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The Inadvertent Tourist: Reflections on Nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro

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Nostalgia is a search that is rooted in the exile from traditional cultural forms that is symptomatic of late capitalism.  In this search are all tourists in a global empire of signs, unmoored and reading images of other pasts and alternative pasts as floating signifiers which help us to appropriate romanticized experiences that never were.  Nostalgic memories are comforting, and are often triggered by encounters with nostalgic things – objects or ideas that bring to mind comforting memories.  Yet, nostalgia is often imagined and so does not have to be moored to real events.  The nostalgia in the film Tonari no Totoro is an excellent example of a series of signifiers that can easily be appropriated by viewers.  In particular, Tonari no Totoro provides all of us, as tourists, with multiple view points on the way to our own generalized longing for childhood and the countryside.  What is ironic about this film as a location for the generalized global nostalgic is that it does not have the ‘odorless’ or mukokuseki quality discussed by Joseph Tobin in the edited volume Pikachu’s Global Adventure – in fact, Tonari no Totoro is redolent of Japanese culture.  In effect we are touring an idealized place and period in Japan.  Still, the nostalgia that it creates works for non-Japanese audiences as well as Japanese.  This is primarily because the film is not about being Japanese.  It is a tour for those of us who live the experience of modern urban life and feel alienated from tradition and culture.  As tourists, we view Totoro in search of those traditions and cultures which we no longer have ourselves.

The sense of nostalgia that the movie creates is based on this feeling of exile from anchoring cultural forms and the desire to return to those forms.  As a tourist looks for hints of a ‘true culture’ in places where it can’t exist, tourists of nostalgia look for a personal past in a romanticized general human experience.  Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has defined nostalgia as dependent not on the reality of memory, but on a series of practices which read cultural images and code them instantly as the play of forms, the traces of interpretive strategies by which individuals craft meaning, rather than as acts participated in and remembered.[1]  According to Stewart, our viewing of cultural artifacts which we read as nostalgic is akin to the practices of tourists, the difference being only that the practice of nostalgia is a touring/looting of the global past, and of culture.  We collect images, signs, which we read as disassociated memories – floating signifiers of a romanticized, timeless past that we appropriate as a longing for connectedness in the disconnected cacophony of the marketplace of late capitalism.  Totoro works as nostalgia on this level.  In fact, Totoro is imbued with nostalgic devices from multiple memories, times, and even places.

The film even has a nostalgic frame of reference with which we can circumscribe our tour of Japan’s idealized past countryside and of Japanese childhood.  This frame is important for the feeling of nostalgia, because it creates a liminal space within which we can reinvent ourselves through the reformulation of our generalized memories.  That frame of reference has to do with time.  Tonari no Totoro was produced by Studio Ghibli in the 1980’s.  This was the time of bursting urbanization and the real estate bubble.  Roland Barthes went to Japan and declared it the world’s first truly post-modern society: an ’empire of signs’ by which he meant the urban world of Japan was a world of floating signifiers, disconnected from anything but the meaning invested in them at the moment by those relating to them.  But the film is set in the 1950’s.  The family does not own a car, and there is no telephone in the house.  The rural roads are surfaced with dirt, and the bus is an old 1950’s snub-nose.  There is no automation, so the bus must have a conductor at the door.  It is ironic that the period in which the movie is set, and the period in which it was actually made sit on opposite ends of the income-doubling policy of the Japanese government, and the period of high economic growth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the economic bubble of the 1980’s.  To watch the movie in this frame of reference is like looking backwards through a long tunnel to the beginning of a journey.  The film was made in the 1980’s urban world that Satsuki, Mei, and their father come from, and is about the rural, childhood, nostalgic world of the 1950’s.   For this reason, although it is a kind of convenience that children can get a thrill from viewing the movie, it seems that the content of Tonari no Totoro is coded for consumption by adults.

