Power and Class in Japan, 500 to 1336

Power to the Nakatomi Family

Buddhism may have arrived in Japan
earlier, but it's said to have arrived
around the mid-500s, when the Korean
king of Paekche (Baekche) was fighting
neighboring Silla and he wished to ally
himself with Japan. He presented
Japan's emperor with an image of the
Buddha and some sacred Buddhist
writings and described Buddhism as
the religion of the civilized world. The
head of an aristocratic clan in Japan
called the Mononobe, who led the
emperor's military, opposed joining
Paekche against Silla. So too did the clan whose leader was in charge of religious rituals at court: the
Nakatomi. Both were opposed to the importation of Buddhism, believing that Buddhism would be an
affront to the traditional gods of the emperor. The leader of the Nakatomi believed that Buddhists
claimed that Buddha had powers superior to all other deities and that Buddhism therefore contradicted
his authority
Japan's emperor sent no troops to Korea, and in 562 Japan was forced from its possession in
Korea that it called Mimana. The emperor had his doubts about the wisdom of adopting Buddhism, but
he allowed the leader of another clan, the Soga, to worship the Buddha privately as a trial. The Soga had
been gaining influence, including marrying their daughters into the ruling Yamato family. The Soga clan
leader believed the king of Paekche's claim that Buddhism was the religion of the most civilized, and he
believed that Japan should have it.
Following the arrival of a Buddhist statue, disease spread among the Japanese, and the
Mononobe and Nakatomi spread hostility against Buddhism, claiming that the epidemic was a sign of the
anger of the Shinto gods. The Soga's temple at the palace was burned down. But this was followed by
the epidemic becoming worse, which was taken as a sign of the anger and power of the Buddha
The Soga were allowed to maintain their adherence to Buddhism, and a few Buddhist monks
arrived from Korea, adding to a small Buddhist community at the capital. The new emperor, Yomei, who
had taken power during the conflict and pestilence, was impressed by Buddhism and accepted it, but he
died in 587 after only a year on the throne. That year, the Soga clan fought a civil war against the

Mononobe and Nakatomi over who should succeed Yomei. The Soga won, and the head of the Soga
family, Umako, made his nephew, Sujun, emperor.
Eventually Sujun wanted to be rid of his benefactor, Umako, but Umako struck first and, in 592,
he had Sujun murdered. Then he placed his thirty-nine year-old daughter, Suiko, on the throne and made
her twenty-nine year-old nephew, Shotoku, her regent. Shotoku became Crown Prince. He converted
Suiko to Buddhism. Buddhist monks acquired high positions in government. Buddhism became the state
religion, and its powers were called upon to protect the Japanese nation. Impressed with things Chinese,
Shotoku imported Confucianist learning. More Buddhist monasteries were built while Buddhism was
followed by only a small number of aristocrats around the capital.
Shinto continued to be a part of official state functions, and the Nakatomi family leader
continued to serve as the Shinto high priest. The cultural diffusion common in the world occurred in
Japan as Buddhist doctrine and Shinto began influencing each other. The Buddha, represented by the
statue at Nara, became identified with the Sun Goddess of Shinto worship, and Buddhist ceremonies were
woven into traditional court ritual.
The Soga family's power was, however, about to end. Their arrogance and posturing had failed to
win hearts and minds, and the Shinto-oriented Nakatomi family led a rebellion against them, and they
resorted to that which was available in making political changes: In 645, the Nakatomi drew their swords
and shed the blood of Soga, while frightened Soga guards abandoned their post. The leader of the
Nakatomi, Kamatari, took power and demanded an oath of loyalty from other officials, and outside of the
palace the Nakatomi eliminated those whom they found opposing their rule.
Having now become the most influential family, the Nakatomi began selecting who among the
royal Yamato family would be emperor still adhering to their belief that the Yamato family was directly
descended from the original king, Jimmu and Jimmu's ancestor, the Sun Goddess. The Nakatomi family
continued to run daily court ceremonies. They served as the power behind the throne and occasionally
as regent. They ran government ministries and married their daughters into the Yamato family.
Japan's Failed Reforms in the 700s
Japan had been growing economically, using better tools and fertilizer, more draft animals and
better tools in their crafts. Better roads and a fleet of ships facilitated trade. Horses and fighting
equipment continued to pour into Japan from the Asian continent. Japan was growing also in population,
and they were expanding against indigenous hunter-gatherers, the Emishi and Ainu, on the main island,
Honshu
In 710, the capital moved from what is now Osaka to Nara, the new emperor moving to a new
palace in order to avoid the pollution of his predecessor's death. Nara was a city of about 200,000 and

