Enter the Mononofu (lecture based on Totman, pp.107~113, 92~97)
We now begin to turn our attention to the rise of warrior class, the so-called bushi or samurai, as the dominant holders of political power on the Japanese archipelago. Before we do so, I want to revisit a note of caution: history does not unfold in tidy sequences, with clear-cut beginnings and ends. We’ve traced the rise of the ritsuryo state and its decline or attenuation, but the privileged elements that constituted the core of that political order—the imperial court, the aristocracy, powerful temples and shrines—did not disappear or simply cede power to the warriors. In fact, the rise of the warriors as significant power-holders is closely tied to the lingering power, wealth, and influence of the ritsuryo elite into the 13th century.
So, we will focus our attention on events and persons from the late-12th century, the processes behind those events and personalities both predated and outlived them.
Change that prefigured the ascendance of the warriors:
- Local Control
Further comment on the weakening of central control (the main conceit of the imperial bureaucracy) seems unnecessary at this point, but the corresponding strengthening of local control requires note because the way it occurred contributed to other changes.
During late Heian, as more and more rural localities were begin designated shoen, the holders of these new shoen confronted the need to identify their property, assess its productive capacity, and determine who would oversee the collection and delivery of rent, as well as maintain order. To do so, they conducted cadastral surveys that identified property boundaries and recorded information on acreage, yield, and resident population. This information was organized to form standard units of account known as myo. They put such myo under the control of local men of influence, whom they referred to as myoshu. The binding contractual document, a myoshushiki, specified the rent that a myoshu was to forward in return for the holder’s recognition of his perquisites of office, any other land holdings he might claim, and such other aspects of his local standing as seemed appropriate. In the Kinai region, closest to the imperial capital, myoshu tended to be small proprietors whose assigned parcels of land averaged about 2.5 hectares (~6 acres), but in outlying regions, such as Kyushu and the Kanto, a myoshuholding might encompass 20 hectares (~50 acres) or more.
Myoshuwere thus people of local consequence whose status and function were sanctioned from above through the formation of shoen. Being local residents, they were in positions to open new land if it was available, discourage cultivators from absconding, recruit cultivators to till vacant land, and improve agronomic practice—in short, to improve productivity. Doing so became worthwhile for them once land rents were set, which assured that at least part of any future gains would stay with the locals.
Moreover, periods of elite disorder, especially after 1150s (as we will see), provided these myoshu with opportunities to maneuver, and the more successful among them gradually became local magnates whose substantial residence compounds included outbuildings, storehouses, protective fences, in-house servants, and satellite servant households. During times of turmoil, these servants could function as fighting men for any myoshu who was inclinded toward military means, found he had little choice, or was serving as the retainer of a more powerful warrior leader in the vicinity.
2. Rural Production
So, during the later Heian period operational control of the periphery (or hinterlands) gradually moved into the hands of myoshu or such other influential local figures as resident officials. As that occurred, more and more villagers found themselves encouraged or pressured to cultivate land more intensively, put nearby scraps of land to use, double crop in southerly regions, work more upland as dry field and orchard, and keep fields in production season after season. This intensified agronomy spurred the development of new hamlets and an increase in hamlet size. Local leaders welcomed the larger, more productive settlements as did villagers, for whom greater numbers mean greater security against bandits, marauding pirates and pillaging warriors during the increasingly frequent periods of turmoil.
A number of changes to agronomic technique contributed to the slowly growing rural output. Regular tillage of more land was made possible by greater utilization of fertilizer material, mainly ashes, mulch, and manure. The last was becoming available because cavalry mounts were proliferating and draft animals were being used more widely. Improvements in iron-smelting technique provided more and better tools. Irrigation works expanded and water wheels for lifting stream flow to new paddy fields came into more common use. More and better-adapted varieties of crops were grown. Most notable was a more hardy variety of rice that came from the continent, probably in the later 12th century, and which improved yield on inferior plots and during poor weather.
With these changes, output rose and society grew, empowering more people to challenge the established ruling elite’s claim to a monopoly of power and privilege. A larger pie, with a growing proportion of it beyond the control of the old elite; those who control that new productivity had little incentive to allow the old elite to take control.