These adult consumers of Tonari no Totoro are tourists of the countryside.  The countryside presented in the movie is Japan’s inaka in the 1950’s, before the period of high growth and income doubling.  But it can stand for a generalized countryside, outside of modern urban life, simply because it is the countryside.  The journey of Satsuki and Mei, and their father to the old house at the beginning of the movie can be read as a migration from the modern city to the “unchanging” countryside, and is analogous to the nostalgic journey undertaken by the audience watching the film.  The house they move into is old, and ready to fall down.  It looks very much like a Meiji-era western style farmhouse, and that is no surprise, since producer Hayao Miyazaki has admitted a “nostalgia” for what he has called “pseudo-Western-style buildings.”[2]  The fact that the house is in terrible condition, and that it is probably haunted, all make Satsuki and Mei a bit scared, and somewhat excited.  The very oldness of the house, and the fact that it has been made home by soot sprites makes it at once a place of apprehension, and of magical comfort for the two main characters.  All of these things are a part of its existing in the countryside.  They are also signs of the haunting which consumers of the film read into their own immediate experience, as they can draw up their own nostalgia for the countryside through the ‘ghosts’ of the film characters,  and the quality of dreams that is so common in the world of Japanese anime.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the way in which Japanese culture adopted the Tales of Tōno, an early 20th century attempt at recording the folk stories of the Japanese countryside before it disappeared through urbanization and westernization.   Author Marilynn Ivy has found that the social process of popularizing the Tales of Tōno involved the experience of an unusual (virtually indecipherable) dialect of Japanese that came to be associated with the inaka, or countryside, along with a kind of fascination with the primitive and almost brutal nature of the stories, and the simplicity (Ivy often reads it as poverty) of life in the Tōno region.  But, as she notes about the idea of hometown, or furusato, the existence of  Tōno as an idealized, sentimentalized referent for a Japan that has passed into history and a “Japaneseness” that has somehow been lost in the mad rush of modern development was only possible through the viewing of Tōno from afar.  Those to whom a place is actually home do not need to refer to that place as the place of their origin.  As Stewart noted, the nostalgia is not for a real experienced past, but a practice that calls up the trace of that past that exists within its absence in a scene drawn from a parallel experience in a foreign culture. The same is true for urban Japanese looking for a sense of their cultural origins – those for whom Tōno culture is a part of daily existence do not think of it as more than their daily routine.  Those who look from afar for signs of traditional culture, though, see Tōno as a place where traditional culture is performed on a daily basis, and adopt the Tōno culture as a sign of their own lost moorings to earlier Japanese cultural authenticity.[3]  Miyazaki, by showing the traditional trappings of the Japanese countryside, including the rice fields worked by hand by family groups of farmers, the natural rhythms of the countryside (time in the movie is marked exclusively by weather, and consists of months as the smallest unit), mountain shrines, old trees, dirt roads, and old-style vehicles probably obsolete even by the 1950’s is calling up the ghosts of viewers’ pasts by showing them the ‘ghosts’/characters in the film, and the spectral landscape which they can haunt.  For foreign viewers this constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the scene of supposed Japanese cultural nostalgia, and recall the nostalgic past that exists through its absence in the scene being watched.  That is, they are touring the episodes in Totoro and assigning meaning that they wish to assign – a nostalgia for nostalgia.

These tourists of the countryside, though, are also tourists of childhood.  As tourists seek to become temporarily, vicariously, members of the culture they are visiting, but must always remain on the outside, viewers to this movie can relive childhood through Satsuki and Mei, but can always and easily return to their adult world.  Once again, it is the absence of child-ness which allows these viewers to imagine their own childhood through the main characters of the film.  The nostalgia for childhood that this movie evokes is complex and provides many opportunities through multiple layers of signs for viewers/consumers to appropriate for the purpose of reading a generalized nostalgia of their own experience onto it.  First, the simple fact of having been a child in or before the 1980’s – the scenes of outdoor play, the excitement of exploring a countryside wonderland, and the idea of walking to school with friends all can be appropriated by adult viewers as generalized memories of childhood.  In addition to the basic relation that adult viewers might make to the characters, the use of film techniques to emphasize characters’ feelings and situations is masterfully done in order to create a sense of sympathy, which can also often trigger nostalgia.  Frequent close ups of Mei and Satsuki in intense emotional situations, as when the film cuts to a shot of Satsuki’s beat-up feet, bruised and blistered from running in sandals for hours, or a close-up of the goat that tries to take Mei’s ear of corn lead us to recognize the desperation of both characters at crucial points in the narrative, and to relate through the characters’ facial expressions to their own childhood experiences of pleasure, pain, fear, and excitement.

