Although the Japanese do not settle Japan until the third century B.C.

, humans
had lived in Japan from about 30,000 B.C.. For Japan was not always an island. During
the Ice Ages, it was connected to the Korean peninsula by means of a land bridge. All
four main Japanese islands were connected, and the southern island of Kyushu was
connected to the Korean peninsula while the northern island of Hokkaido was connected
to Siberia. Stone Age humans crossed this land bridge in much the same way they
crossed the Bering land bridge into the Americas. We can date these humans back to
around 30,000 B.C. from the flint tools that they left behind.
Then around 10,000 B.C., these original inhabitants developed a unique culture which
lasted for several thousand years: the Jomon culture. As with all preliterate people, all we
know of them comes from fragments of artifacts and the imaginative guessing of
anthropologists and archaeologists. Jomon means "cord pattern," for these people
designed cord patterns on their pottery—the oldest of its kind in human history. Pottery,
however, is a characteristic of Neolithic peoples; the Jomon, however, were Mesolithic
peoples (Middle Stone Age). All the evidence shows that they were a hunting, gathering,
and fishing society that lived in very small tribal groups. But in addition to making
pottery, they also fashioned mysterious figurines that appear to be female. An ancient
goddess worship?

We divide the Jomon into six separate eras—ten thousand years, after all, is a long time
and even preliterate cultures change dramatically over time. These eras are the Incipient,
Initial, Early, Middle, Late, and Final Jomon periods.

The Incipient Jomon, which is dated from about 10,500 B.C. to 8,000 B.C. has left us
only pottery fragments. These pottery fragments were made by a people living in the
Kanto plain on the eastern side of Honshu, the plain on which Tokyo is located. We have
little idea what these fragments looked like when they were actually in one piece, but we
believe that they were very small, rounded pots. The Incipient Jomon pots are a major
challenge to understanding human cultures, for they represent the very first ceramics in
human history, predating Mesopotamian ceramics by over two thousand years. The
standard anthropological line on the development of human arts asserts that pottery-
making developed after agriculture and is characteristic of a more sedentary culture. The
Incipient Jomon, however, were hunter-gatherers who lived in nomadic small groups. Yet
they developed the art of pottery long before agriculture was introduced into Japan—in
fact, the Incipient Jomon invented pottery-making long before any human was introduced
to agriculture. The Incipient Jomon, then, demonstrate that pottery-making is a human
technology independent and distinct from agriculture.

The Initial Jomon, which lasted from 8,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. is distinguished by the
fact that we have pretty complete pots (isn't archaeology exciting?) that were used to boil
food. Like the fragments from the Initial Jomon, these aren't just plain old pots, but are
inticrately decorated in the "cord-like" structure that characterizes Jomon.

The Early Jomon, from 5000 to 2500 B.C., corresponds to the single most interesting
couple thousand years in human history. At the end of the last ice age, around 14,500
years ago, the world began to slowly warm. Between 5000 and 2500 B.C., the world
reached its warmest in the millenia following the ice age—during this period, the average
global temperature was about four to six degrees farenheit higher than it is today. Never
again would the world be as warm as it was in these two centuries. Here's the exciting
thing: corresponding the steady warming of the earth was the development of agriculture,
the single most important technological invention of human beings. Corresponding the
warmest period since the last ice age were tremendous innovations in human habitation.
It was in this period that human beings all over the world began to live in a more
sedentary manner—at the beginning of this period, human beings begin to live in
substantially sized villages; towards the end of this period, the very first human cities
appear. The Jomon were no exception to this world-wide phenomenon. Completely cut
off from all other humans, the Jomon also began to live in large villages in a settled
lifestyle. These villages consisted of large pit-houses; the floors of these houses are about
a foot below ground level. It seems they lived in extended family groups. The Jomon also
developed their pottery work even further: they began to fashion figurines. It's not clear
what they are, animal or human, but they are the first Japanese sculptural art.

In the Middle Jomon, from 2500-1500 B.C., the Jomon migrated from the Kanto plain
into the surrounding mountainside. While the Old Kingdom Egyptians were building
pyramids, the Yellow River kings developing the first centralized states in China, and the
Sumerians building the very first urban centers, the Jomon, who had no awareness of
people off their island, began to live in very large villages and developed very simple
agriculture or proto-agriculture. They were no longer hunter-gatherers, but rather a
skilled and settled people that developed increasingly sophisticated artwork with
magnificent decorations. Their figurines now distinguish between animals and humans,
and their human figurines have tantalizing but perplexing gestures whose meaning is now
lost to us.

The Late (1500-1000) and Final (1000-300) Jomon corresponded to the neoglaciation
stage in modern climactic history. The world cooled noticeably (colder than today), and
the Jomon migrated back down to the Kanto plain. At this point, the Jomon developed an
identifiable religion—they produce a remarkable number of figurines and stone circles
constructed outside the main villages begin to appear. The figurines they produce are
largely heavy female figurines which suggests that the Jomon religion was a goddess
religion.

The Jomon culture, in essence a Mesolithic culture (although they display Neolithic
traits, such as pottery-making), thrived in Japan from the eleventh century to the third
century B.C., when it was displaced by a wave of immigrants from the mainland. These
were the Yayoi, and their origins lay in the north of China. Northern China was originally
a temperate and lush place full of forests, streams, and rainfall. It began to dry out,
however, a few thousand years before the common era. This dessication, which
eventually produced one of the largest deserts in the world, the Gobi, drove the original
inhabitants south and east. These peoples pushed into Korea and displaced indigenous
populations. Eventually, these new settlers were displaced by a new wave of
immigrations from northern China and a large number of them crossed over into the
Japanese islands. For this reason, the languages of the area north of China, the language
of Korea, and Japanese are all in the same family of languages according to most
linguists. Because Mongolian (spoken in the area north of China) is also part of this
language family and because the Mongolians conquered the world far to the west, this
means that the language family to which Japanese belongs is spoken across a
geographical region from Japan to Europe. The westernmost language in this family is
Magyar, spoken in Hungary, and the easternmost language in this family is Japanese.

