Ch 4 - Koryo and the Khitan

China in Miniature

After modeling their capital and government after that of the Tang Chinese, the Japanese diverged from their earlier cultural identity with China and mainland Asia and began developing a culture uniquely their own.

From its earliest history through the beginning of the eighth century, Japan borrowed and adopted a great deal of its culture and methods of governance from mainland Asia. During the seventh and eighth centuries, China's Tang Dynasty sat as the richest, most powerful and technologically advanced nation in Asia, if not in the world. Many of the cultural, political, philosophic, and religious characteristics of this dynamic nation found their way to Japan, where they took root.

The Japanese emperor system, tenno-sei, an institution that touched all aspects of life in Japan, emerged out of the long, continuous line of hereditary emperors stretching back to the seventh century BC. The emperor, tenno, ruled Japan as the "heavenly sovereign." Deemed a god in human form, he was seen as the bridge between the divine spirits and base humans, the absolute ruler of Japan. According to legend and tradition, Japan's emperor ruled by the "mandate of heaven" and by his lineal descent from Amaterasu, the Shinto Sun Goddess. During the earliest periods of Japanese history, the emperor's role was closely tied to agriculture, and many of the rituals for which he was responsible were intended to insure the fertility of the crops, successful harvests, and continuance of the cosmic cycle.

Creation of the tenno-sei provided the Japanese social and national unity and continuance of the imperial dynasty. The emperor was essential to maintaining the well being of society and state through his magical powers to converse with the kami, but it was considered inappropriate for the emperor to concern himself with the secular business of government. By the sixth century, the emperor's function became almost entirely ceremonial in nature. Most power for running the state was given to ministers of the tenno-sei, the men who wielded effective political power in Japan. The emperor's symbolic divinity was kept, even enforced, to incite loyalty to the decisions of the imperial house, regardless of who actually made them. This pattern of rule persisted throughout most of Japanese history.

Beneath this singularly unique ruler, the Japanese created an elaborate central government patterned after the Tang Chinese system, the most complex and highly developed governmental system the world had yet seen. The Japanese even borrowed the architecture of the great Tang capital city of Changan as a model for their own capital. By the late seventh century, Changan was a sprawling metropolis. Its population of close to 1 million people lived within a great rectangular city that covered some thirty square miles surrounded by massive earthen walls. In 710, the Japanese built their first permanent capital in order to favor the new central government. Situated on the on the Yamato Plain at the modern city of Nara, the new capital was a close imitation of the mighty Tang capital at Changan.

The introduction of Buddhism into Japan during the mid-sixth century brought a new addition to Japan's growing cultural identity. Although the commoners did not understand or appreciate its complexities, the pro-Buddhist faction at the Yamato court quickly adopted the new religion as its own. Buddhism never became as established in the provinces as it did in the capital district, where the new religion reigned supreme. Beautiful Buddhist temples were built at government expense in and around the capital at Nara and the royal court and local aristocracy sponsored impressive Buddhist ceremonies. Despite a few open conflicts with adherents of the native Shinto religion, Buddhism soon established a niche for itself and the two religions not only managed to co-exist, but even came to complement one another. More than a few Japanese emperors retired from the burdensome duties of a secular and religious leader to the serene life of a Buddhist monk.

From their monasteries on Mount Hiei and Mount Koya near the capital, Buddhist monks developed new forms of esoteric Buddhism that became a vital force in Japanese culture. From their belief that anything that had beauty revealed the truth of Buddha, they encouraged the cultivation of such artistic skills as painting, music, and gesture. The beautiful artwork produced by the Hiei monks contributed to the religion's remarkable popularity in the imperial court and had a strong influence on the court's cultural evolution. Japan's poetic, literary and visual arts can trace their roots to the Buddhist monks of Mount Hiei and Mount Koya.

A number of the great Buddhist temples and monasteries built in and around the capital at Nara were architectural masterpieces that housed some of the finest achievements in Chinese and Japanese artistry and craftsmanship. By the end of the eighth century, the growing political influence exerted by the large Buddhist monasteries around Nara reached such a level that, in order to protect the emperor's revered position, the capital was moved to Nagaoka in 784. Moving away from the monasteries did nothing to diminish their growing power. The problem of politically ambitious and even militant monasteries remained a central issue for Japanese governments for centuries. Plagued by Buddhist politics and inter-clan struggles over succession to the throne, Emperor Kammu moved the capital once again in 794. Located some 30 miles north of Nara, the new capital at Heian-kyo, the city of "peace and tranquility" (modern Kyoto), was a grandiose site laid out as a Chinese-style city within a rectangle measuring 3 by 3.5 miles. Heian-kyo remained the capital of Japan for the next one thousand years.

In their attempt to remold their nation into a miniature version of Tang China, Japanese scholars diligently codified complex legal codes based on Chinese models. They even attempted to adopt the labyrinthine Chinese systems of land ownership and taxation, systems that not even the Chinese could completely master. Tang China was an urbanized and industrial culture of nearly sixty-five million people living in relative prosperity. Japan however, was a loose confederacy of only about five million people. Except for the capital city of Heian-kyo and its immediate surroundings, Japan was still sparsely populated and highly undeveloped. Clans ties remained very strong in outlying areas of the country where the spirit of local autonomy was far too deeply felt and communications far too difficult and imperfect to permit any centralized government to directly rule the provinces through a capital-based bureaucracy.