Second, the plot of the movie is driven by the childhood fears that go with moving to a new place, to the idea of a haunted house, the difference in dialect and behavior between country and urban people, and the foreignness of the countryside.  I have noted before how all of this is similar to the journey taken by the audience in the process of viewing the movie.  Further, a kind of vicarious titillation at re-experiencing the pain and fear of a child whose parent is not well helps us to explain the overdone nature of the characters emotions of fear for their mother.  The vivid sequences of Totoro flying, and the cat bus parting the woods give a sense of the wonder and mystery of the world that exists when one is a child.  The clear linkage between the blowing wind that makes Satsuki drop the firewood she is carrying on the first night in the new house, and the inability of the adults to see anything but wind when Satsuki and Mei pass them riding in the cat bus provides adult viewers with a gateway into the magic of the world of children, as does the way in which Mei first discovers Totoro.  This movie provides an unambiguous opportunity to temporarily return to a generalized childhood.  This invitation works on so many levels of consciousness, it is difficult to refuse.

In fact, there are also some very specific elements involved in the movie that provide nostalgia that could be related directly to the personal experience of some viewers.  For instance, the movie itself evolved from a 1970’s era television anime by the same producers (Takahata and Yamazaki) called Pandakopanda, the art and storyline of which is very similar to Totoro, though the main character is a panda.  Adults who viewed the original TV series will find Totoro to be quite a nostalgic experience, with a similar cast and art reminiscent of the Pandakopanda series.[4]  When they watch Totoro, it is entirely possible that they will be transported back to memories of life when they watched Pandakopanda as children, even though the story of Totoro has nothing to do with their memories.  Nostalgia, then, allows us to fill space between the film and our own suspension of disbelief in the reality of animated characters with personal experience and memories.  These memories need no direct relation to what we are watching.  They can be triggered by the situation on-screen.  Watching, we recognize a situation analogous to our own that constitute the memories of an unknown other.  We transfer our nostalgia to the scene we are witnessing, relating ourselves to the characters, and filling in the interstices of the character’s experience and the situation we are witnessing with our own memories.  By giving the character our own memories and thoughts, we appropriate the character, and so inhabit the character as ourselves within the scenes of the movie.  This process of nostalgia-creation is what makes Tonari no Totoro so successful, even in an international context, and even without deodorizing.

In this way, a large part of the success of nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro is the fact that the main characters, Satsuki and Mei, are young girls (shoujo), yet their childhood experience stands for the childhood experience of all viewers.  Shoujo are commonly androgynous in appearance, and that is certainly the case with Satsuki, whose hair is short, and somewhat unkempt, and who, despite her skirt, frequently looks like a boy.  Satsuki’s androgyny is also reflective of the Japanese popular aesthetic of the bishonen – loosely translatable as the beautiful young boy, who is also androgynous, and who exhibits characteristics that are sometimes more relevant to female behavior than male, such as easy tears, smooth, feminine facial features, and relationships with other characters that are non-sexual in nature, but show much caring from the heart.  Both Mei and Satsuki are constructed such that they are clearly female, and yet their differences with males are somewhat effaced.  Satsuki is clearly somewhat of a ‘tomboy’ – willing and able to play games with the boys, and not shy about sticking her tongue out at her classmate and neighbor Kanta when he bothers her.  But she is also distinctly female.  She carries Mei at the bus stop while waiting to give an umbrella to her father.  She makes bento lunches for everyone in her family in the absence of her mother, and she is clearly flattered by her mother’s comment, during the hospital visit, that her hair is just the same as her mother’s was when she was a child.  Satsuki’s foil in this role is the coarsely male character of Kanta, whose stereotypical male behavior sets off the androgynous Satsuki as female.  Satsuki’s curiosity is combined with courage, as in the scene in which she charges up the stairs despite her fear of the ‘dust bunnies’ living in the attic, and takes a look around before opening the window.  She clearly has motherly instincts. She is willing to run for hours searching for Mei, despite the bruises, dirt, and blisters on her feet.  But she can be aggressive like a boy in scenes like the one in which she stops the motorcycle by jumping in front of it.  As an androgynous female, Satsuki is effective as a kind of ‘every child’ with whom both males and females can relate.