modeled after China's great city, Chang'an, but without Chang'an's great walls. Japan was an island nation
and the Japanese were less worried than the Chinese about invading armies.
At Nara in 743, the Emperor Shomu ordered the building of the Great Buddha Temple, the Todaiji, while factionalism and conflicts continued at the emperor's court. The Nakatomi remained dominant.
Various aristocrat families and Buddhist monks contended for influence under Nakatomi domination, and
about 10,000 persons in Nara worked at government jobs.
The years 710 to 784 was a time of reforms. The whole of Japan (excluding the indigenous
people) came under the discipline of the government at Nara. People paid taxes to the palace in the
form of a percentage of what they grew, or in textiles, labor or military service. Roads linked Nara to
provincial cities, and taxes were collected more efficiently. There were government projects such as
building bridges, excavating canals, improving irrigation and building harbors. And land reform was created
designed to help the common farmer.
But land reforms were circumvented or postponed. Another dynamic common elsewhere was
occurring in Japan. Aristocratic families were growing in wealth and buying more land. Buddhist temples
were also amassing wealth and buying more land. Land reclamation favored the wealthy, who could
afford the costs involved. Less land was available to the common farmer, and tax exemptions were given
to the most influential families.
Good works, however, were done by the Buddhists. Dedicated to serving common people,
Buddhists initiated public works such as the founding of charity hospitals, free clinics, free lodging houses,
orphanages and old people's homes. Buddhism was viewed with awe for inspiring good deeds and for its
powers of magic in warding off calamity.
The Buddhists in Japan continued to see the material world as illusory, holding that reality was
one's own consciousness and harmony under the Universal Buddha. But, of course, they continued to
make accommodations with the material world. Buddhist monasteries had their own armies and were
unscrupulous in making alliances. As readers of Chinese, some Buddhist monks became expert in
administration and technical matters, such as engineering, and these monks served Japan much as the
Latin reading clergy served in medieval Europe.
For common peasants calamity was, however, an overwhelming reality. Common peasants went
into debt and if they could not repay their debts they were held in bondage or as slaves. Some peasants
escaped to frontier areas. Some became vagrants, and some joined other peasants in working on great
estates. The one-tenth or so of the population that became slaves were the possession of government
bureaucrats, landlords and temples. The main concern of the court nobility, meanwhile, was ritual and
ceremony. There, orchestras with string and percussion instruments played. People danced and wore
brilliant costumes and fanciful masks.

