Playlist: Introduction to Classical Japan

During its classical period, Japan was highly influenced by Chinese culture. The influence of Buddhism, Confucianism, and other elements of Chinese culture had a profound impact on the development of Japanese culture.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: Japan's classical period spanned the sixth to the twelfth centuries. Unfortunately, this period is often neglected in world history textbooks. In time it falls after the classical eras of Greece, China, and India. lt precedes the quite distinctive medieval period in Japan, famous for its samurai warriors, that began in the twelfth century.

But here in the classical period, we see a pattern that often recurs. The Japanese consciously and deliberately borrow — in this instance from China. Then they create a cultural synthesis which is uniquely Japanese.

The classical period gave birth to a refined court culture, in which many of the prominent figures were women. One of them, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote what is today considered by many to be the world's first novel, the Tale of Genji.

This classical culture laid the basis for later Japanese civilization.

Haruo Shirane: One of the things about Japanese culture is, it never sheds the earlier periods, as in the Chinese tradition. Each layer continues to coexist with the new. So each period — the medieval period, the Tokugawa period, the modern period — produces new literature, new aesthetics, but the old continues to coexist with it.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: In 710 the Japanese established their first capital at Nara, moving it to Heian (now Kyoto) in 794. So historians speak of two great Classical periods, the "Nara Period" and the "Heian Period."

Donald Keene: The Japanese had, previous to the great influence of Chinese culture, they probably lived in small towns, villages. And it was only with the introduction of Chinese culture, especially Buddhism, that the Japanese were induced to build a permanent capital, not a capital that shifted with each new reign.

Robert Oxnam: The new capital at Nara was planned as a perfect square, facing exactly south, just on the model of the Chinese Tang Dynasty capital at Changan (which is Xian today). Not only did the Japanese import Chinese forms of capital design — majestic cities on a north-south axis — but also great temples as well.

The Horyu-ji temple, founded in the seventh century, is an example of great Japanese architecture. The original inspiration, however, came from China and Korea.

Transcript

Carol Gluck: Japan now comes into the sphere of Chinese civilization. This is an Asian civilization in which China is, if you like, the mother country — Central Kingdom would be a more appropriate reference — and it's a great civilization. And it has different variants in countries like Japan, Korea, what is now present-day Vietnam. And each of these countries borrows and adapts immediately, and so this is the Japanese version — the Japanese variant — of East Asian or Sinic, Chinese, civilization.

The Nara Period in Japanese history is the period of what the Japanese call the first great reform, the first of three. And that signifies the first period of cultural borrowing from China and the establishment for the first time of an imperial state on the Chinese model, the first unification, the first justification of the Japanese emperor and the economic underlying principles of the realm. So, this is the beginning of Japanese history as a unified state on the Chinese model.

The Nara Period refers to the time when the imperial capital was located at Nara, from 710 to 794 CE. Also see the subtopic The Capital at Nara.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: The Japanese borrowed and adapted four important elements of Chinese civilization at this time:

• Buddhism;
• a centralized, imperial state;
• Confucian ethical and political thought; and the
• Chinese writing system.

It is crucially important to understand that what the Japanese borrowed, they also adapted and made Japanese.

For example, in establishing a centralized, bureaucratic state headed by an emperor, the Japanese didn't adopt the Chinese notion that the emperor rules by virtue of a "Mandate of Heaven" that can be withdrawn. Instead — and it's a major difference — the Japanese drew on their own mythological traditions which supported the eternal rule of one imperial family.

In the classical period, Japan developed into a centralized state headed by an emperor. In developing the idea of a centralized state, the Japanese took the Chinese concept of the emperor — who ruled by virtue of a "Mandate of Heaven" — and related it to already existing mythological traditions that supported the eternal rule of one imperial family.

Transcript

H. Paul Varley: The mythology had been brought down mostly as oral tradition until this time. The mythology was put down into writing, and the central story of the mythology was how the Sun Goddess — the supreme deity of the mythology — sent her grandson down to rule Japan. And the descendants of that grandson were regarded as the imperial family, or dynasty, which was to rule Japan eternally.

