Lucas Peyton Thomas - Japan: A History

By Western count, the year was 800, marked by Charlemagnes coronation. By Japanese count, it was Enryaku 19, the nineteenth full year in the reign of Kanmu, the fiftieth emperor of the island kingdom. In the West, the year was marked by a nine-month-long royal progress that traversed most of Frankland and terminated in Rome in late November. There, on Christmas Day, the conqueror of Italy, Spain, and Germany accepted the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, thus becoming the spiritual as well as the temporal master of Western Europe. In the East, the year 800 marked the official completion of Japans magnificent new imperial capital. In the shadow of Mount Hiei, a sprawling and resplendent metropolis had risen under Emperor Kanmus aegis, a city that he called Heian-ky, Capital of Peace and Tranquility. That official designation never became popular, however, and later generations knew the city by a succession of other names - Miyako, Raku, Rakuyo. Ultimately it would be known as Kyoto, a name derived from two Chinese characters signifying capital.

Viewed from Mount Hiei, ninth-century Heian-ky was most unprepossessing - a vast parallelogram cross-hatched by intersecting avenues and composed almost entirely of single-story buildings roofed with tile, shin gle, or thatch. From the citys southern gate the impression was altogether different, however, for from that point Heian-kys great central boulevard, Suzaku-ji, stretched straight northward to the gates of the im perial enclosure, some two and a half miles distant. From this vantage, Heian-kys symmetry was absolute, its scale monumental, and its effect both calculated and immediate. Its grand geometry dwarfed the visitor, and its sweep accentuated the remoteness of the emperor, spiritual and temporal master of the Japanese people.

The year 800 was one of high promise in Western Europe as well as in Japan, for in both places years of factionalism and strife seemed, at last, to be giving way to a new and more stable order. Unhappily for the sub ject peoples of Western Europe, that promise was to dim with Charlemagnes death in 814 and disappear for a millennium in the internecine feuding that followed. Happily for the people of Kanmus kingdom, the great capital that he established in the mist-shrouded foothills of Hiei not only survived the emperor but grew with a vigor and speed that might have astonished its founder. Within a century of Kanmus death, Heian-ky could justifiably claim to be the second most important center of culture in the entire world, surpassed only by the Chinese capital of Changan - the city upon which Heian- ky was openly modeled.

Japans evolution from primitive agrarianism to aristocratic bureaucracy during this period represented the culmination of a process that actually began fully 1,000 years before the founding of Heian-ky, for it was then that the cultural traits so closely associated with the Japanese people political insularity, social rigidity, religious tolerance, and intense clan loyalty - began to develop. Those traits, which manifested themselves dramatically in the personality of Kanmu, were characteristics common to his people, making him less a shaper of history in the Carolingian mold than the embodiment of centuries of cultural transformation.

According to the annals of the Japanese imperial family, which claims the oldest unbroken dynastic line in the world, those years of transformation began in BCE, the year traditionally assigned to the accession of Jimmu Tenn, the legendary first emperor of Japan. Archaeologists have probed tens of thousands of years deeper into the Japanese past, however, and their findings point to the existence of a culture on the islands at least 100,000 years ago. At that time, the Japanese archipelago was joined to the Asian mainland by a series of land bridges, but by Neolithic times the islands lay some 100 miles from the tip of the Korean peninsula. This geographic isolation helps explain the relatively late settlement of the archipelago in prehistoric times - and also the extraordinary homogeneity of the Japanese people in modern times.

The southern islands of Kyushu and Shikoku were to prove a fertile seedbed for migrant civilizations once the treacherous Korean Strait had been crossed, but for eons that gulf would loom broad and impassable. In fact, it seems likely that the islands were first settled by Asian immigrants driven east by pressures that an increasingly vigorous China was exerting along the periphery of its empire. Subsequent waves of migrants included: Proto-Negroid ancestors of the Malay, New Guinea, and Filipino peoples; Proto-Caucasoids, from whom the aboriginal Ainu of Japans northern islands are presumed to be descended; and, finally, a dominant group of Mongoloids who carried with them a sophisticated bronze and iron culture from the plains of inner Asia. Despite later infusions of Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian stock, there can be little question that it was these Mongoloids who established the first Japanese state, for it is their distinctive artifacts - the sword, the comma-shaped jewels known as magatama, and the bronze ritual mirror - that have been recognized through the centuries as symbols of imperial authority.

After 4500 BCE, there is increasing evidence of settled civilization, located in the southern and central re gions of Japan. Shell middens, sunken pit dwellings, stone tools, and other relics - all dating from this period - have been found in profusion, but it is pottery of a highly sophisticated and almost baroque style that hallmarks the age. Indeed, that pottery, distinguished by its cord-marked design, or jmon, has given a name to the first epoch in Japans Neolithic history.

In the third century BCE, Jmon culture was disrupted by the sudden appearance of a new and radically advanced wave of immigrants, the Yayoi, whose name is associated with an equally distinctive but far more austere style of pottery. Possibly driven from the mainland by the dynastic wars that attended the unification of China under the Chin and Han, these settlers rapidly displaced the Jmon. So complete was this take over that the Jmon virtually disappeared as a cultural force, making the Yayoi the true ancestral culture of Japan. This Yayoi influx, which brought with it the advanced rice culture of the continent, also introduced the techniques of metalsmithing, animal husbandry, spinning, and bronze casting to Japan, hastening the countrys conversion to a fully agrarian economy.

A distinctive feature of the Yayoi period, which lasted roughly from BCE to CE 200, was the evolution of pronounced social stratification and particularly of clan organization, the kinship-based focus of traditional Japanese society. In a sense, such stratification was a logical outgrowth of the Yayoi invasion, for as the food supply became more stable and the population more sedentary, the topography of the land itself became increasingly important. Japans numerous mountain vales and readily irrigated plains favored compartmentalization into small, self-contained communities that, in turn, fostered an intensification of individual tribal loyalties.

By the end of the Yayoi period, Japanese society had coalesced into distinct clan units, many of which were already beginning the process of amalgamation that would eventually unify them under the leadership of the imperial clan. Chinese emissaries traveling in Kyushu in the third century CE noted the proliferation of what they termed countries - the distinct territorial holdings of local tribes and clans. By this time, marked gradations of rank were already observable within these clans, and a distinct hierarchy was emerging, with society dividing into two interacting social entities: the