Along with that fact, the unmediated way in which Satsuki and Mei, two urban children relocated to the countryside, take in life in their new surroundings can remind parents of a romanticized childhood self.  The pain of the possibility of mother’s death, along with the thrill of flying with Totoro, and of participating in a magical tree raising ceremony, however much it might be a dream, can lead to a sensation of longing for the unproblematized experience of a child experiencing life for the first time.  In this way, as Stewart says, adults watching Tonari no Totoro become tourists of an experience that they cannot have had, but from which they can code a nostalgia for a generalized experience of childhood and feast on the longing that such an imaginary provides.

The movie Tonari no Totoro, then, is itself an act of nostalgia.  It provides a space where adults and many children can find traces of a past that is less than a memory, and therefore, common to all.  Satsuki and Mei act as signs that we read as ourselves, as bakemono tour guides taking us away from the busy, urban, modern life that we live to a generalized mythical countryside in which we find ourselves, once more, children –  not the children we were, but the children we want to have been.

[1] Stewart, Kathleen. “Notalgia – a Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1988): 229.

 

[2] Ryoko Toyama, trans. “Interview:  Miyazaki on Sen to Chihiro No Kamikakushi.” Animage, no. May (2001).

 

[3] Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing : Modernity, Phantasm, Japan.Chicago:University ofChicago Press, 1995.

[4] Niskanen, Eija. “Untouched Nature, Mediated Animals, in Japanese Anime.” Wider Screen, no. 1 (2007), http://www.widerscreen.fi/2007/1/untouched_nature_mediated_animals_in_japanese_anime.htm.

 

Ancient Japan

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Japan and Korea are interesting cases in the World History. Both of them exist on the periphery of China, and both have been heavily influenced by Chinese ideas, yet both have remained distinctive cultures with their own languages, literature, and cultural-social traditions, unique politics, and specific development patterns.

We’ll concentrate primarily on Japan in this unit, though Korea must, and will, come into the picture as well.

What we know about Japanese culture before written historic documents is, like all cultures at this stage, pretty limited. We know that as early as 10,500 BC, there were people living on the islands that we now call Japan. These people were of various ethnic types, probably including ocean voyagers from the south seas (by way of Taiwan and the Ryukyus), and migrants from the Asian mainland.

We can break these two groups down a bit more, and show that the culture of the people who lived in the area of Kyushu (the southernmost of the main islands of Japan) primarily displayed cultural styles of southern seas peoples, including huts built on stilts, and heavy dependence on seafood. The migrant cultures from the mainland displayed some variant cultural habits and ethnic differences. One group appears to have been ethnically related to Koreans and to steppe nomad groups present on the mainland of Asia around the same time, the other more caucasian in appearance. This period is known as the incipient Jomon period and lasted from 10,500 BC or so to about 8,000 BC. The majority of archaeological finds on this culture come from the Kanto plain, in the area around what is now Tokyo. The Jomon people were pretty uniform in their use of pottery decorated with rope patterns (from which the Japanese name for the culture – Jomon – comes) and shaped in a kind of inverted bullet shape. The fact that they made pottery at all is important, since most human groups seem to have developed pottery as a storage and carrying system after developing agriculture. The Jomon developed pottery well before they began any kind of organized farming, and perhaps even before settling down into permanent villages. Certainly they developed pottery before any human group had developed agriculture, making them perhaps the first pottery-makers in the world. This also demonstrates that there in no necessary causal link between the development of an agricultural society and the creation of pottery, which had long been an assumption of archaeologists.

After 2500 BC the Jomon culure began to develop a simple agriculture, and created sedentary villages of a rather large size. These villages consist of houses made in pits, with thatch roofs and dirt floors. This culture has been able to provide quite a lot of information about itself from the midden piles (garbage heaps) that village inhabitants left behind, as well as from broken tools, pots, and other possessions that can be found at various levels in the pit floors of their dwellings.

By 300 BC, migrations of people from the North China Plain began to arrive in Japan in substantial numbers. These people, who are known today as the Yayoi people, brought with them more sophisticated agricultural techniques than the Jomon culture had, as well as specialists in metalworking, pottery, and other important skills of the pre-industrial world. Their arrival in Japan appears to have driven out or absorbed the Jomon people, so that by 300 BC, it is fair to say that the Yayoi culture is the dominant one in the main islands of Japan, and the culture and language that came to exist within that culture after 300 BC is the culture and language that provided the basis for historical Japanese society.