In 749, during construction of the great Buddhist statue, Emperor Shomu's daughter succeeded to
power, to become known as the Empress Kken. She took Buddhist vows and brought Buddhist monks
into the royal court. After nine years of rule, at the age of forty, she abdicated in favor of her third cousin
and crown prince. In his mid-twenties he became Emperor Junnin. Junnin barely ruled, and six years later,
in 764, the Empress Koken again ascended the throne, with a new name: Empress Shotoku. She appears
to have fallen in love with a Buddhist monk, Kokyo, with whom she was rumored to share the same
pillow. Empress Shotoku promoted Kokyo as her chief minister. She commissioned the printing of one
million prayer charms and may have wanted to make Kokyo emperor. Nara society was shocked. The
Fujiwara family stepped in and by 770 she was out of power. That same year she was dead. Henceforth
women were to be exempted from imperial succession. And Buddhist monks were removed from the
offices they held.
The new emperor, Kammu, wished to be free of influence from the Buddhist monasteries around
Nara. In 784 he moved his court thirty-five miles northwest to Nagaoka, a new palace and royal court
built there in five months by 300,000 men. To defray the expense of the move, taxes were increased a
burden felt by the peasantry.
Bad omens appeared at the new capital in the form of frequent epidemics and the death of an
heir to the throne, and it was believed that his spirit had to be placated. So in 794, after only ten years at
Nagaoka, the capital was moved again, to Heian-kyo which means "Capital of Peace and Tranquility." It
was another city modeled after Chang'an. Eventually, in the eleventh century, accompanying the failure
of peace and tranquility, the capital was to be renamed Kyoto (pronounced KYOH-toe rather than Key-ohtoe) which simply means "capital city."
Japan in the Ninth Century
Emperor Kammu, who reigned from 781 to 806, cut his ties with Buddhism and restored the
system of government laws called the Ritsu Ryo. Buddhism was now forbidden to interfere in secular
government matters, but its religious functions were encouraged. Kammu ended military conscription of
peasants, and he left court appointed aristocrats as leaders of his army.
His army responded to raids by Ainu against Japanese incursions and it warred against the Ainu
north of Sendai. The war lasted from 780 to 803. The aristocrat leader of the army, Sakanoue
Tamuramaro, became the hero of that war, and he became the first who wore the title of Shogun
Garrisons were established in Mutsu province to keep the Ainu in their place, and for the next
150 years Japan had no more wars, the emperor's army seeing little action.
A succession crisis erupted in 806, when Kammu died. Bloody fights erupted between rival
cliques as to who should rule as emperor. That same year, the fighting ended and Kammu's eldest son,

Heizei, became emperor. He was apparently influenced by Confucianism and announced that good
government depended on literature and that progress depended on learning.
Heizei ruled only three years, and the emperors who followed Heizei were more interested in the
study of Buddhism and Buddhism's inner peace than they were in ruling. Rather than create anything that
could be called good government, they began a tradition of ruling as figureheads confined to the duties
of religious ritual and various innocuous works.
Government was run by the Nakatomi family, which continued to benefit from its ties with the
Yamato family, and the Nakatomi changed their name to Fujiwara.
Occasionally the head of the imperial family would try to reassert his family's power. The
Emperor Uda (r 887-97), who was not born to a Fujiwara mother, tried, but the Fujiwaras remained
dominant. The head of the Fujiwara family ruled as a regent or as a prime minister, and the Fujiwaras
continued to monopolize daily government routines and religious rituals.
The Fujiwara Era, 858 to 1160: Wars among nobles and their Samurai
The Fujiwara Period in Japan's history is said to have begun in 858 and to have continued to
1160. At the emperor's court, life was gay and there was devotion to the arts, while the capital's
aristocrats were losing political and economic control over the rest of the country. In the capital, paper
makers, weavers, scroll painters, smiths and other specialists were developing their skills. Competition
between the aristocratic families for land and resources was becoming more intense. Clans were
expanding their estates while central government was inclined to leave the great landowning families
alone. In the 900s more wealthy landholders freed themselves from paying taxes. The government was
low on revenues and soon gave up supporting a national army. In the countryside, the hardier aristocratic
relatives of those in the capital were consolidating their various lands into single administrative units.
Province governors were marrying daughters of local aristocratic landowners and becoming a part
of the local power elite. They collected taxes and used their authority to put peasants to work on
projects that benefited them. Their hired agents over-estimated the size of peasant lands to justify
increased taxation, and the governor-aristocrats depended upon violence to suppress peasant outrage.
Without a functioning central governmental authority the economy was suffering. By the year
1000, money was disappearing. Thieves were free to prey on travelers.
Rural aristocrats were recruiting peasants, workers and soldiers for their own armed force to
protect themselves against lawlessness. Their armed men came to be known as samurai (men who serve),
or bushi (warriors). Like the knights in Europe they had a code of behavior that gave some assurance to
the estate owners (lord) of their loyalty, but unlike Europe's knights generally they were not proprietors.