3. Continental influence
In general terms, contacts with the Chinese continent had atrophied during the Heian period. As the example of the introduction of a new variety of rice suggests, however, contact did continue and some of it is relevant to our understanding of the transition to decentralized rule. Trade slowly developed between Japan and China, which Japan exporting large timbers, which were hauled from Kyushu to timber-starved China, and major import was Sung coins. They proved so convenient, despite official objections to their use, that during the 1220s resistance disappeared and their use became widespread. They also added to disorder in the realm, however, because the compactness and marvelous fungibility of coins, compared to most booty, encouraged piracy and banditry. Moreover, coins injected a new source of uncertainty into transactions and made the established elite more dependent on marketmen, who not only understood the mysteries of monetary process, but also were in position to provide, and hence to profit from trade. (A new source of wealth for a new strata).
4. Domestic trade
For most of the Heian period, as we’ve noted, changes in domestic economic arrangements did not undercut elite control of exchange because the favored few remained the main consumers of non-essentials as well as the overseers of much production. By the 12th century, however, some trends were beginning to undermine that control, one being the emergence of organized groups of artisans and skilled provisioners that became known as za.
Many Heian-period artisans functioned as house provisioners, directly providing goods and services to temples/shrine, aristocrats, and the imperial house itself. During the 12th century, which political tensions more acute, Heian in disarray, and provisioning evermore problematic, more and more of these elite institutions licensed specialized za to provide such diverse goods as reed mats, cloth, sewing needles, malt, lamp oil, charcoal, firewood, and lumber. The more successful of these provisioning groups expanded their roles as time passed, as when coins came into use, zamembers were optimally placed to exploit them.
The zagradually acquired an array of new customers thanks the proliferation of well-to-do local magnates, including myoshu, resident official in district and provincial offices, and local warrior leaders, thereby reducing their dependence on the privileged few of Heian. During the decades around 1200, the formation of the Kamakura bakufu, with its country-wide network of subordinate peacekeepers, provided za with yet more customers. By the thirteenth century za members were peddling in the hinterland, controlling sectors of the market, functioning as money lenders, and lobbying among the favored few to promote their interests and fight their rivals. And they were doing so with minimal regard for courtly interests or sensibilities.
5. Demography
Cumulatively, these trends meant that material production was rising; goods, services, and their providers were becoming more diverse, and exchange was growing more extensive. Contact among people across the realm was increasing, and villages were becoming larger, more numerous, and more densely settled. These developments appear to have altered the epidemiological enviroment, elevating small pox and measles pathogens to the status of endemic parasites of the human community. As such they gradually became, from the late 11th century onward, sources of habitual, non-lethal childhood disease rather than recurrent fatal epidemics of adulthood. This change in disease mortality smoothed over demographic trends, reducing the incidence of suddenly depopulated hamlets and abandoned land, and contributing to a renewal of overall population growth.
For generations, however, that growth was slow, erratic, and regionally unbalanced. Much of it occurred in outlying area, main the Kanto, but also the northeast (Tohoku) and Kyushu, where more land was still reclaimable, where woodland offered more resources, and where the elite’s capacity to commandeer new production was weaker. Even there, however, population increase was slowed by a series of weather-related crop failures that may be attributed to global climate perturbations of the day. Most notable were crop failures in western Japan that severely weakened Taira opponents of Yoritomo’s eastern insurgency during the early 1180s and , later, crop failures that affected the realm more broadly around 1230 and 1260.
Periodic demographic setbacks notwithstanding, the overall population did grow slowly, rising from 5 million or so around 700 to an estimated 7 million by 1200, and expanding more rapidly thereafter to perhaps 13 million by 1600. And because they slowly accelerating population growth was regionally imbalanced, it reduced over time the relative power of central Japan, the heartland of ritsuryo elite dominance, while strengthening the Kanto and helping sustain the breakaway potential of the northeast and Kyushu.
Changes of the day were thus undermining the geographical basis of the ritsuryoorder as well as its socioeconomic foundation. And fighting men were the ones most successfully turning these changes to advantage, in the process rising to political prominence.
Rise of the Bushi
The warrior class “emerged” long before the 13th century. Their rise, also, did not destroy the favored position of the ritsuryoelite. It did, however, constitute one of the many Heian-period developments that changed the way the classical aristocracy sustained itself. And it help lay the groundwork for eventual displacement of that aristocracy and its reduction to a symbolic remnant of old elegance whose residual political function was to help legitimate new ruling power.
One facet of the bushi’s evolution from a force supporting Fujiwara regents and retired emperors to one destructive of them was a gradual change in the social composition and character of the warrior population itself. The rising bushi of Heian are usually envisioned as a two-tier populace: a small upper stratum of men with paternal imperial ancestors, and a vastly larger lower stratum commonly sprung from local magnates of one sort or another. Unlike the upper stratum, these lesser bushi had little reason to support the favored few. As generations passed, moreover, the distinction between high-born and lesser bushiblurred, and changing interests blurred the bushi leadership’s commitment to the established order.