The Yayoi brought with them agriculture, the working of bronze and iron, and a new
religion which would eventually develop into Shinto (which wasn't given this name until
much, much later). While we don't know what these immigrations did to the indigenous
peoples, there are several possibilities. According to one theory, which is widely accepted
in Japan, the waves of Yayoi immigrants were very small. While they brought new
technologies with them, they were nevertheless assimilated into the native Jomon culture.
By this account, Japanese culture, particularly as it is represented by the Shinto religion,
is very ancient and indigenous Japan. Some Japanese believe that the Jomon spoke an
Austronesian language, that is, that the Jomon were more closely related to south Pacific
islanders and that Japanese is still largely a Pacific island language. In the West,
historians believe that the Yayoi displaced the indigenous Jomon and thus ended their
culture permanently. The Yayoi displaced the indigenous language, social patterns, and
religion of the original inhabitants. In this view, Japanese culture is a foreign import
deriving ultimately from the north of China and ancient Korea, a view that is not popular
among the modern Japanese.

Whatever the origins of Japanese culture, it is clear that the Japanese language, social
structure, and religion can be dated no farther back in Japan than the Yayoi immigrants.
So for all practical purposes, the Yayoi are a new beginning in Japanese culture. The
transition was dramatic, far surpassing even the transition represented by the industrial
revolution. Japanese culture changed overnight with these new immigrants; eight
thousand years of cultural placidity was dramatically hoisted into the agricultural age.

The Yayoi lived in clans called uji . The clans were headed by a single patriarchal
figure who served as both a war-chief and as a priest. Each clan was associated with a
single god which the head of the clan was responsible for; all the ceremonies associated
with that god were headed or performed by the head of the clan. These gods, called
kami , represented forces of nature or any other wondrous aspect of the world; the Yayoi,
we believe, also had accounts of the creation of the world by gods. When one uji
conquered another, it absorbed its god into its own religious practices. In this way, the
Yayoi slowly developed a complex pantheon of kami that represented in their hierarchy
the hierarchy of the uji .

The Yayoi lived primitively. They had no system of writing or money; they dressed
largely in clothes made from hemp or bark. Marriages were frequently polygamous, but
women held a fairly prominent place in the society of the uji . It is probable that women
even served as clan-heads or priests; support for this possibility comes from the Chinese
histories that first discuss the Japanese.

The relationships between the uji were complex; slowly, territorial conflict gradually
produced what came close to small states. The first Japanese state, however, would be
built on the Yamato peninsula, the area into which Chinese influence began to flow in
200 AD.
peninsula, on the southwesternmost portion of the island of Honshu, has historically been
the region through which cultural influence from the mainland has passed into Japan.
Beginning in 300 A.D., a new culture distinguished itself from Yayoi culture in the area
around Nara and Osaka in the south of Honshu. This culture built giant tomb mounds,
called kofun , many of which still exist; these tomb mounds were patterned after a similar
practice in Korea. It is from these tomb mounds that these people derive their name: the
Kofun. For two hundred years, these tombs were filled with objects that normally filled
Yayoi tombs, such as mirrors and jewels. But beginning in 500 A.D., these tombs were
filled with armor and weapons. So we know that around this time, a new wave of cultural
influence had passed over from Korea into Japan.

The earliest Japanese state we know of was ruled over by Yamato "great kings"; the
Yamato state, which the Japanese chronicles date to 500 A.D., that is, the time when a
new wave of Korean cultural influence passed through southern Japan, was really a loose
hegemony. Yamato is the plain around Osaka; it is the richest agricultural region in
Japan. The Yamato kings located their capital at Naniwa (modern day Osaka) and
enjoyed a hegemony over the surrounding aristocracies that made them powerful and
wealthy. They built for themselves magnificent tomb-mounds; like all monumental
architecture, these tombs represented the wealth and power of the Yamato king. The
keyhole-shaped tomb-mound of Nintoku is longer than five football fields and has twice
the volume of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
According to the Japanese chronicles, the court of the Yamato kings was based on
Korean models for the titles given to the court and regional aristocrats were drawn from
Korean titles. As in Yayoi Japan, the basic social unit was the uji ; what had been added
was an aristocracy based on military readiness. This military aristocracy would remain
the single most powerful group in Japanese history until the Meiji restoration in 1868.
The various aristocratic families did not live peacefully together; the Yamato court
witnessed constant struggles among the aristocratic families for power.

During this period, Japan had a presence on the Korean peninsula itself. Korea was in
its most dynamic cultural and political period; the peninsula itself was divided into three
great kingdoms: Koguryo in the north, Paekche in the east, and Silla in the west. Paekche
understood the strategic importance of Japan and so entered into alliance with the
Yamato state. This connection between the Yamato court and Paekche is culturally one of
the most important events of early Japanese history. For the Paekche court sent to Japan
Korean craftspeople: potters, metal workers, artists, and so on. But they also imported
Chinese culture. In the fifth or sixth century, the Koreans imported Chinese writing in
order to record Japanese names. In 513, the Paekche court sent a Confucian scholar to the
Yamato court. In 552, the Paekche sent an image of Buddha, some Buddhist scriptures,
and a Buddhist representative. These three imports—writing, Confucianism, and
Buddhism—would transform Japanese culture as profoundly as the Yayoi immigrations
had done.

The most important period in early Japan occurs during the reign of Empress Suiko,
who ruled from 592 to 628 A.D.. In the latter years of the 500's, the alliance between
Paekche and the Yamato state broke down; this eventually led to the loss of Japanese
holdings on the Korean peninsula. Waves of Koreans migrated to Japan, and, to make
matters worse, the powerful military aristocracies of the Yamato state began to resist the
Yamato hegemony.

The Yamato court responded to these problems by adopting a Chinese-style

government. In the early years of the seventh century, they sent envoys to China in order
to study Chinese government, society, and philosophy. At home, they reorganized the
court along the Chinese model, sponsored Buddhism, and adopted the Chinese calendar.
All of these changes were adminstered by Prince Shotoku (in Japanese, Shotoku Taishi,
573-621) who was the regent of the Yamato court during the reign of Empress Suiko. His
most important contribution, however, was the writing and adoption of a Chinese-style
constitution in 604 A.D.. The Seventeen Article Constitution (in Japanese, Kenpo
Jushichijo) was the earliest piece of Japanese writing and formed the overall philosophic
basis of Japanese government through much of Japanese history. This constitution is
firmly based on Confucian principles (although it has a number of Buddhist elements). It
states the Confucian belief that the universe is composed of three realms, Heaven, Man,
and Earth, and that the Emperor is placed in authority by the will of Heaven in order to
guarantee the welfare of his subjects. The "great king" of earlier Japanese history would
be replaced by the Tenno, or "Heavenly Emperor." The Seventeen Article Constitution
stressed the Confucian virtues of harmony, regularity, and the importance of the moral
development of government officials.