The militarized aristocracy began to take over in the provinces the carrying of swords not to be
outlawed by the central government until the nineteenth century.
Concerned with rivals, lords were interested in improving their military technology: horses, armor,
more powerful bows and better swords. A new, medieval Japan was in the making called "middle
period" (chusei) by Japanese scholars. The period's central figure was a local warlord on horseback,
leading his men with his bow and sword and wearing steel armor.
The great landholders were like the old warlords and princes in China and like contemporary
nobles in Europe: they were jealous and fearful of each other. They were concerned with their honor as
well as their ability to commit violence. They made war on one another, while the common people and
slaves, who labored at creating food and tried to survive, suffered.
Buddhist monasteries were also large landholders, and they were expanding in size as Buddhist
temples were expanding in wealth. Buddhist estates had their own armies: armed monks called acuso.
And occasionally they fought against each other, against some other expanding estate, or against the
government in Kyoto.
Meanwhile, Kyoto was Japan's biggest city with a population of something link 200,000. Towns
along trade routes had at most several hundred inhabitants with the rest of Japan remained rural. People
in the far north of the island of Honshu were considered under Kyoto rule and also considered halfbarbarian. People on the eastern half of Honshu spoke a different dialect than was spoken in Kyoto, and
with these cultural differences came distrust.
The Kamakura Shogunate: Japan,1156-1192
In 1156 two noble families, each related to the family of the emperors, the Yamato family, began
fighting. One of these families as the Taira, centered by the Inland Sea. The other was the Minamoto,
which had been allied with the Fujiwara family. Their wars were on-again, off-again across thirty years. The
dispute was over who would be the next figurehead emperor. During the thirty years the Taira family won
a big round in the war. The Fujiwara were eclipsed, and from Kyoto the head of the Taira family ruled for
ten years, appointing which Yamato family member was to be emperor. The Taira army grabbed more
land, some of it from the Buddhists. The Taira leader had members of the Minamoto family hunted down
and killed. But, demonstrating confidence in his power, he spared the sons of his former Minamoto rival,
keeping the eldest of them, Minamoto no Yoritomo (no translates as of), hostage at the small fishing
village of Kamakura, not far from what today is Tokyo.
Yorimoto took advantage of a new conflict over succession to organize an army of dissatisfied
men, and five more years of war ensued: the Genpei War of 1180-85. Yorimoto's army seized Kyoto and
drove the Taira back to their stronghold by the Inland Sea. In 1185 Minamoto clan fleet defeated the
Taira clan fleet in a sea battle, the Battle of Dan-no-ura, on the Shimonoski Strait between Honshu and

Kyushu islands. Minamoto no Yorimoto won the title of the emperor's military deputy: shogun. He had
the entire Taira family hunted down and slaughtered. And rather than stay at the capital, he returned to
his base at Kamakura, from which he appeared to be in control of all Japan. In 1192, what was to be
known as Japan's Kamakura Period had begun.
Rule of Law and Class Privileges in Kamakura Japan
Subordinates of the first Kamakura shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo, collected taxes. Yoritomo
passed laws and appointed people to imperial positions while the emperor in Kyoto remained a
figurehead who performed ceremonies and gave Yoritomo sanction for his policies.
Among Yoritomo's descendants, and in the imperial bureaucracy, sons continued to inherit their
father's offices. It was their military government that ruled the bakufu, literally "tent government."
Government by murder survived in the succession dispute that followed Yoritomo's death in
1199. Two of Yoritomo's sons and a grandson were assassinated by another of his sons. Yoritomo's thirtytwo year old widow, Hojo Masako, had retired to a Buddhist nunnery but then she took power and
became known as the "nun-shogun." She ruled, made and unmade emperors, and presided over the
expansion of the land of her family the Hojo. The Minamoto family and members of the royal family
were puppets and hostages of Hojo family rule.
The shoganate had military force to back up his centralized authority, and, by the year 1230, men
around the shogun adopted Confucian principles and believed that it suited their position to be familiar
with the Chinese classics. They had an idea of what good government should be. They were interested in
law and order, and a part of their new law and order was taming unruly warriors. Penalties were imposed
on those who were abusive or started fights. Samurai who started fights could lose their estates.
The shogun's constables gained greater civil powers, and the court at Kyoto was obliged to seek
Kamakura's approval for all of its actions. While legal practices in Kyoto were still based on 500-year-old
Confucian principles, the new code under Hojo rule was a highly legalistic document that stressed the
duties of stewards and constables, provided means for settling land disputes and established rules
governing inheritances. It was clear and concise in stipulating punishments for violators of its conditions,
and it was to remain in effect past the mid-1800s.
Order meant preserving privileges, and, as with other class societies as far back as Hammurabi's at
Babylon, penalties were in accord with one's social status.
An Improving Agriculture
About half of all the land was in the hands of aristocrat-governors appointed by the emperor's
court. The rest of was cultivated by wealthy peasants (myoshu) or controlled by low-ranking warriors. The
poor lived scattered in small dark cabins and had a pot, a few bowls and tools such as spades, hoes and