The Yayoi culture had within it the beginnings of a very carefully organized socio-political system. Although by the first three centuries of the Common Era (1-300 AD) there was as yet no identifiable ‘government’ or state, the society itself became rather rigidly hierarchical. Regional landholding elite clans, known as uji exercised power and patronized associated clans who provided certain services for them. These service clans were known as be (pronounced “bay”). The uji-be relationship was complex, and be appear to have served in various capacities, including that of military or political advisor, metal-smith, tool-maker, cloth-maker, etc… In all, the uji-be system provided for numerous more or less independent political and economic units in competition with each other for resources.

The clan heads were given lavish burial services, often in mounds shaped like key-holes, surrounded by a ditch or moat. Many of these survive today, and in the excavation of them, we can gain some important information. Sometime around the 4th century, the Yamato culture seems to change. The grave implements before that time consist of valuable objects prized by the chieftain or clan head buried, and frequently those included not only jewels and ceremonial cups, etc, but also agricultural tools, and small figures of humans called haniwa. These haniwa were placed in the mounds in place of human servants, and they depict the followers and clan members of the deceased in costumes and doing things that they would wear and do in everyday life. Most of them before 300 are in the garb of agriculturalists, weavers, servants, etc… After 300, we begin to see the appearance of haniwa on horseback, carrying swords, and wearing armor. Burial implements include, after 300, weapons, and horse-riding tack. It is clear that a major cultural change occurred sometime in this period – and that such change was sudden. Egami Namio and Gari Ledyard have found evidence that horse-riding “barbarians” from across the Japan sea, in the area of Korea and Manchuria, may have arrived in the Japanese peninsula around this time with horses, cavalry tactics, and better weapons and technology than the earlier Yamato people – who were also mainland transplants. This is known as the Horserider Theory, and its impact is far reaching. Some proponents of this theory even go so far as to suggest that all or most of the uji clans were replaced by warrior clans in this period, and the emperor of Japan, who is supposed to have been a member of an unbroken line of rulers from well before this time, is probably actually a member of the clan which replaced the original sun line. In fact, the current Heisei Emeperor (Emperor Akihito) announced in 2003 that he believed his family had a Korean lineage. This has caused great controversy in Japan, and continues to be an important issue for archaeologists, and those with a political agenda, to argue about.

In any case, with the arrival of the horseriders, or the development of Yamato culture, as it were, the Sun Line (current imperial family of Japan) found numerous ways to assert its superiority to other uji even in regions far removed from its center of power in the area we now know as the Kinki – around Osaka, Nara, and Kyoto. As assertion of power, and probably some military maneuvering, brought this clan into a more and more secure situation, the emperors and their advisors began also to organize Japanese society. This was very difficult for a number of reasons. First of all, the uji-be system had created a set of relatively autonomous, locally powerful houses who did not easily submit to authority, nor did they see themselves as a part of any kind of unified political system. Convincing them that they were occupied much of the Sun Line’s energies. Beyond that, Japan in this period had no towns, as it were – or even what we might call villages – just groups of residences around land owned and controlled by the local clan – kind of a compound. Because of the fact that the Sun Line was also really just an uji, or clan, itself, this was its situation, too. Also, because of the religious belief that death polluted the place where it occurred, the Sun Line was forced to move its compound/capitol each time an emperor died, meaning that not only were there no cities or towns, but no permanent capitol, either. This caused difficulty in organizing and ruling society.

Prior to the creation of the first permanent capitol city of Japan, in Heijo-kyo (what is now called Nara) in 710, the imperial court went through several stages in its process of organization and creation of legitimacy. One of the first to assist in this process was Prince Shotoku (574-622) who is given credit for four major contributions. First, in 607, he sent a mission of Japanese to Sui Dynasty China. There, they learned about Chinese law, philosophy, and state organization. After a number of years, they brought back what they had learned.