Already by the 1090s, the proliferating Minamoto seemed a threat to at least one Fujiwara observer, and from the 1160s onward Taira no Kiyomori’s incursions on aristocratic privilege severely eroded elite trust in bushi behavior. Then Minamoto no Yoritomo’s assertion of a permanent governing function for his bakufugovernment undermined the very basis for aristocratic faith in warriors as obedient subordinates. Unsurprisingly bushirepaid the growing aristocratic distrust and disdain with an elevated sense of their own worth. This changing mood was implicit in the emergence of the terms kuge and buke to distinguish the civil aristocrats of ritsuryotradition from the powerful warrior houses affiliated with the bakufu. As the two came to view each other as separate and dissimilar social groups, moreover, warriors developed an accompanying rhetoric of self-esteem that increasingly defined bukeas competent governing houses and kuge as cultured dandies of doubtful worth.
Even more threatening to the old order were the many other warriors, particularly those of pedestrian ancestry, who had fared less well and who felt alienated not only from the old ritsuryoelite but also from its bukecollaborators in the court-bakufu diarchy. Yoritomo’s victories during the 1180s, after all, were essentially the victories of one assemblage of warriors over rivals, most notably the Taira of Kiyomori but also diverse others situated all the way from Hakata to Hiraizumi. The victors acquired income rights, mainly in the form of shiki to shoen, many being gained at the expense of vanquished warriors. Subsequently the peace-keeping tasks of victors often put them at odds not only with the survivors of defeat but also with the many others who found avenues of advancement closed and means of support few. Those policing the peace referred to the many sorts who broke it as akuto, “evil bands,” and as decades passed, their numbers grew. By the later 13th century akuto had become a major element in civil disorder, a growing threat to diarchy and its beneficiaries.
By 1250, the buke leaders of diarchy saw themselves not as dutiful servants of an esteemed aristocratic ruling class but as the operators of a political order that accepted, as one of its tasks, the obligation to assure the perquisites of a bothersome, often feckless, but useful populace of civil aristocrats. Within that bushi group, however, cohesion was weak and the new regime’s personnel foundation was eroding badly. In its cobbled-up form as diarchy, the old ritsuryo order and its privileged elite were in parlous condition, while many in the warrior class ere primed for further, more radical change.
The blow by blow
We are roughly familiar with the dominance of Fujiwara regents from x to y and the subsequent rise of retired, or cloistered emperors in the mid-11th century. In order to set the stage for the events of the clash between the Taira and Minamoto warrior clans, we need to return to the rise of retired emperors as the primary power-brokers in the capital.
The mature Go-Sanjo, if you recall, exploited mistakes and misfortunes of the regent Fujiwara no Yorimichi to become emperor in 1068, and he then moved energetically to reassert imperial authority and trim the power of the regent family. Despite his untimely death five years later, his vigorous 20-year-old son Shirakawa was able to ascend the throne and control affairs. He adroitly pitted Fujiwara leaders againsts each other, employed officials of other ancestries, and after retiring in 1086 enlarged in insei, or cloistered rule, structure and expanded the number of shoen it administered. He undertood major construction projects in Heian and so dominated political life during the early-12thcentury, that a senior Fujiwara figure declared:
“the grandeur of the abdicated sovereign is equal to that of His Majesty, and at the present moment his abdicated sovereign is sole political master.”
Subsequently Shirakawa’s son Toba took command, rapidly adding shoento his holdings and using that fiscal foundation to sustain the splendor of imperial rule until his death. After his death, however, personal conflicts so poisoned the atmosphere in Heian that political life grew violent. The energetic retired emperor Go-Shirakawa lost control, and during the 1180s politics dissolved into all-out civil war, after which retired emperors never regained their pre-eminence.
In an immediate and visible sense this rule by retired emperors constituted a vigorous reassertion of imperial governance, even though the shoen mechanism of fiscal control and the dominant role of the insei institution itself constitution subversions of ritsuryogoverning procedure. It reaffirmed the authority of the imperial houseful and helped perpetuate the existing distribution of power and privilege.
In other, more basic ways, however, inseirule witnessed considerable decay in risturyogovernance. Most strikingly, the early-Heian arrangements in the northeast (Tohoku) grew shaky late in the Fujiwara heyday as rival magnates in the region jockeyed for position. In the 1050s warfare erupted, and during the 1080s a breakaway regional regime arose at Hiraizumi. For a century thereafter that entire region was lost to imperial rule.