Japan in the late sixth century was a loosely organized state. When I say state, it was centered in what we call the central provinces of Japan that contains the present day Kyoto and Nara. And it was divided up into territorial entities that were ruled by families or clans called uji. And one of these families emerged as the, was emerging or had emerged, as the dominant family. Primus interpares — that is, one family gaining superiority over others. And this is the family that became in historic times, and we are getting into historic times now, became the imperial family.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: The Japanese were also influenced by the Confucian ideas that good government depends on the correct behavior of ethical men.

H. Paul Varley: If you borrow from China as the Japanese did, you automatically get Confucianism. Confucianism is fundamental to Chinese civilization, much more so than Buddhism. It is essentially a socio-political creed. Basically, Confucianism is concerned about the development of ethical behavior, starting with individuals, and then the individuals using this developed ethical behavior in the public arena, serving as ministers of the state. In the central thinking of Confucianism, it is not enough to develop your own ethical qualities. You are then duty bound to try to use these in the service of the state, and the state in Confucian terms ought to be a state that is run by ethical men.

Robert Oxnam: Prince Shōtoku [573-621], a legendary leader of seventh century Japan, gave voice to Confucian principles in this seventeen article constitution.

[Excerpts from the Constitution of Prince Shōtoku]

The Prince Imperial Shōtoku in person prepared laws for the first time. There are seventeen clauses as follows:

One. Harmony should be valued...

[Four.] The ministers and officials of state should make proper behavior their first principle, for if the superiors do not behave properly, the inferiors are disorderly; if inferiors behave improperly, offenses will naturally result. Therefore, when lord and vassal behave with propriety, the distinctions of rank are not confused. When people behave properly the Government will be in good order.

Excerpts from Prince Shōtoku's constitution from Japan: Selected Readings, Hyman Kubin, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968), pp. 31-32.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: In the year 552, the Emperor Justinian was on the Byzantine throne, and the great dome of Hagia Sophia was under construction in Constantinople.

This is when Buddhism, the dominant religion in China at the time, reached the Japanese islands from Korea, marking the beginning of the Classical Period in Japan.

H. Paul Varley: Buddhism is a thousand years old by this time, had come from India into China, and to a large extent had been sinicized and had a number of very complex sects. And it's obvious in studying the early centuries — the late sixth, seventh, even the eighth centuries — that the Japanese, or at least not very many of them, are very clear about the differences between the sects that were introduced to Japan.

But certain basic premises on which Buddhism is based — fatalism, the idea that people are enmeshed in a process of karma, of fate, what they did in earlier lives affects them in this life and so forth — the basic Buddhist ideas, were something that could readily be understood and appreciated and embraced.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: As the Japanese adapted Confucian and Buddhist thought, they did not relinquish their indigenous beliefs. Indeed, during these years the Japanese gave those beliefs a name.

H. Paul Varley: When Buddhism was introduced to Japan during this period of cultural borrowing from the late sixth century that we've been talking about, the amalgam of native religious beliefs was labeled, or called, "Shintō." In other words, the word "Shintō" was created. It's a Chinese type of word. It's written with two characters that mean "the way of the kami" — kami being the Japanese word for deities.

In Shintō, the Japanese look at nature, in particular the natural beauties of the Japanese islands, and they have a great love for this. And their art and their aesthetics, to a large extent, centers on this love of nature. And nature is inherently good because the kami — the deities — live in nature. Shintō has largely been concerned with life and the life processes and passages.

Well, Buddhism comes into the country during the reform period. One might imagine that Buddhism would just obliterate Shintō, but that wasn't the case. In fact, the Japanese continued to believe both in Shintō and in Buddhism.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: Along with the other imports — Buddhism, Confucianism, and Chinese governmental institutions — came the Chinese language. The Japanese used Chinese in order to study religious and political texts that came from China. At this time, Chinese language was to East Asian civilization what Latin was to early Europe. It was written and read by educated elites in China, Japan, Korea, and what is Vietnam today.

Haruo Shirane: The official language, the official writing system was Chinese. Chinese was still the great model, the great standard by which the Japanese saw themselves, measured themselves. And so men wrote in Chinese. This is the public language. All documents were in Chinese. All imperial edicts were in Chinese.

Robert Oxnam: The Japanese, in addition to mastering the reading and writing of Chinese, also adapted Chinese as the basis of their own language. Prior to this time, Japanese was only a spoken language.