Second, Prince Shotoku was a great supporter of Buddhism. There is no clear point at which we can say for certain that Japanese first became aware of, or began to practice, Buddhism. However, a gift of a Buddhist Sutra from one of the three Korean Kings of the time apparently set the stage for imperial adoption of the religion as one of its pillars of legitimacy. Prince Shotoku promoted this, building temples all over Japan with the money collected by the imperial house for the project. Prince Shotoku may have been a devout Buddhist, but he clearly also hoped that the use of Buddhism would give the imperial clan something that the other uji did not have – something more than the traditional “shinto” relations to gods of nature. Buddhism, with its universal appeal, strong universal theologies, and foreign (Indian and Chinese) origin seemed to be able to lend weight to the imperial claims to be leaders of Japan both in religious terms, and in their claim to be accepted by other rulers from outside of Japan. Prince Shotoku clearly hoped that Buddhism would bolster the imperial line’s power.

Third, Prince Shotoku is given credit for creating the so-called Constitution of 17 Articles (though, in fact, historians now believe that while he may have approved it, he did not in fact write it). This “constitution” was nothing like the modern style constitution we think of when we think of the American Revolution, for example. Instead, it was a series of articles not at all concerned with the common people of Japan, but deeply concerned with the way in which the ruling elite related to each other, and with the prevention of corruption, etc…

Finally, Prince Shotoku is given credit for the institution of the system of hat ranks, by which every person attending the emperor at court wore a hat specific to the office he held. These hats then were symbols of rank, and granted specific authority and responsibilities. This system further delineated the hierarchy of power relations at court, creating a system by which the emperor could claim to rule an organized government in which specific responsibilities were delegated by the emperor to those below him. If one wanted to attend court and play in the power politics of the day, one had to have a hat rank, and thus implicitly accept both the superiority of the emperor and the imperial family (during Prince Shotoku’s life, the emperor was actually a woman – Empress Suiko – and could be either male or female), and their right to place him above or below other clan leaders in society.

In 646, very soon after the death of Prince Shotoku, and immediately following a narrow scrape in which the imperial clan defeated what may have been an attempt by the Soga clan to usurp the throne, Emperor Kotoku, along with his advisor Nakatomi no Kamatari, and Crown Prince Naka no Oe, created a set of legal reforms known collectively as the Taika Reform. Based to some degree on what scholars had brought back from their study of Sui Dynasty China, the Taika Reform was primarily a land reform. Japan (as it was – really only including what is now known as the Chugoku and Kinki regions – the area roughly from the southern edge of the island of Honshu to just north of Osaka) was divided into roughly equal plots of land, all of which were declared to belong solely to the emperor. The land was then distributed to people based on their status, with most peasants receiving roughly equal shares, in the manner of a Chinese land distribution scheme. The emperor thus derived income from the rents paid on this land (taxes), and those who worked the land recieved income from their produce. This standardization of land tenure and practice enabled a budget to be created, centralized taxation, and the creation of a bureaucracy, again on the Chinese model. The Taika Reform also standardized service in the army, and created a uniform body of law on which Japan was to be governed.

In 710, the process of centralization took another step in the creation of the new permanent capitol city at Heijo-kyo (today’s Nara city). While there were at least two previous capitol cities (Asuka-kyo, Fujiwara-kyo) in Japanese history by this time, neither had lasted long, and neither were so much a part of the plan to centralize the state than was Heijo-kyo. This was not only the first really permanent capitol (remaining capitol city from 710-784), but was, like the Taika Reform, designed at least partially on the Chinese model – in this case, the T’ang Capitol, Chang’An. Although one key difference was that Nara never had walls, and Chang’An had immense walls, the layout of the city, from the direction in which streets were pointing to the grid-pattern divided into four distinct districts, was very close to its T’ang Empire model. This had the effect of geographically emphasizing the centralization of power, and dramatizing the emperor’s position, in a sort of cap to the Taika Reform program.

Nara’s key problem, however, was the power of Buddhist temples, who had gained their legitimacy as aids to imperial legitimacy in the time of Prince Shotoku, but which had become far too powerful in politics by the Nara period. Buddhist temples’ ability to influence politics and the possibility of another usurper, this time a Buddhist monk, of the imperial throne led the emperors to conclude that a new capitol city had to be built, within which no Buddhist temples were to be allowed. By 794, the completion and population of Heian-kyo, now known as Kyoto, was complete, and Heian became the capitol, beginning the so-called “Heian Period” in which this city would serve as Japan’s political center for a millenium.