Given Japan's relatively small and loosely organized state structure, its early government was a tremendously overdeveloped organization. Even in China, with its much longer tradition of centralized bureaucratic rule, the cumbersome system worked imperfectly at best and tended to collapse every few decades. Nonetheless, the Japanese imperial government maintained six thousand employees of the imperial government, four thousand of whom administered the imperial house. This massive system seemed to work to some degree in the capital district and in localities held directly under the control of the Yamato clan, but in the more remote parts of the country it never took hold. As a result, the imperial government spent the majority of its time concerned with court issues alone and spent little time involved with the day-to-day governance of outlying areas.

The development of a central government under the emperor proved to be a much easier task than recreating a Chinese-style provincial administration to rule Japan's sixty-six provinces. Borrowing heavily from Tang China's government, most of the administrative power in Japan was vested in the Council of State, with specific functions relegated to a set of eight ministries beneath the council. Japan's most powerful clans vied for a position on the Council of State, believing they could control the emperor, even the entire government from such a post. The court replaced regional chieftains in the provinces with government officials carrying impressive titles to administer each province. Many of the appointees considered the job a demotion from the traditional aristocracy. They were not at all pleased with leaving the comfort, pleasures and power of the court. It did not take long before they began delegating their authority to subordinates, local aristocrats with a much greater interest in building a local power base for themselves. As a result, provincial control by the central government was never very strong.

Japan began slowly diverging from its earlier cultural identity with China and mainland Asia near the middle of the ninth century. While China's prestige remained great, the Japanese were no longer as anxious to learn from China or to readily admit that China's civilization was superior to their own. In a profound shift of emphasis, the imperial court began developing a culture independent of the Chinese. Instead of borrowing new cultural elements from China and Asia, they began to assimilate and transform those elements into something uniquely Japanese.

The greatest of these transformations was in the role and scope of the central government. By the tenth century, the imperial government in Heian-kyo had become a totally ineffective organization, if not irrelevant. Increasing demands for tax revenues did to Japanese farmers the very same thing that happened to peasants in China and Koryo under the same demands. It resulted in the impoverishment of farmers who were forced to sell their land and become tenants of larger, wealthier land owners. Many wealthy aristocrats and the Buddhist monasteries managed to establish their lands as tax exempt property. This phenomenon became so widespread that by the tenth century the national domain had virtually disappeared. When it went, so too did the economic basis for the Chinese form of centralized government;  tax revenue. With the state's coffer's nearly empty, provincial government agencies, which had never been strong to begin with, withered away almost completely, leaving little in their wake except imposing administrative titles.

Japan's once impressive government structure became largely an empty shell, literally a massive paper organization with few working personnel, little money, and dramatically reduced functions. While the court nobility kept their high-sounding titles and worked to maintain the pomp and ceremony of court life, Japan's complex ruling system was virtually abandoned. Centralized government simply ceased to exist in most of Japan. The great estates, freed from encroachments by tax collectors and government agents, became small autonomous domains, in essence "mini-states" within the hollow framework of the old imperial government. These semi-independent political units supported themselves through income from their own estates and, through either family government or monastery administration, exercised many government functions.

In the mid-ninth century, the Fujiwara family ranked as the most dominant family line in the royal court. With a heritage that stretched back over three centuries, they controlled a large number of estates throughout Japan and enjoyed an income probably far greater than any other family, including the imperial family itself. On numerous occasions after 814, excess members were cut off from the imperial line and given their own family names. The Minamoto (also called Genji) received their family name from Tsunemoto, the son of Prince Teijun, the sixth son of Emperor Seiwa (858-876). The Taira (also called Heike) were descendants of Prince Katsurabara, the son of Emperor Kammu (781-806). Blocked from achieving high office at court, these men went into the provinces in order to make their fortunes as provincial officials or estate proprietors or managers. Surrounded with the aura of imperial descent and carrying the prestige of the imperial court, they soon formed a top layer in the provincial aristocracy over and above the descendants of the existing provincial clan leadership.

The Minamoto and Taira clans took control of vast amounts of land, enabling them to support and maintain large standing armies in the provinces. The Minamoto dominated most of eastern Japan, while the Taira clan held sway in both eastern and western Japan. Faced with the growing power of the provincial aristocracy, particularly the Minamoto and the Taira, the Fujiwara began shrewdly maneuvering to control what seemed to matter most - the emperor, since at the time all final power in the land resided in him.

The Fujiwara built its unchallenged dominance at the capital through intrigue, skillful political manipulation and intermarriage with the imperial family. The head of the family would marry his daughter to a young emperor, making her the empress. By the time her son reached the age when he could ascend the throne, the reigning emperor, usually bored with the seemingly endless ceremonies required by his dual role as a secular and religious leader, was easily persuaded to abdicate and retire to a simpler life. This left the Fujiwara girl as an empress dowager and made her father, the powerful head of a large and wealthy court family, grandfather of the new child emperor. Through just such tactics, the Fujiwara gained control of the imperial court in 858.

The dominance of the Fujiwara meant that no imperial prince would ever sit as regent, sessho, for a child emperor. In 880, the Japanese regent Fujiwara Mototsune established the new post of chancellor, kampaku, through which he acted as regent for four adult emperors in succession until his death in 891. Appointment to these two alternating positions, as well as Prime Minister and most other high offices in the imperial government and the important provinces became the hereditary right of members of the Fujiwara clan. Successive generations of the northern branch of the Fujiwara clan continued to completely overshadow the emperors. They not only became the real holders of power in the imperial government, but they became the openly recognized trend-setters in taste and fashion at the royal court. Although control over the empty shell of the Chinese-style government became progressively less significant as power slipped away from the imperial court, the Fujiwara, despite occasional challenges by the imperial family, maintained their domination over the Heian-kyo court for exactly a millennium.