Shotoku, however, was also a devout Buddhist. The second article of the constitution
specifically enjoins the ruler to value the Three Treasures of Buddhism. The overall
Constitution, however, is overwhelmingly Confucian.
The constitution was followed by a coup against the ruling Soga clan, from which
Shotoku was derived. The new emperor, Kotoku Tenno (645-655), began an energetic
reform movement that culminated in the Taika Reform Edicts in 645 A.D.. These edicts
were written and sponsored by Confucian scholars in the Yamato court and essentially
founded the Japanese imperial system. The ruler was no longer a clan leader, but
Emperor that ruled by the Decree of Heaven and exercised absolute authority. Japan
would no longer be a set of separate states, but provinces of the Emperor to be ruled by a
centralized bureaucracy. The Reform Edicts demanded that all government officials
undergo stringent reform and demonstrate some level of moral and bureaucratic
competency. Japan, however, was still largely a Neolithic culture; it would take centuries
for the ideal of the Chinese style emperor to take root.
Because of the thought and philosophy of the Tokugawa period in Japan (1600-1868),
nothing says "Japan" like the Shinto religion. The Tokugawa "Enlightenment" inspired a
group of thinkers who studied what they called kokugaku , which can be roughly
translated "nativism," "Japanese Studies," or "Native Studies." Kokugaku was no dry-as-
dust academic discipline as the term "Japanese Studies" seems to imply; it was a
concerted philosophical, literary and academic effort to recover the essential "Japanese
character" as it existed before the early influences of foreigners, especially the Chinese,
"corrupted" Japanese culture. Recovering the essential Japanese character meant in the
end distinguishing what was Japanese from what is not and purging from the Japanese
culture various foreign influences including Confucianism (Chinese), Taoism (Chinese),
Buddhism (Indian and Chinese), and Christianity (Western European). The kokugakushu
("nativists") focussed most of their efforts on recovering the Shinto religion, the native
Japanese religion, from fragmentary texts and isolated and unrelated popular religious
practices.

Despite this optimism, Shinto is probably not a native religion of Japan (since the
Japanese were not the original "natives" of Japan), and seems to be an agglomeration of a
multitude of diverse and unrelated religions and mythologies. There really is no one thing
that can be called "Shinto," since there are a multitude of religious cults that gather
beneath this category. The name itself is a bit misleading, for "Shinto" is a combination
of two Chinese words meaning "the way of the gods" (shen : "spiritual power, divinity";
tao : "the way or path") and was first used at the beginning of the early modern period.
The Japanese word is kannagara: "the way of the kami ." Calling the religion of the early
Japanese "Shinto" is a gross and unsupportable anachronism.

Despite the difficulty in pinning down the form and nature of early Shinto, several
general assertions can be drawn about it. First, early Shinto was a tribal religion, not a
state one. Individual tribes or clans, which originally crossed over to Japan from Korea,
generally held onto their Shinto beliefs even after they were organized into coherent and
centralized states.
Second, all Shinto cults believe in kami , which generally refers to the "divine."
Individual clans (uji ), which were simultaneously political, military, and religious units,
worshipped a single kami in particular which was regarded as the founder or principal
ancestor of the clan. As a clan spread out, it took its worship of a particular kami with it;
should a clan conquer another clan, the defeated clan was subsumed into the worship of
the victorious clan's kami . What the kami consists of is hard to pin down. Kami first of
all refers to the gods of heaven, earth, and the underworld, of whom the most important
are creator gods—all Shinto cults, even the earliest, seem to have had an extremely
developed creation mythology. But kami also are all those things that have divinity in
them to some degree: the ghosts of ancestors, living human beings, particular regions or
villages, animals, plants, landscape—in fact, most of creation, anything that might be
considered wondrous, magnificent, or affecting human life. This meant that the early
Japanese felt themselves to be under the control not only of the clan's principal kami , but
by an innumerable crowd of ancestors, spiritual beings, and divine natural forces. As an
example of the potential for divinity: there is a story of an emperor who, while travelling
in a rainstorm encountered a cat on a porch that waved a greeting to him. Intrigued by
this extraordinary phenomenon, the emperor dismounted and approached the porch. As
soon as he reached the porch, a bolt of lightning crashed down on the spot his horse was
standing and killed it instantly. From that point on, cats were, in Shinto, worshipped as
beneficent and protective kami ; if you walk into a Japanese restaurant, you are sure to
find a porcelain statue of the waving cat which protects the establishment from harm.

Third, all Shinto involves some sort of shrine worship, the most important was the
Izumo Shrine on the coast of the Japan Sea. Originally, these shrines were either a piece
of unpolluted land surrounded by trees (himorogi ) or a piece of unpolluted ground
surrounded by stones (iwasaka ). Shinto shrines are usually a single room (or miniature
room), raised from the ground, with objects placed inside. One worshipped the kami
inside the shrine. Outside the shrine was placed a wash-basin, called a torii , where one
cleaned one's hands and sometimes one's face before entering the shrine. This procedure
of washing, called the misogi , is one of the principal rituals of Shinto, which also
included prayer and spells. One worships a Shinto shrine by "attending" it, that is,
devoting oneself to the object worshipped, and by giving offerings to it: anything from
vegetables to great riches. Shinto prayer (Norito ) is based on koto-dama , the belief that
spoken words have a spiritual power; if spoken correctly, the Norito would bring about
favorable results.

Unfortunately, we know almost nothing at all about early Shinto, since nobody wrote
about it. Early Shinto may, in fact, be a myth; what is called early Shinto may simply be a
large number of unrelated local religions that began to combine with the advent of
centralized states. History has accreted an enormous amount of non-Shinto ideas into this
original religion: Buddhism, Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism have all significantly
changed the religion.

