respect. Outside the

imperial court, the upper classes moved in very small numbers in relative isolation. Even

though we have access to the subjective experience of women in a way unprecedented for

early cultures, we are still only accessing the barest of minorities.

Of all the literary forms that were dominated by women in the Heian period, including

poetry and the novel, the most important for understanding women's communities,

experience, and place in society are the nikki, or literary diaries. These are not diaries inour sense of the word, that is, daily accounts of one's thoughts and life, but rather literary

in nature and intended for distribution. They are, in fact, closer to our idea of anautobiography. They're composed after the events with a strong sense of how events

contribute to a final outcome. Since they're intended for distribution, it's unclear how

much of these diaries represent the literal truth and how much of these diaries are

fictional. In literary studies, the process of presenting an artificial version of yourself iscalled self-fashioning, and these diaries are usually more works of self-fashioning then

straight autobiography. Keep in mind that self-fashioning is not about lying about

yourself: it's a combination of telling the truth, selectively telling the truth, adopting apose, and lying outright.

No two nikki are alike; the situations described by each woman and their response tothem all run a rich gamut of experience and understanding. For this reason, there's no

other way to present them except one by one. Cumulatively they give a portrait of female

life and women's communities across all ages and all roles, from youth to old age, fromcourtesan to grieving mother.

The Gossamer Years (Kagero Nikki). No other Heian diary explores the subjective

experience of a women's relationship with her husband than The Gossamer Years , whichdetails the unhappy life of an upper class woman married to Fujiwara no Kaneie (929-

990). The author, whose name we don't know since women were rarely if ever referred to

by their names in Heian court culture, is simply known as the Mother of Michitsuna andlived from 936 to 995. The diary is less of an account of the marriage then an account of

her own bitterness and unhappiness in what was probably a typical upper class Heian

marriage.

The Mother of Michitsuna considered herself in her diary to be unexceptional in

intelligence and looks (though others contemporary with her claim the opposite). The

diary begins with her love affair as a teenager with Kaneie and ends twenty years later.


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She not only suffered from his repeated absences, but bitterly resented his affairs with

other women which he, as other Heian nobles, carried out openly and frequently. While

male critics tend to emphasize that the Mother of Michitsuna is her own worst enemy, thediary chronicles the sheer loneliness of an upper class woman in a standard marriage. The

Mother of Michitsuna is well aware of romances and love stories circulating in the court

and chronicles how the fiction of the time does not correspond to the reality. For thereality of life for most married upper class women was loneliness; the cult of love in

Heian Japan stressed extra-marital affairs and the sheer tedium of a cloistered life

amplified the resentment towards one's spouse.

The Sarashina Diary (Sarashina Nikki). In distinction to the lonely and bitter interior

life chronicled by the Mother of Michitsuna, the writer of the Sarashina diary chronicles a

young life consumed by romances and their fanciful plots. The author tells of a life fromthe age of twelve (1020 A.D.) to middle age that spans her home life to her service at

court. This life, however, is spent reading monogatari , or tales, most of which are

romances. Her whole life in the narrative goes by in a whirl of romance stories; she

seems to have spent every hour of every day reading them. Of all the tales she reads, theone that most consumes her is The Tale of Genji ; she imagines herself to be the character

Ukifune in that novelthis character suffers tragically from love. She doesn't seem tohave been bothered by men at all; most court diaries tell of strings of males and their

unwanted attentions.

Aside from the whirl of romance stories, the diary faithfully accounts enormousnumbers of dreams the author had. The world she lives in is, quite literally, a world of

dreams and fictions. The author, however, is aware of this and the diary is meant to be a

tale of religious conversion. She eventually learns the disparity between reality anddreams and, through this, learns the truths about Buddhism. The diary, then, is meant to

be a warning about the perils and seductions of the world.

Even though the diary has a specific argument, it gives us a valuable insight into the

subjective experience of gender among upper class women. For the most part, diary

writers see little contrast between the monogatari circulating at court and their own livesof adventure in the court. The Sarashina Diary , along with The Gossamer Years ,

however, draws a dramatically different picture. Both writers turn to the monogotari as

refuges from the world: the Mother of Michitsuna turns to them to relieve her ponderous

boredom and sadness and the author of the Sarashina Nikki turns to them as the sole basisof her identity. For both writers, these monogotari , which were at the heart of women's

culture in the Heian period, are seen as precipitating disappointment and sadness.