The new capitol at Heian-kyo was also modelled on Chang’an, but the resemblance really ended there. though an imperial university was founded in Heian-kyo, for example, in order, like the Chinese, to produce scholars who could pass confucian examinations and become able administrators, in fact, no one who was not of noble court rank was able to enter the university, and if one was of noble court rank, one had a job at court whether the exams had been passed or not. In other words, unlike the developing Chinese meritocracy based on the Confucian Examination System, in Japan power was based on connections, family lineage, and proximity to the emperor himself. For this same reason, even though Heian-kyo was planned and built in a grid pattern with straight criss-crossing streets in a rectangular shape, the pattern of settlement was uneven, with the majority of people settling in the north-east, near the imperial palace and the Kamo River, and almost no one settling in the southwestern corner of the city’s grid. My point here is that Japan, and Japanese culture, was in fact very different from that of China, and the lack of fit between the design of Heian-kyo and its settlement pattern is one obvious physical way to see that difference. Of course, there were other differences as well.

Japanese had borrowed China’s writing system before the Nara Period (even before Prince Shotoku, who as far as we know was able to read and write). The problem with this was that the Japanese and Chinese languages were actually very different from each other, both in terms of thought and grammatical patterns. So Chinese did not easily work for the writing of Japanese. There were many techniques used for approsimating Japanese meaning. Among these, one solution was to do all reading and writing in Chinese, even though one probably only spoke Japanese. This was extremely difficult to master, and only a few did. Another solution was to use Chinese characters, but only for their sounds, divorcing the pictograph from its visual meaning. This was, as may be expected, also extremely difficult, especially since there are often a myriad of Chinese characters which are pronounced in the same way, meaning that a Japanese word might be written in any one of several different ways, even in consecutive sentences. Still another was to write in Chinese characters, giving them Japanese pronunciations and Chinese pronunciations, but to also use their pictographic meaning to represent the meaning in Japanese. Since numerous words and concepts existed in each language that were untranslatable into the other, this was also extremely difficult to use. A final, and late, solution, was the development of kana systems of syllables. These syllabaries function somewhat like an alphabet, although each “letter” represents a full syllable sound, rather than just a part of one. Creating these phoenetic syllabaries vastly simplified writing (the two syllabaries created were katakana and hiragana. Both were based on Chinese characters which shared the same sound as the kana symbol, but the Chinese characters were highly simplified to make the kana.

During the Heian Period, writing and literacy would become increasingly common among the upper class (women, for one, became increasingly literate, as did lower-level court officials), and poetic conventions for standard forms such as the waka and nagauta came to be recognized and refined. A source of great entertainment, but also serious enough to use in letters, formal speech, and conversations with friends and lovers, these poems became a very subtle and symbolic communication system, and have constituted one of the major strains of Japanese literature and scholarship ever since.

By the tenth century (900’s) the pattern of rule became quite settled in Heian-kyo. Because most emperors married in a matrilocal pattern (that is to say, the marriage takes place between a man and a woman, but the couple’s residence is with the wife’s family, and the child is raised in the wife’s home) in which the emperor, who had to be at the palace, was usually largely absent from the lives of his empress and children, who were raised by their maternal grandparents. This meant that children were often as loyal to their grandparents’ family as they were to their father. Several large and important families came to understand this, and to try to manipulate this reality to obtain increased power for themselves without ever trying to usurp the throne. One such family, whose success rate was high, were the Fujiwara, actually probably descended from Nakatomi no Kamatari, whose loyalty to Kotoku in a very tight situation had prompted the new emperor to bestow upon him the clan name of Fujiwara.

In any case, powerful court families like the Fujiwara (but not only them) tried to marry their daughters to the emperor, and if the progeny of such a union were in line for the throne, to train the young child to be loyal to the mother’s clan. In the case of the Fujiwara, who were most successful with this strategy, after raising one emperor, it became possible to have the boy crowned when he was very young. Since the youth had not yet reached his majority, the Fujiwara grandfather became his regent, ruling in his place until the real emperor could rule. Once the boy turned adult, however, if there were an heir available, he would abdicated his throne in favor of the crown prince, who also turned out to be a child of the emperor and a Fujiwara daughter. In this way, Fujiwara could maintain their positions as regents (virtual emperors) without usurping power in a legal sense at all.

By the mid-tenth century, changes were under foot that would eventually lead this system to collapse.