The two great texts of Shinto belief and mythology, the Kojiki (The Records of Ancient
Matters ) and the Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan ), were written down around 700 A.D.,
two centuries after Buddhism had been declared the state religion of Japan. Although
these texts contain the only versions of Shinto mythology, including Shinto creation
stories, both of these texts are heavily influenced by both Buddhism and Confucianism
and the stories of the kami had been deeply corrupted by Chinese and Korean thought
long before.

The most profound change in Japanese government was the adoption of Chinese,
particularly Confucian, models of government in Prince Shotoku's Seventeen Article
Constitution . The reforms undertaken by Shotoku not only addressed the internal
problems the Yamato court was faced with, they also dramatically changed Japanese
history.
The various Japanese states are named for the regions in which the capital was located.
In 710, the capital was moved north to Nara. It was a carefully planned city laid out on a
rigorous grid after the Chinese capital of Chang-an. Meant to be a permanent capital, it
was moved again only eighty years later.
 Japan during the Nara period, however, was primarily an agricultural and village-based
society. Most Japanese lived in pit houses and worshipped the kami of natural forces and
ancestors. Building a capital city on the model of a Chinese capital produced a dramatic
alienation of Japanese aristocracy from the Japanese population. In this region of villages,
pit-houses, and kami -worship, grew up a city of palaces, silks, wealth, Chinese writing
and Chinese thought, and Buddhism. The Nara capital represents the definitive break of
the Japanese aristocracy from their roots in the uji .

The most influential cultural development in the Nara was the flowering of Buddhism.
Several schools of Buddhist thought imported from T'ang China made their way to the
capital city. For the most part, Buddhism was a phenomenon of the capital city well into
the Heian period. However, the vitality of Buddhism at this time led to a closer
integration of Buddhism with Japanese government. The Nara emperors in particular
deeply reverenced a Buddhist teaching called the Sutra of Golden Light ; in it, Buddha is
established not only as a historical human being but also as the Law or Truth of the
universe. Each human has reason, prajna , with which to distinguish good from bad. The
life of reason, then, is the beginning of a proper Buddhist life. Politically, the sutra
claimed that all human law must reflect the Ultimate Law of the universe; however, since
law was a phenomenon of the material world, it was subject to change. This gave
Japanese monarchs a moral basis for their rule and a justification for adapting rules and
laws to changing circumstances.

The devoutness that the Nara emperors held for Buddhism guaranteed its rapid and
dramatic expansion into Japanese culture. Although Buddhism entered Japan in 518, it
was during the Nara period that it became a solid presence in Japanese culture.
The Heian period (794-1192) was one of those amazing periods in Japanese history,
equaled only by the later Tokugawa period in pre-modern Japan, in which an
unprecedented peace and security passed over the land under the powerful rule of the
Heian dynasty. Japanese culture during the Heian flourished as it never had before; such
a cultural efflorescence would only occur again during the long Tokugawa peace. For this
reason, Heian Japan along with Nara Japan (710-794) is called "Classical" Japan.
The Nara period was marked by struggles over the throne and which of the clans would
control that throne. In order to quiet these disturbances, the capital was moved in 795 to
modern-day Kyoto, which at that time was give the name "Heian-kyo," or city of peace
and tranquility. The struggles for the throne ceased, but Japan still did not completely
unite under a central government. What happened instead was that power accumulated
under a single family, the Fujiwara, who managed to skillfully manipulate and hold onto
their power in the face of changes and rivalry for over three centuries. With such
stability, the Heian imperial court at thrived.

The Japanese at the Heian court began to develop a culture independent of the Chinese
culture that had formed the cultural life of imperial Japan up until that point. First, they
began to develop their own system of writing, since Chinese writing was adopted to an
entirely different language and world view. Second, they developed a court culture with
values and concepts uniquely Japanese rather than derived from imperial China, values
such as miyabi, "courtliness," makoto , or "simplicity," and aware, or "sensitivity,
sorrow." This culture was forged largely among the women's communities at court and
reached their pinnacle in the book considered to be the greatest classic of Japanese
literature, the Genji monogatari (Tales of the Genji) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu.

Heian government solidified the reforms of the late Yamoto and Nara periods.
At the top of the official hierarchy was the Tenno, or "Divine Emperor." The Emperor
was both Confucian and Shinto; he ruled by virtue of the Mandate of Heaven and by
legitimate descent from the Shinto Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. Because of this, the
imperial line of descent has remained unbroken in Japanese history from the late Yamato
period.

The government hierarchy beneath the Emperor was built along Chinese lines. The
Japanese borrowed the T'ang Council of the State, which held most of the power in
Japan. The most powerful clans vied for the position as Council of State, for from that
seat they could control the emperor and the entire government itself. Like T'ang
government, there were several ministries (eight instead of six). There was, however, a
profound difference between T'ang China and Heian Japan. China was a country of some
sixty-five million people; Japan was a loose confederacy of some five million people.
The Chinese lived relatively prosperously, and T'ang China had by and large become an
urban and an industrial culture. Japan, on the other hand, was still very backward when
one left the capital city of Heian-kyo. Uji bonds were still felt, and outlying areas still
exercised a degree of autonomy. The result for court government was very simple: most
of court government concerned the court alone. There were six thousand employees of
the imperial government; four thousand administered the imperial house. So the Heian
court was not overly involved in the day to day governing of outlying provinces, which
numbered sixty-six.

In both the Nara period and the Heian period, regional chiefs were replaced by court-
appointed governors of the provinces. This was a demotion for the traditional aristocracy;
it did not mean, however, that Heian government exercised a great deal of control over
these regional governors who ran their provinces more or less autonomously.

The Heian period, though, was one of remarkable stability. There was little dissension
or disagreement in the government itself or between the government and provincial
governors. The only problems were conflicts between uji either vying for territory or for
influence at the court.