sickles. The myoshu lived in a house with a few rooms, a thatch roof, and they owned a few cows,
maybe a horse and had more tools. These wealthier peasants rented land to tenant farmers and had
farmhands, servants or slaves working for them. They associated their privileged position to the gods and
organized Shinto festivals and feasts. The poor were not allowed to organize such gatherings, but they
were invited to join in and show their respect.
In mid-1200s, agriculture was advancing in Japan as it was during the favorable climate that
Europe was enjoying. Japan's farmers developed a two-crop system. They flooded their fields in late May
or early June to plant rice, which they harvested in October. Then they drained their fields and planted
grains. They were making better use of fertilizer. With their greater harvests they participated in an
increase in trade. Local markets sprang up near a local lord's manor or perhaps at the gate to a Buddhist
temple, or at a crossroads. Poorer peasants began selling soybeans, sesame seeds or string beans and
maybe hemp. Better-off peasants sold rice and barley.
With the rise in agricultural productivity and the rise in commerce came a rise in population and
growth in the number and size of towns. Traveling merchants joined in, and craft persons were producing
more goods for common people, and common people were trading their produce for pottery, farm tools,
pots and pans. Craft persons were making umbrellas, leather, saddles, copper products, roof tiles and
weaving fabrics. Artisans and merchants traveled more. The number of market days in a locale typically
increased from six a year at the beginning of the 1200s to perhaps twenty-one by the end of the century.
Rice, lumber, fish, salt, sesame, dyes and other products were being transported about Japan on
waterways.
The use of money was increasing. At mid-century, forty or fifty Japanese ships a year arrived at
southern China during the reign of the Southern Song and the Japanese exchanged lumber, sulfur and
other products for China's copper coins. In the port area where the trade took place, copper coins might
follow a visit by Japanese traders. Alarmed, the Song government responded with a decree forbidding the
trading of its coins with the Japanese, part of the naivet of those times about economics. The decree
had little effect. Inspectors at China's port took bribes, and coins continued to pass to the Japanese. In
Japan the naivet about money expressed itself in people talking about the new "coin sickness," while
authorities in Japan apparently failed to see the benefit in Japan minting its own coins. It was China's
money that was respected, along with other things from China.
Rank in the Countryside
Good harvests came and went, and those who became destitute sold themselves to slave
traders in order to survive. And the slave traders sold them in regions were there was demand for their
labor. How easy it was for those who sold themselves into slavery to buy back their freedom is unknown.

