Heian period

“ The passion for Chinese culture during the Nara period of the eighth century led to a brief fling with Tang Chinese-style three-color glazed wares among the imitative Japanese aristocracy; but these seem to have been too much at odds with native instincts, for they were soon forgotten. After the government moved to Kyoto and launched the Heian era, both the indigenous pottery techniques—the low-fired, brown, porous pots for the common people and the high-fired, gray, polished bowls for the aristocracy—continued to thrive side by side. ”

“ It was during this period that the Japanese rejected for all time a rigorously intellectual approach to life. As Earl Miner wrote in his description of pre-Zen Heian society, "The respect accorded to correct or original ideas in the West has always been given in Japan to propriety or sincerity of feeling. And just as someone without an idea in his head is archetypally out of our civilization, so the person without a true feeling in his heart is archetypally out of the Japanese."7 From such an attitude it is not far to the Zen intuitive approach to understanding. ”

“ Ceremonials were many and magnificent, and poetry writing became, not only a game, but a natural adjunct to every possible event. The Japanese as a nation are dowered with a rare and exquisite taste, and in the Heian Period taste was cultivated to an amazing degree. Murasaki Shikibu records the astounding pitch to which it had reached in a passage in her diary. Speaking of the Mikado's ladies at a court festivity, she says of the dress of one of them: "One had a little fault in the colour combination at the wrist opening. ”

“ The drama and fiction of modern Japan are full of stories of revenge (kataki-uchi) , and this passion occupies the same place of honour with their novelists that love does in European fiction.
In presence of the obligations imposed by loyalty and filial duty, life was regarded as of no account. When we remember the humane Buddhist influences to which Japan was so long subjected, and the ancient national character reflected in the mildly sentimental Heian literature, the disregard of human life which pervades history and fiction alike during the Yedo period is not a little remarkable. ”

“ With the transfer of the capital from Nara to Kyōtō, at the close of the eighth century, began the Heian epoch, marked at the outset by the founding of large monasteries, especially those of Hiyei and Koya, and by the spread of esoteric Buddhism. ”

“ The Japanese aristocracy had ruled the land for hundreds of years practically without drawing a sword, using diplomatic suasion so skillful that Heian was probably the only capital city in the medieval world entirely without fortifications. ”

“ Historical subjects (rekishi gwa dai) suitable for Japanese painting are extremely numerous subjects and are divided into categories corresponding to the following periods: The Nara, the Heian or Kyoto, the Kamakura Yoritomo shogunate, the Higashiyama shogunate, the Yoshimasa shogunate, the Momoyama or Taiko Hideyoshi, and the Tokugawa Iyeyasu shogunate brought down to the present Meiji period. These with their numerous subdivisions supply an infinite number of subjects for [pg 97] pictorial treatment. ”

“ The development of singing, dancing, and music is among the most remarkable features of the Heian epoch. It would be an extravagance to say that the era produced any great scholars in the Occidental sense of the term, for the range of accessible knowledge was extremely narrow. Men profoundly versed in the Chinese philosophical writings were not wanting, but, as a general rule, refined accomplishments were the test of high education. ”

“ But the priests never raised their hand against the people. Their feuds were with the usurping aristocrats, and especially with the military class; for the latter, as the Heian epoch wore to its close, began to grasp the administrative power and to exercise it in a manner subversive of much of the progress with which Buddhism had been closely associated from the time of its advent. ”

“ But Harunobu's conceptions of life and its graces recall the declining day of Heian civilisation, when "cloud gallants" painted their eyebrows, powdered their faces, and aped femininity. His work is never robust; his men are scarcely distinguishable from women; he deforms hands and feet to make them slender, and he knows only one type of female beauty which he produces and reproduces unceasingly. Nevertheless to him undoubtedly belongs the credit of having inaugurated a new and almost final departure in Japanese chromo-xylography. ”

“ But the inhabitants of Tsukushi and Naniwa, which were favourably located for voyages, continued to visit China and Korea, whence they are reported to have obtained articles of value. Other ports frequented by foreign-going ships were Kanzaki, Eguchi, Kaya, Otsu, and Hakata.
SUPERSTITION Turning to the inner life of the people in the Heian epoch, we may say with little fear of exaggeration that the most notable thing was the increase of superstition. This was due in part at least to the growth in Japan of the power of Buddhism, and, be it understood, of Buddhism of a degraded and debased form. ”

“ It was fortunate for Japan that circumstances favoured the growth of a military class in this age of her career, for had the conditions existing in Kiōto during the Heian epoch spread throughout the whole country, the penalty never escaped by a demoralized nation must have overtaken her. ”

“ INDUSTRIAL DANGER Everywhere the course of human civilization has been shaped by the same evolutional law; and as the earlier history of the ancient European communities can help us to understand the social conditions of Old Japan, so a later period of the same history can help us to divine something of the probable future of the New Japan. It has been shown by the author of La Cite Antique that the history of all the ancient Greek and Latin communities included four revolutionary periods.* The first revolution had everywhere for its issue the withdrawal of political power from the priest-king ”

“ The early Japanese, who saw in nature the expression of life's spirit, naturally found the flower a congenial symbol for an abstract philosophy like Buddhism. In the years preceding Zen's arrival in Japan, a parallel but essentially secular taste for flowers permeated the aristocratic court civilization of the Heian, where lovers attached sprays of blossoms to letters and eulogized the plum and cherry as symbols of life's transient happiness. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to describe blossoms as the foremost symbol of Japan's great age of love poetry. ”

“ THE JESUIT PERIL The second half of the sixteenth century is the most interesting period in Japanese history—for three reasons. First, because it witnessed the apparition of those mighty captains, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu,—types of men that a race seems to evolve for supreme emergencies only,—types requiring for their production not merely the highest aptitudes of numberless generations, but likewise an extraordinary combination of circumstances. ”