In the earliest periods in Japan, warfare was largely confined to battles between
separate uji , or clans. The clans would go into battle under a war-chief; there was no
separate class of soldiers. At the emergence of the Yamato state, new techniques of larger
scale warfare seem to have been adopted including new technologies such as swords and
armor. The Nara government, faced with a country of sixty-six provinces of competing
clans, tried to change the Japanese military system by conscripting soldiers. By the end of
the Nara period, in 792, the idea was given up as a failure.
 Instead, the Heian government established a military system based on local militias
composed of mounted horsemen. These professional soldiers were spread throughout the
country and owed their loyalty to the emperor. They were "servants," or samurai. An
important change occurred, however, in the middle of the Heian period. Originally the
samurai were servants of the Emperor; they gradually became private armies attached to
local aristocracy. From the middle Heian period onwards, for almost a thousand years,
the Japanese military would consist of professional soldiers in numberless private armies
owing their loyalty to local aristocracy and warlords. The early samurai were not the
noble or acculturated soldiers of Japanese bushido , or "way of the warrior." Bushido was
an invention of the Tokugawa period (1601-1868) when the samurai had nothing to do
because of the Tokugawa enforced peace. The samurai of early and medieval Japan were
drawn from the lower classes. They made their living primarily as farmers; their only
function as samurai was to kill the samurai of opposing armies. They were generally
illiterate and held in contempt by the aristocracy.

Buddhism developed profoundly during the Heian period as well. Situated near
the capital on Mt. Hiei, the monks of the Hiei monastery developed new forms of esoteric
Buddhism. The great genius of Japanese Buddhism of the time, however, was Kukai
(774-835), who established in Japan a form of Buddhism called the True Words (in
Japanese: Shingon) at his monastery at Mount Koya. The three mysteries of Buddhism
are body, speech, and mind; each and every human being possesses each of these three
faculties. Each of these faculties contain all the secrets of the universe, so that one can
attain Buddhahood through any one of these three. Mysteries of the body apply to various
ways of positioning the body in meditation; mysteries of the mind apply to ways of
perceiving truth; mysteries of speech are the true words. In Shingon, these mysteries are
passed on in the form of speech (true words) from teacher to student; none of these true
words are written down or available to anyone outside this line of transmission (hence the
term Esoteric Buddhism). Despite this extraordinarily rigid esotericism, the Shingon
Buddhism of Mt. Hiei became a vital force in Japanese culture. Kukai believed that the
True Words transcended speech, so he encouraged the cultivation of artistic skills:
painting, music, and gesture. Anything that had beauty revealed the truth of the Buddha;
as a result, the art of the Hiei monks made the religion profoundly popular at the Heian
court and deeply influenced the development of Japanese culture that was being forged at
that court. It is not unfair to say that Japanese poetic and visual art begin with the
Buddhist monks of Mount Hiei and Mount Koya.
In the late Heian period, private families began to accrue vast amounts of
property (shoen ) and began to support large standing armies, mainly because the Heian
government began to rely more on these private armies than on their own weak forces.
The result was an exponential growth in the power of the two greatest warrior clans, the
Taira (or the Heike) and the Minamoto (or the Genji). The Genji controlled most of
eastern Japan; the Heike had power in both eastern and western Japan.
 As the powers of these two increased, the clan of the Fujiwara began to control the
Emperor closely—a shrewd move since the Taika reform theoretically gave all final
power to the emperor. From 856 until 1086, the Fujiwara were, for all practical purposes,
the government of Japan. In 1155, however, the succession to the throne fell vacant, and
the naming of Go-Shirakawa as Emperor set off a small revolution, called the Hogen
Disturbance, which was quelled by the clans of the Taira and the Minamoto. This was a
turning point in Japanese history, for the power to determine the affairs of the state had
clearly passed to the warrior clans and their massive private armies.

After the accession of Go-Shirakawa and later his successor Nijo, a lesser lord of the
Taira, a dissolute, ambitious and shrewd man named Kiyimori, began to slowly accrue
massive power for himself in the Emperor's court. Seeing this, it became apparent that the
power of the Taira had to be diminished in some way, so the retired Emperor Go-
Shirakawa attempted to lay a military trap for Kiyimori with the aid of a minor Genji
lord, Yukitsuna. The plot failed and opened an irreparable breach between the Heike and
the retired Emperor and the Genji. In 1179, the head of the Taira, Shigemori, died; his
forceful and ruthless leadership had propelled the Taira into the forefront. He was
replaced by his brother Munemori, a coward and poor strategist. Go-Shirakawa, seeing he
now had an advantage, began to dismiss Taira in the capital, and Kiyimori fired several
court officials and marched on the capital, forcing the new Emperor Takakura off the
throne by installing his own one-year old grandson, Antoku, as the Emperor. Takakura
enlisted the aid of the Genji and the great civil war began, ushering in the feudal age of
Japan.

Nara Budhism

In 552, the emperor of the Korean Paekche sent to Japan an image of Buddha along with
some Buddhist scriptures. The Emperor of Japan, Kimmei, was pleased with the gift and
the head of the most powerful clan in Japan, the Soga, urged that Buddhism be embraced
as the new religion of Japan. For Buddhism was the religion of the civilized west and
Japan had just begun actively importing the culture of China and Korea.

Outside of the Emperor and the Soga, the reception given Buddhism was less than
enthusiastic. Each of the clans worshipped their own kami , or gods; the chief of these
gods, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, was the creator of the world. Japan was the center of
creation and the Japanese a select people. Buddha, on the other hand, was a foreign god,
one that did not create the universe or have any central role in the pantheon of gods. Was
it worth angering one's native gods? What did Buddha have to offer that the powerful
gods of the native Japanese religion couldn't?

The conservative reaction against Buddhism was overwhelming. The Soga set up a
shrine for the image of Buddha and began to venerate it, but when an epidemic spread
across Japan, the conservative aristocracy demanded that the Emperor destroy the image.
The Buddha image was cast into a moat and the Soga were forced to burn their shrine.
 A few decades later, Buddhism made its way back to Japan in 584. Again, the Soga
clan was instrumental in its arrival. When a member of the Soga clan was given two
images of Buddha, he then set up a temple for them and had a girl ordained as a Buddhist
nun in order to attend to the shrine. As before, an epidemic swept through Japan and the
images were destroyed. But Korea had begun to send Buddhist monks and priests and
managed to convince Prince Shotoku, the regent who composed the Japanese
Constitution, to convert to the religion. Shotoku, in fact, became a fervent Buddhist; the
establishment of Buddhism in the royal court certified its permanence.