Then the Japanese began using Chinese characters to transliterate their own spoken tongue. Eventually they adapted Chinese written characters to create a set of syllables, called kana, that would fit the Japanese language.

And so, once again, a fundamental aspect of Japanese culture has foreign roots but a uniquely Japanese expression.

Haruo Shirane: The Japanese always spoke in Japanese. But they didn't have a writing system, and the writing system that they drew on was Chinese. Chinese became the public writing system, the public language, the language that men had to use as part of their education and in everyday public service. And it's not until the late ninth, the early tenth century, that kana, that is to say the Japanese syllabary, emerges, and that the Japanese can start writing their own language.

H. Paul Varley: Now Japanese is related to Korean and other languages of northeast Asia, but it is totally different from Chinese and from a practical, rational standpoint the Chinese writing system, which comprises literally tens of thousands of characters, was entirely inappropriate to the Japanese language.

Robert Oxnam: It was the invention of the kana syllabic writing system that made Chinese fit the Japanese language better, if not perfectly. The writing on the left is Chinese, Japanese on the right. You don't have to know either language to see that the Japanese contains signs of a kind that don't show up in the Chinese text.

Take these, for instance. These are the kana invented in classical times and still in use in today's Japan. They were adapted from Chinese characters and are used to convey sounds. Japanese needs them for its many inflections.

This is the Japanese for "to see," pronounced "me-roo" (miru). The Chinese character also means "to see," when it stands alone in Chinese. Japanese adds the kana for "ru" to make it present tense, and the same Chinese character with kana pronounced "ta" and you have "I saw, mita."

It is possible to write Japanese totally in kana. Reformers have suggested that the Chinese be dropped entirely. The suggestion has gotten no further than plans to reform English spelling. The mix of Chinese characters and kana is not the most efficient way to write and print Japanese, but many Japanese would agree with Professor Varley that the Chinese characters are a link to the past.

H. Paul Varley: For those of us, like me, interested in Japanese cultural history, the Chinese written characters are an extraordinary repository of taste and cultural, ethical values, even, received from Chinese civilization.

The Heian Period (794-1185) began when the imperial capital was moved from Nara to Heian (now Kyoto). During this period, Japanese classical court culture flourished.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: Around the year 1000, the Heian court elite brought Japanese classical culture to its height. The Fujiwara family came to dominate court politics. Like the Medicis of later European history, the Fujiwara patronized poetry and the arts over a long period of peace.

Haruo Shirane: It's an extremely small society, maybe consisting of just a few hundred people at the very top, and spreading out to maybe five hundred, a thousand people. It represents less than one percent of the population. The rest of the people are toiling in the rice fields. They're illiterate. We never really hear from them. This is a very rare instance in which the wealth of the entire country is being funneled into one spot, which was the imperial court, and in particular, the salons of the consorts.

H. Paul Varley: The period when the Japanese fully developed their classical court culture — which was late ninth, tenth, eleventh centuries — was a time when at the court affairs were in the hands almost entirely of a single family, the Fujiwara. The Fujiwara, as others had done before them, married into the imperial family and became regents to the emperor, so that, for the most part, emperors during this period were figureheads, and the Fujiwara were the real rulers, the real managers of affairs at the capital, at the court.

Haruo Shirane: The political situation is that the powerful Fujiwara, the commoner clan, is jockeying for power by marrying their daughters into the throne. And the way that they gained power was by earning the affections of the Emperor through their daughters. And the way that they made their daughters attractive was to create a literary and cultural environment.

H. Paul Varley: The image that we have of them is standing at the pinnacle of court society, having monopolized marital relations with the imperial family, in other words, simply, they're the ones who provided the consorts for the emperors and, therefore, their offspring became crown princes and emperors in their return.

But in addition to very skillfully engaging in marriage politics, and that being the basis of their power, the Fujiwara were also the models in terms of court culture and the arts, and of course court society during this time, during the time of Michinaga, around the year one thousand. And around the time of the writing of the Tale of Genji, the court reached its zenith of brilliance as a cultural entity. Classical aesthetics, classical tastes, classical literature were at their peak at this time and the Fujiwara were patrons of that art and culture. So that we have the image of them as very successful politicians in marriage politics and also as patrons of the arts.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: In the Heian court, one of the highest and most popular arts was that of writing poetic verse. At this time, waka poetry became the dominant form with its characteristic five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. The first three lines were the basis for the later haiku form that retains its popularity down to the present.