“ Among these six eras, the Nara and Heian were richest in religious influences; the Meiji is poorest.
It has been shown already that the supernatural had a large place in the thoughts of the early Japanese, and that for important guidance they relied on divination, omens, ordeals, and portents of various kinds. With the introduction of Chinese civilisation they added to this catalogue the superstitions of Confucianism as well as those of Taoism, and when Buddhism arrived, its teachings accentuated the confusion between the mundane and the supernal. ”

“ During the Nara epoch the many-hued hats of China had been abandoned for a sober head-gear of silk gauze covered with black lacquer, but in the Heian era this was replaced by an imposing structure glistening with jewels: the sleeves of the tunic grew so long that they hung to the knees when a man’s arms were crossed, and the trowsers were made so full and baggy that they resembled a divided skirt. From this era may be said to have commenced the manufacture of the tasteful and gorgeous textile fabrics for which Japan afterwards became famous. ”

“ But in the Japan of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the religion of the ancestors was very much alive; and society was only entering upon the second period of its yet imperfect integration. The Jesuit conversions were not made among a people already losing their ancient faith, but in one of the most intensely religious and conservative societies that ever existed. ”

“ Will the Chinese absorb the Soviets as they did the Huns, the Mongols and the Tartars? Time alone will give us the answers to these questions. Time alone will prove the importance of the incubation period spent in Yenan, and whether or not it was worth the sacrifices made by the Reds. The die is cast. From it we shall learn what the future holds for Asia, for Europe, and perhaps for ourselves as well. ”

“ Despite our incapacity to enter into the soul-life of this ancient East, —despite the certainty that one might as well hope to remount the River of Time and share the vanished existence of some old Greek city, as to share the thoughts and the emotions of Old Japan,—we find ourselves bewitched forever by the vision, like those wanderers of folk-tale who rashly visited Elf-land. ”

“ Gleanings in Buddha-Fields [33] (10) is the third book [Pg 217] of the Japanese period, and was written at Kobé. In this volume of essays, intermingled with sketches in lighter vein, Hearn continues his philosophical studies. There are the unmistakable signs that even this ardour is losing zest. The charm of Japan is going fast; and after this volume, until his final interpretation, which is a summary of all that has gone before, is reached, we find him seeking material in fairy-tales, legends, and even returning to old thoughts about the West Indian life. ”

“ Thereupon Shigeyoshi, hitherto so faithful to the Hei cause, suddenly changed his heart, and with three hundred ships or more, manned with troops from Shikoku, rowed away, and remained a passive spectator of the battle, prepared, if the Hei proved the stronger, to shoot his arrows at the Gen; if the Gen seemed likely to gain the victory, to aim them at the Hei. How true is it that heaven may be reckoned upon, earth may be reckoned upon; the only thing which we cannot reckon on is the heart of man. ”

“ But it [30] is probable that the real belief in ancient European societies was much like the belief as it exists in modern Japan. The dead are not supposed to consume the substance of the food, but only to absorb the invisible essence of it. In the early period of ancestor-worship the food-offerings were large ”

“ Another of the Fujiwara nobles (Yasutada) made a habit of carrying hot rice-dumplings in the bosom of his garment, for the sake of their warmth, and throwing them away when they cooled, for the sake of displaying his opulence. To play the samisen [14] was the accomplishment of a legislator; to turn a couplet the proof of a statesman's capacity. It is impossible to recognise the Japanese of later eras in some of the hysterical creatures with whom history peoples the Heian Court. ”

“ Even very imperfectly understood, the causes of this Japanese attitude to a certain class of Western ideas might well incite us to reconsider our own estimate of those ideas, rather than to tax the Oriental mind with incapacity. Now, of the causes in question, which are multitudinous, some can only be vaguely guessed at. But there is at least one—a very important one—which we may safely study, because a recognition of it is forced upon any one who passes a few years in the Far East. ”

“ The three Fujiwara brothers volunteered to undertake the task, but only one of them, Michinaga, was able to achieve it, and his valour won universal eulogy. Sensual excesses, which were without limit in the Heian epoch, supplemented and strengthened this ever-present dread of the spirits of the dead and of evil, so that idiocy became common and the span of life in the upper classes was shortened to thirty or forty years. ”

“ It expresses a timelessness unknown in earlier landscape gardens, particularly those of the Heian era, which, with their fading blossoms and falling leaves, were attuned to the poignant transience of life. In the Ryoan-ji garden, the Heian aesthetic concept of aware, the thought that beauty must die, has been replaced by the Zen idea of yugen, which means, among other things, profound suggestiveness, a reduction to only those elements in a creative work that move the spirit, without the slightest concession to prettiness or ornament. ”

“ But before considering how the social structure in old Japan was shaped by the ancestral cult, let me again remind the reader that there were at first no other gods than the dead. Even when Japanese ancestor-worship evolved a mythology, its gods were only transfigured ghosts,—and this is the history of all mythology. The ideas of heaven and hell did not exist among the primitive Japanese, nor any notion of metempsychosis. The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth—a late borrowing—was totally inconsistent with the archaic Japanese beliefs, and required an elaborate metaphysical system to support it. ”

“ The darkest epoch of Asia Minor began undoubtedly with the advent of the followers of Osman, who, ever since their irruption into that country, have wrought havoc among its people, and within a comparatively short space of time have reduced that fair land to barbarity and desolation. The ancient seats of learning, the theaters, the stadia, the treasures of art and other tokens of Hellenic civilization are now nothing but heaps of ruins, inarticulate witnesses to the ancient glory of Hellenism. ”