The Nara period (709-795 AD) saw the flowering of Buddhism in Japan; it was
limited, however, to the capital and the royal court. For the bulk of Japan was culturally
unaffected by the adoption of Chinese urban culture and Chinese Buddhism.
Nevertheless, the earliest stages of Nara Buddhism were dominated by Korean and
Chinese monks and priests. They brought with them Buddhist rituals, clothing,
architecture, art, and books; the Nara period represents the most active period of cultural
imports into Japan. Not only did the Buddhist priests and monks flooding Japan bring
cultural artifacts, they also brought non-Buddhist ideas, such as the Chinese schools of
Taoism, Confucianism, and the Yin-Yang physical theories.

Because the bulk of Japanese Buddhists in the Nara period were Korean and Chinese,
Nara Buddhism was essentially identical with Chinese Buddhism of the same period
(T'ang China). Three main schools dominated Chinese and Japanese Buddhism at the
time: the "Three Treatises" school (in Japanese, Sanron ), the Dharma Character school
(in Japanese, Hosso ), and the "Flower Wreath" school (in Japanese, Kegon ). Each of
these schools, like all Chinese Buddhism, were branches of Mahayana Buddhism which
had arisen in India in the second century AD. All three schools believed that the universe
was in constant flux and constant change. All external reality and all perceptions change
as well, so there is no certainty in things. The goal is to attain the Ultimate Truth, which
is equivalent to the overall principle of the universe; this Ultimate Truth can only be
attained if one frees oneself from the external world and deceptive sense perception. At
the same time, all three schools were overwhelmingly moral in their outlook. Like most
forms of Mahayana Buddhism, they did not expect full participation by everyone. For
those who could not dedicate themselves to the monastic life, there still remained the
possibility of starting down the road towards enlightenment by behaving in an altruistic
manner in the current life. The Kegon school, for instance, taught that all beings are
interrelated as if they were part of a large wreath of flowers; they emphasized
communion and friendliness.
The ultimate Buddhist ideal, however, was rule by a priest of Buddha; such a sovereign
would create a Buddha-Land here on earth. In 766, Japan came very close to realizing
this ideal when the Empress Shotoku tried to abdicate her throne in favor of the master of
the Hosso, Dokyo. The conservative aristocracy, however, rebelled and Japan failed to
become the first Buddha-Land.
In 788 a Chinese Buddhist priest named Saicho (767-822) founded an unpretentious, tiny
Buddhist temple on the slopes of Mount Hiei near Kyoto. As small as its beginnings
were, Mount Hiei would quickly become the cultural, religious, and artistic center of
Japan until it was destroyed by Oda Nobunaga in 1571. At the time Saicho founded his
monastery, the area around the mountain was unproductive marsh-lands. All this changed
in six years when the Emperor Kammu moved the capital from Nara to the area around
Mount Hiei. It was one of those strange practical jokes of history: Kammu, a devoted
Confucian, originally moved the capital in order to get away from the Buddhists. The
move, however, would make the Buddhists of Mount Hiei the most powerful political
force in early and medieval Japanese history.
Kammu took a liking to the young priest, though, and sent him to China in 804 to
further his training as a Buddhist priest. While in China, Saicho became a follower of the
T'ien T'ai school; on his return, he converted the Hiei temple to Tendai, the Japanese
name for T'ien T'ai. The Tendai school was based on the Lotus Sutra, which was the
foundational text of all Mahayana Buddhism. The Lotus Sutra claims to be the last
definitive teaching of Buddha. In it, the Buddha reveals the "Greater Vehicle" (in
Sanskrit, Mahayana ) which allows for salvation for a larger number of people.
Buddhahood is open to all people rather than to a few; the teaching of Buddhist law, then,
is of paramount importance. This law was taught by bodhisattvas, or "beings in Truth."

The monastery that Saicho set up on Mount Hiei, then, was dedicated to the production
of bodhisattvas. Each monk had to live in the monastery for twelve years where he
learned the Mahayana scriptures and also learned "Concentration," or shikan . Unlike the
Nara Buddhists, however, the Hiei Buddhists did not exercise control over its followers
in the court. In particular, while the best students remained in the monastery, the others
would graduate into positions in the government or in the court. As a result, the Hiei
monastery, which was officially titled, "Center for the Protection of the Nation," became
the most influential institution in the country. By the time it was burned to the ground by
Oda Nobunaga in 1571, it was a sprawling complex and university of over three thousand
buildings.

Although Hiei Mount was the most significant Buddhist monastery in early Japanese
history, Kukai (774-835) is perhaps the most significant individual in the history of Heian
Buddhism. Unlike Saicho, Kukai was native Japanese; he came from an aristocratic
family. He was a brilliant and creative man, and as a young man he began by studying
Confucianism, but soon mastered Taoism and Buddhism as well.

The Emperor Kammu sent Kukai to China along with Saicho in 804. At the great T'ang
capital of Chang-an, he became the disciple of Hui-kuo (746-805), one of the most
significant Buddhist teachers in China at the time. When he returned to Japan, he
established a monastery on Mount Koya and thus began the history of Shingon Buddhism
in Japan.
 Shingon in Japanese means "True Words," a translation of the Sanskrit Mantrayana.
The "True Words" school believed that there were three mysteries of Buddhism: the
body, speech, and mind. Each and every human being possesses these three faculties.
Each of these faculties contain all the secrets of the universe, so that one can attain
Buddhahood through the use of any one of these three. Mysteries of the body apply to
various ways of positioning the body in meditation; mysteries of the mind apply to ways
of apprehending truth; finally, the mysteries of speech are the true words which were
secretly spoken by Buddha. In Shingon, these mysteries are passed on in the form of
speech (true words) from teacher to student; none of these true words are written down or
available to anyone outside this line of transmission (hence the term Esoteric Buddhism).