First, the cost of maintaining an army in an island nation where the majority of threats to imperial power had been subdued, and for which other natural enemies did not exist or could not easily access the coastlines meant that Japanese emperors and their regents gradually began to move resources away from the ‘public’ army, and toward other needs and luxuries. When soldiers were needed, if imperial forces were inadquate, the imperial government turned more and more frequently to mercenaries, whose work was effective, and could be paid for on an as-needed basis.

This move from public to private power, as historian Karl Friday has called it, was accompanied, perhaps even foreshadowed, by another trend or set of trends that made the dissolution of imperial power more likely, and led indirectly to the rise of the samurai (though they would not be called that until centuries later). That trend was the growth of the shoen – private estates held primarily by court-rank clans.

Shoen were one piece in a long tradition of imperial rewards for loyal service. After the Taika Reform, when land had been redistributed, noble families often got larger-than-usual pieces of property consisting of more than one tract. However, as the power system worked through proximity to the emperor, and as the emperor desired to reward his most loyal courtiers for their service, it was not uncommon for the emperor, through his bureaucracy, to grant tax-free status to the noble users of these large estates. As more nobles, through connections, were able to gain tax-free status, more taxes had to be levied on those who did not have such status, and who mostly had smaller plots of land (and, of course, the move from public to private warrior power was also a part of a number of cost-cutting measures taken in order to deal with decreased tax revenues). This meant that, with the level of taxes they paid, it often made more financial sense for commoners to commend (read “give”) their land to nobles, who could get tax free status on it, and would charge rents much lower than the taxes paid to the imperial government, and who, in exchange, wanted the farmer to remain on the land and work it. As more commoners commended their land, and more nobles received tax free status, the shoen system began to create a massive financial squeeze on the imperial family. At the same time, noble houses with shoen all over Japan would find themselve in competition with each other. With clan leaders unable to leave the capitol for fear of losing their position at court, and noble managers unable to visit all of the shoen a family might have, it became common to hire local farmers or headmen to manage the shoen, and often those local headmen saw a need to defend the land from others who might want to take it.

Those local managers were often themselves descendents of nobles in Heian-kyo who, being disinherited because they were too far down the family line, moved to the country and took on such service to make ends meet. Some of these clans, including the Heike (Taira) and Genji (Minamoto) clans, were actually branches of the imperial family who could no longer stand in line for the throne. These local managers and toughs, then, took on guard duties, and also became mercenaries, working for the imperial government, or for other noble families who could pay them for their services. They were mostly illiterate, unsophisticated country toughs – swords for hire.

So, we have a number of historical lines coming together at this point. The development of the shoen system, and its consequences for imperial finance and defence; the growth of rural warriors for hire, and the system of retired emperors and virtual Fujiwara control of the imperial institution.

In 1155, the Fujiwara had no emperor to step in, and retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa returned to the throne with the intention to rule as an adult with no regent. This set off the Hogen Disturbance – violence in the streets of Kyoto as factions set about supporting Go-Shirakawa or the Fujiwara-sponsored claimant to the throne. Country toughs the Genji and Taira clans came into the city and settled things down. The reality here is, though, that the paradigm had shifted. Rather than marriage a proximity politics being the sole sources of power in Japan, now the power to do violence, held almost exclusively by these private warrior clans, had the strength to make or break an emperor. Go-Shirakawa and his heir recognized this, and attempted to play the Genji and Heike against each other. In 1179 a war between these two clans led to the Genji (Minamoto) being vanquished. All adult men were killed, but two young boys survived – Yoritomo, and his younger brother Yoshitsune. Both were sent into exile far from the capitol in Heian, and the new head of the Heike clan, Taira no Kiyomori, ruled Japan as regent to the emperor, and controlled Heian-kyo (Kyoto) with his army of samurai.

In 1185, Yoritomo, with the help of his brilliant military commander brother Yoshitsuen, was able to unify most of Eastern Japan from his base around Kamakura, where he had been exiled, and using his Eastern Japan (Kanto region) allies defeated the Heike (Taira). After this event, Yoritomo created an uneasy agreement with the emperor, and went back to Kamakura to create his government – what was called at the time the bakufu, meaning “tent government” – probably a reference to military men. In any case, from 1189 until his death, Yoritomo shared governance powere with the imperial court in Kyoto, and provided all of the emperor’s military support. This is the beginning of what we might call “feudal Japan.”