The high-ranking lords had vassals who were rewarded with fiefs of their own, and fief holders exercised
local policing powers. The lords continued to receive rents from the middle class farmers, the myoshu.
Some myoshu might also belong to the samurai class. The myoshu were themselves lords over their
tenant farmers, farmhands, servants or slaves, but they differed from the higher lords in that they might
work in their fields alongside others. It's a point of disputation among historians whether some who
worked for the myoshu could be called serfs people bound in servitude.
Beach Towns, the Itinerate and Public Baths
Before the 1200s, there were those who fished on the sea, settled on a beach and then moved
on, but in the 1200s they began to settle, to build houses and create villages of fishermen. Their
communities tended to be egalitarian, with fishing zones equitably distributed and families heads sharing
salt-making ovens. The seashore villages grew into towns, with inns built to house merchants and other
itinerants. Two such towns were Tsunuga and Obama (Little Beach), on the northern shore in Western
Japan. The independence of such towns ended as the powerful lords or monasteries with the advantages
of armed men moved in to claim jurisdiction and the right to tax. They had a protection racket. The
towns accepted their power and in return received armed protection against anyone causing them
trouble.
Moving through these and other towns were blacksmiths, pot makers, sellers of oil, mats, rice
wine and other goods. These itinerants traveled under a freedom accorded them by the imperial court in
exchange for their having supplied the court with goods. There were also itinerant dancers and musicians,
people who lived by entertaining. Among the dancers and musicians some had a secondary form of
entertaining: prostitution. They enjoyed an elevated status and had the same right to travel as the
craftsmen and merchants.
Along major roads one might find a public bath, first built in the 1200s by monks in association
with monasteries. Bathing was associated with purification, and all were allowed to enter: commoners,
warriors or nobles, men, women or children. The baths were considered places of peace and asylum.
Mongol Invasions and the End of Kamakura Rule in 1333
In 1274 the Mongols, backed by Koreans and Chinese, landed on the coast of Kyushu. They
attacked the Samurai with explosive devises and poisoned arrows and gained advantage, but a storm
arose in the evening and they were forced to abandon their invasion and withdraw from Japan.
The Shogun, Hojo Tokimune (r. 1268-84), was known for leading Japan's forces against the
invasion and for having spread Zen Buddhism and Bushido among the warrior class. In the wake of the
invasion he extended his power, appointing nine new governors in western Japan, six of them members
of the Hojo or allied clans.

In 1281, the Mongols with their Korean and Chinese troops returned to Kyushu. Samurai kept the
Mongol cavalry from deploying. After a week of fierce fighting the Mongols had established only a small
beachhead. The Mongols were forced to retreat to small islands offshore. A storm arose that wrecked the
Mongol armada. The Samurai attacked and slaughtered the 30,000 Mongol, Koreans and Chinese trapped
on the small islands.
As with the first Mongol invasion, Shinto priests described the storm that smashed it as divine
intervention, as a god (kami) wind (kaze). Japan's victory over the Mongols gave its military a sense of
superiority that would remain to 1945. And among the Samurai it reinforced the notion that the
shogunate was the right form of government.
The End of Kamakura Rule
Japan had become more defense conscious, and new taxes were levied to maintain the
country's defense preparations. A new discontent arose against the Hojo shogunate, some of it from those
who had expected more compensation for their help in defeating the Mongols.
Officials of the Hojo shogunate had created two contending imperial lines to alternate on the
throne. In 1318 a new emperor Go-Daigo, ascended the throne. When it was his turn to step down, he
instead raised an army in an attempt to overthrow the shogunate. In 1332 the shogunate's army won. The
shogunate exiled Go-Daigo and placed another emperor on the throne. In 1333, Go-Daigo escaped and
won enough allies to his side while the Hojo shogunate was abandoned by crucial backers. The result was
a military victory for Go-Daigo. Rule by the Hojo clan and rule from Kamakura that had begun in 1185 was
at an end. An attempt to re-establish rule by the emperor, the so-called Kenmu restoration, began an
attempt to restore traditional royal family rule after 150 years of a military rule.
A newly appointed shogun, Ashikaga Takauji, was supposed to be the emperor's military leader. A
conflict between Emperor Go-Daigo and the shogun, Takauji, resulted in a military defeat for Go-Daigo in
1336. He escaped into the wilderness. The Kemmu Restoration was over. Another dynasty of military
dictators began, to be known as the Ashikaga shoganate. Emperor Go-Daigo died in 1339. He was
succeeded by one of his sons, and emperors for centuries would have little influence politically.