Despite this extraordinarily rigid esotericism, the Shingon Buddhism of Mt. Hiei
became a vital force in Japanese culture. Kukai believed that the True Words transcended
speech, so he encouraged the cultivation of artistic skills: painting, music, and gesture.
Anything that had beauty revealed the truth of the Buddha; as a result, the art of the Hiei
monks made the religion profoundly popular at the Heian court and deeply influenced the
development of Japanese culture that was being forged at that court. For this reason,
although the monks of Mount Hiei became the most powerful Buddhists at court, esoteric
Shingon Buddhism was the most important religion of the Heian period and the early
feudal period.

As with all other languages, the Japanese language can be understood formally as a set of
lingusitic characteristics or subjectively as a way of experiencing and ordering the world.
However, unlike other languages, Japanese is unique to both linguists and to the people
speaking the language. The Japanese by and large believe their language to be a highly
unique language—some believe it to be unlike any other language in existence. Western
linguists believe that Japanese is a language clearly related to other, Northern Asian
languages, but there is a fair amount of disagreement among them. Suffice it to say that
Japanese is the only human language where we can't quite decide where it came from or
what other languages it's related to.

From the point of view of the Japanese, the experience of this language is based on two,
widely held beliefs about the language. First, the Japanese believe that the language is
somehow highly unique—almost a language unto itself. Second, the Japanese believe that
their language is extremely difficult for non-Japanese to read or understand. In fact, the
Japanese have a name for non-Japanese who can speak and understand the language: hen
gaijin , or "crazy foreigners." So the "experience" of Japanese as a language is an
exclusive experience, a sense that one is participating in a language that no others can
share or penetrate.
 From a Western perspective, Japanese is not an overly difficult language to learn
(Chinese and Old Irish are considerably more difficult) nor is it a unique language. There,
however, the agreement ends. For it's uncertain exactly what language family Japanese
comes from. There are three main theories about the origin of the Japanese language
among both Western and Japanese linguists:
1. Japanese is an Altaic language related to Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish.
2. Japanese is an Austronesian language related to Papuan, Malayan and other Pacific
languages.
3. Japanese is a Souteast Asian language related to Vietnamese, Tibetan, Burmese or, in
one school of thought, the Tamil languages of southern India and Ceylon.
Almost all linguists believe that Japanese is an Altaic language, which makes a certain
amount of sense considering the fact that the Yayoi people seem to have migrated from
Korea. A fair number of Japanese linguists, however, believe that Japanese is an
Austronesian language. These alternative views have given rise to three theories
concerning the origin of Japanese:
1. In the Western model, Japanese was derived from a language spoken in northern Asia
that would split off into several languages, such as Mongolian, Korean, and Turkish. The
earliest peoples of Japan probably spoke this language, but eh Yayoi certainly spoke this
language. By the end of the Yayoi period (300 A.D., this Altaic language was the
dominate language on the islands. This language was in part influenced by the Pacific
Island languages (the Austronesian languages) that surrounded the islands of Japan and
thus formed an Austronesian substratum in Japanese.
2. The Jomon spoke an Austronesian language and the Yayoi introduced an Altaic
language. This Altaic language combined with the Austronesian languages spoken on the
islands to form a unique hybrid, Japanese, which became the dominant language in Japan.
In this model, there are two possibilities: Japanese is an Altaic language with an
Austronesian substratum or Japanese is an Austronesian language with an Altaic
substratum. Take your pick.
3. Japanese was originally a language related to Tibetan or a language related to Tamil
that was introduced into Japan during the great migrations of Southeast Asian peoples
four or five thousand years ago. This language combined with, you guessed it, an Altaic
and an Austronesian language to form the contemporary language.
This is quite a quagmire to wade through. It doesn't help that Western linguists and
Japanese linguists are in basic disagreement over much that has to do with Japanese—as
is the case with linguists the world over, their debate is largely conducted on the level of
name-calling with Western linguists accusing the Japanese of being stupid and Japanese
linguists exercising similar restraint!

At this present moment, however, this is the standard line on the history of Japanese.

The Yayoi were originally migrants from the Korean peninsula and brought with them
an Altaic language. This language combined with a language already spoken in the
islands which may or may not have been Altaic—at some level, however, the Japanese
were influenced by Pacific Island languages. Because of their relative isolation, the
Japanese language became very different from the languages it was related to. Adding to
this, when Chinese culture was introduced, the Chinese language changed Japanese
profoundly as it introduced new ways of thinking and new ways of expressing that
thought.

In fact, most Japanese words are derived from Chinese—over sixty percent, to be
precise. The situation is similar to English in which some sixty percent of English words
are derived from Latin derived languages and only a minority of English words come
from original English. For the most part, however, Japanese grammar did not
significantly change.

Since the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), Japanese has been greatly influenced by
Western languages. Technology in particular has introduced a host of new words and
expressions. In the realm of grammar, some writers, such as Yukio Mishima, have
written Japanese in such a way to make translation into English easier. As a result,
they've significantly changed some grammatical constructions to fit in more closely with
European languages.
What is apanese like as a language? In many ways, it's completely unlike the experience
of English or any other European language. Unlike English, Japanese constructs
sentences in a sentence-object-verb structure (called an SOV language—English
constructs sentences as subject-verb-object, or SVO). While this is familiar to people
who've studied other languages, it expresses a relationship between the subject and object
that is far more intimate than that expressed in English.

Most apparent to a first-time learner of Japanese is that it is a di-syllabic language

(most words are formed from two syllables) in which each syllable consists only of a
consonant and a vowel (called a CV syllabic system). These syllables, however, are
different than English syllables. Called mora in Japanese, all syllables are consonant-
vowel—no syllables can be consonant-vowel-consonant. If a consonant is not followed
by a vowel, it's counted as a single syllable. The word, shinbun, has four mora or
syllables (shi-n-bu-n) and is equivalent to futomaki , which also has four syllables. You
should remember this when studying Japanese poetry—all Japanese poetry is based on
counting syllables, but you can never produce the same syllabic effect in English or any
other European language. In addition, it is the mora system which renders most English
words incomprehensible when they're adopted into Japanese. By far the majority of non-
Chinese foreign words in Japanese are derived from English; when the Japanese use these
words on English speakers, however, they're met with confusion. This is because every
syllable must be in the form "consonant-vowel" in Japanese: in "besaboru" (baseball), for
instance, when a batter swings and misses a pitch, it's a "seturoku," not a "strike" (a
worker initiated work stoppage is a "seturoki").