The Izumi Shikibu Diary (Izumi Shikibu Nikki). The tone and purpose of Izumi

Shikibu's autobiography couldn't be farther from The Gossamer Years or the Sarashina

Nikki . Izumi Shikibu was a famous author in her own time and notorious for her affairs.The diary is more similar to the monogotari : it chronicles a romance beween the author

and Prince Atsumichi in the year 1003. Eventually, Atsumichi installed her in his own

household, but the diary emphasizes the sadness of the affair. More than anything else,

the Izumi Shikibu Nikki shows how powerfully fiction and fictional narrative could be


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translated into everyday life and understanding. For Izumi Shikibu, the romances

provided a model for living and understanding gender relations; for the Mother of

Michitsuna and the author of the Sarashina Nikki , these romances were a source ofunreality and unahappiness.

The Murasaki Shikibu Diaray (Murasaki Shikibu Nikki). The two best accounts that we

have of women's communities in Heian Japan are Murasaki Shikibu's diary and SeiShonagon's Pillow Book > The Murasaki Shikibu Nikki , written by the same author of

The Tale of Genji , considered to be Japan's greatest work of literature, also is rich in the

subjective experience of gender relations in the Heian court.

As in the novel, the life in the Murasaki Shikibu Nikki centers around beauty and

courtliness. However, unlike the characters in the Genji , the male courtiers she describes

are drunken and gluttonous. While the Genji men are courtly, the men in the imperialcourt she moved in were clumsy and loutish. Rather than sending love poetry, they make

lewd jokes; rather than gracefully seducing, they drunkenly mash women and pull up

their skirts while singing dirty songs.

Even though she was a famous figure in her time, the portrait she draws of women's

communities shows she felt little support or love from the women surrounding her. Themost frequent fear in court is gossip, by both men and women, and Murasaki Shikibu

describes most of her relationships with women as rival relationships. She herself claims

to be unbearably lonely simply because she can't find companionship at her level. While

she is close to the empress Saisho, the women's community that she describes isstandoffish and hostile. In part, this was due to her own standoffishness, for which she

was famous, but it was also a part of the women's community at the Heian court since it

was composed of a diversity of women from a diversity of ranks and backgrounds.

The Poems of the Mother of the Ajari Jojin (Jojin Ajari Haha no Shu). We end this

survey with a diary chronicling the last years of a woman's life, a collection (Japanese:shu ) of poems and narratives describing their composition by an eighty year old woman

in 1071. The diary tells us of the great-granddaughter of the Emperor Daigo, which

makes the author the highest ranking Heian woman writer that we know of.

However, like the Mother of Michitsuna, the Mother of the Ajari Jojin chronicles what

she feels is the most unhappy life ever lived. While the Mother of Michitsuna suffered

over the loneliness of her unhappy marriage, the Mother of the Ajari Jojin tells ofsuffering wrought by an ungrateful son. She writes in her diary that her old age was made

bearable after the death of her husband with a dream that her two sons would be at her

death-bed reading holy sutras. When her son, Jojin, went to China to study TendaiBuddhism, she becomes consumed by her grief, hurt and disappointment.

Like all the diaries that preceded it, the Jojin Ajari Haha no Shu , is the story ofloneliness and disappointment. The loneliness, however, is that of age and abandonment.

Throughout the narrative, the theme is the nature of the relationship between mother and

son. The Mother of Ajari Jojin explores all the ramifications of that relationship from

birth to death and the inevitable bitterness and disappointment that relationship entails.


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Like the Mother of Michitsuna, the Mother of Ajari Jojin has to come to terms with male

abandonment and, like the Mother of Michitsuna, finds no answers in literature or

religion.

While the introduction of Buddhism irrevocably altered the Japanese religious,

literary, and visual imagination, it also irrevocably installed a pervasive genderinequality. For the Buddhism that the Japanese imported from China ruthlessly separated

the sexes; it's not unfair to say that Buddhism in its earliest forms is overwhelmingly

male-centered. As with the Chinese, Japanese Buddhists excluded women from most ofBuddhist life, including the monasteries, the priesthood, and rituals. Heian court women,

however, forged their own unique Buddhist practices within this atmosphere, including

the worship of Fugen and the spread of Amidism.

Fugen

It's unquestionable that women's religious life centered on the bodh

Istoria Japoniei - Engleza

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