Haruo Shirane: Poetry, the thirty-one syllable form, extremely short, compressed, was something that everyone composed. Unlike in the West — where poetry is for poets, poets compose in their studios or at home — you had to have the ability to compose poetry; otherwise you couldn't have conversation. The men and women were divided, separated physically, so that anyone who hoped to have any encounter with the opposite sex had to do it through poetry. So it was an extremely important social medium. It also became an important public medium because the ability to turn out a good verse put you in very good standing with those in higher authority

[Reading of a waka poem]

I thought to see whether I could do without you.

I cannot tell of the longing, even in jest.

H. Paul Varley: Waka poetry is the very essence of Japanese aesthetic taste, sensibility, of the way the Japanese look at themselves, look at nature, look at the world. And this remained the core of aesthetic values, the expression of aesthetic values, right until recent times. Even today, poets, and others, are influenced by the qualities of classical waka poetry.

Poem, anonymous, Kokinshū, 1025.

Transcript

Robert Oxnam: The two great poetry collections from the classical period show the evolution of waka as the dominant form of expression. The Man'yōshū, or "Collection of a Myriad Leaves," was compiled in the Nara period. It contains a mixture of long poems and waka. The Kokinshū, or "Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems," was compiled by imperial edict in the Heian period and consists solely of waka poems.

Donald Keene: It was a great generation of poets. We don't know why these poets suddenly arose. I think it was the maturity of the civilization itself. The Man'yōshū, the first great Japanese collection, has a great variety of poems by a variety of authors, not only noblemen, but also priests, members of soldiers, and even some poems by unknown commoners in distant parts of the country. Probably the people who compiled it, we think of one man particularly, Yakamochi [Otomo no Yakamochi, c. 718-785], thought at the time that this would show the people what we in Japan have done, what our cultural life is like.

[Reading from the Man'yōshū]

Since in Karu lived my wife,

I wished to be with her to my heart's content;

But I could not visit her constantly

Because of so many watching eyes —

Men would know of our troth,

Had I sought her too often.

So our love remained secret like a rock-pent pool;

I cherished her in my heart,

Looking to after-time when we should be together,

And lived secure in my trust

As one riding a great ship.

Suddenly there came a messenger

Who told me she was dead —

Was gone like a yellow leaf of autumn.

Dead as the day dies with the setting sun,

Lost as the bright moon is lost behind the cloud

Alas, she is no more, whose soul

Was bent to mine like the bending seaweed.

Donald Keene: By the time the Kokinshū was written at the beginning, compiled at the beginning of the tenth century, the court became the center of Japanese life, and the poems in the Kokinshū are almost entirely by members of the court. It was considered essential for a courtier to be able to compose a poem.

[Reading from the Kokinshū]

Autumn leaves which fall in distant mountains

Are damasks worn in the darkness of the night.

Donald Keene: And so from the Man'yōshū, which is a collection known best of all to us today for long poems written on dignified, sometimes extremely tragic themes — the death of someone — the scale was reduced in the Kokinshū to writing about moments of happiness, moments of unhappiness, appreciations of nature, understanding of another person's heart. These moments of understanding were the subject of the poems, but not tragic poems. They were not poems with jagged emotions. They were beautifully refined, exquisitely phrased, beautiful, much admired, much copied, but not of the intensity of the Man'yōshū.

Haruo Shirane: It's all about minute sensibilities. When are the cherry blossoms going to appear? The spring mist is here. It must mean that spring has come earlier than usual. We should be hearing the cuckoo. Isn't it summer? So that everything, and then talking about love in those terms: "I haven't heard the cuckoo, " means, "I haven't gotten a letter from you."

And in fact they spoke to each other in a highly allusive, highly suggestive fashion. I mean one of the characteristics of Japanese aesthetics is that it is highly suggestive. You never say anything directly. That's being a brute basically.

[Reading from the Kokinshū]

These mountain cherries with no one to look upon them:

Might they not bloom when all others have fallen?

First poem from Donald Keene, Pleasures of Japanese Literature (Columbia University Press, 1988), pp.29-30; second poem, Ki no Tsurayuki, Kokinshū 297; third poem, Ise, Kokinshū 68.