The most startling difference that an English speaking person encounters with Japanese
is to find out that it is not a heavily inflected language, that is, it does not define various
uses of a verb or noun by adding a host of suffixes, but rather employs particles, which
are independent words (like our prepositions) that indicate the nature of a noun or verb.
In some ways, this makes it easy to learn Japanese. These particles, however, don't
correspond to categories that we have in English or other European languages.
 The most startlingly disconcerting of these particles is the difference between ga and
wa, a distinction that leaves many an undergraduate crying over their Japanese language
textbook. Both of these particles are used with nouns in much the same way that we add
an -s to a noun to indicate a plural. But ga and wa do not indicate plurals—rather they
indicate the distinction between a subject and a topic.

This is a difficult distinction to really understand. Almost all languages are of one of
two types: they express things as subjects or they express things as topics. Japanese is the
only human language that is neither a subject language nor a topic language but rather
both. Here's the difference: I can say, "the snow is white," in two different ways in
Japanese:
"Yuki ga siroi" (the snow is white)
"Yuki wa siroi" (the snow is white)
These are, despite the English translation, two entirely different sentences. The first
would be used if you're referring to a particular bunch of snow, say, if you walk out the
door and you're surprised at the whiteness of the snow: "Boy, the snow is white!" You're
referring to a particular bunch of snow (snow is the subject). If, however, you're making a
judgement about a general state of affairs, that is, if you're talking about snow as if it
were a topic to be judged or described, then you'd the second statement. Unlike English,
then, most Japanese sentences have to distinguish between a pure description (subject
based) or a judgement (topic based).

The Japanese understanding of time is far different in their verb forms than the Western
view of time. While English and other European languages organize actions largely on
the basis of their time relations, Japanese verbs express far different ideas in their tenses.

A Japanese verb can express a.) a non-past continuing action, but not necessarily one
that has occured in the past, present, or future (this is commonly and inaccurately called
the "present tense" in Western grammars); b.) a tense that describes an action that has
been completed and occurred in the past; and c.), a "tentative" action, that is, an action
that hasn't been carried out (commonly called the future). This latter verb form would be
best translated in English as "it might happen" or "it might be happening." This latter
form is also used in formal speech as a form of deference to the listener. If, for instance, a
Japanese speaker is trying to be respectful or highly polite, he or she will use the tentative
tense: "I might be eating dinner with you" rather than "I'm eating dinner with you."

Japanese also includes an elaborate grammatical and lexical system of "honorifics," or

rules of language to show respect according to your rank and the rank of those you're
speaking to. These honorifics include adding suffixes to nouns and verbs and were a way
of both marking your rank and the rank of the person above you. In Japanese, this
elaborate system begins in the Heian period and develops to its fullest in the Tokugawa
period (1603-1868) with its codifcation of social class. In modern Japan, this elaborate
linguistic system has simplified; one cannot, however, learn to speak Japanese without
learning the language forms, including syntax and grammar, for defining one's social
place. This is a difficult concept to communicate to English speakers, but through most of
Japanese history, the experience of language meant experiencing and reinforcing the
social differences that ordered society. From the Heian period to the Meiji Restoration in
1868, you literally could not say a sentence without defining one's own social class and
the social class of the person you were speaking to. In addition, the system of honorifics
is a gendered system. One not only defined social class in one's speech, but one's sex.
Women's speech in Japanese tends to be filled with honorifics and with the "tentative"
tense as a deference to male auditors. Part of the experience of Japanese through most of
its histroy, then, is to encounter every day language usage that always put women in a
subordinate position to men.

Writing was introduced in Japan in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Like so much else
in early Japanese culture, it was a direct import from China. Since the Japanese had no
native writing system, the introduction of literacy involved writing first in Chinese using
Chinese characters. However, since knowledge of Chinese was limited, the Japanese soon
adapted the Chinese style of writing to the Japanese language—by the seventh century
AD, the Japanese were writing Japanese using the Chinese style of writing. Japanese,
however, was an exponentially different language than Chinese —they are not even in the
same language family—so the development of Japanese writing involved ingenious but
complex reconfigurations of Chinese writing.

Chinese writing is in part a ideogrammatic writing system and partly a syllabic writing
system. The earliest Chinese characters were pictures of the object being denoted, as in
the earliest Mesopotamian writing. Like Mesopotamian writing, this pictographic writing
eventually developed into a more simple, cursive way of drawing the characters rather
than drawing the objects. In Mesopotamia this led to the development of cuneiform, in
China this led to ideograms, which are halfway between being a picture of the object and
being an abstract representation. In addition to ideogrammatic characters, some Chinese
characters simply represent syllables. When the Japanese exported Chinese writing, they
first exported Chinese writing phonetically. That is, if you needed to write the word,
"onna," meaning woman, early Japanese writing would write first a Chinese character
that in Chinese represents the word "on" or something close to it and then another
Chinese ideogram that translates into the Chinese word "na." After a while, the Japanese
began to use the characters ideogrammatically, that is, they'd use the character that
corresponded not to the sound but to the meaning of the Chinese word with which it was
associated. So, in later Japanese writing, when one wanted to write the word "onna," one
would use the Chinese character for "woman." This style of writing, which characterized
all Japanese writing until the late seventh century, is called kanji. By the seventh century,
both methods were used whenever one wrote Japanese using Chinese characters.

Kanji , as anyone who has studied it knows, was highly limited. The problem is
particularly acute when there are no Chinese equivalents for Japanese words. In some
cases they used Chinese words in their pictographic meaning—for instance, the Chinese
character for "mountain" (shang ) could serve as the Japanese character for mountain,
which is "yama" in Japanese. However, when the Japanese came to unique Japanese
names or concepts, they had no Chinese characters for these names or concepts. In these
cases, they used the Chinese characters phonetically. So, if one is writing "Yamaguchi" in
kana , you would use the Chinese character for "mountain" to write the first two syllables
of the name, since "mountain" in Japanese is "yama.". In the earliest Japanese writing,
however, there were no formal rules for phonetic spelling, so the first two syllables of
"Yamaguchi" could also be spelled by using the character (there are several) for "ya" and
the character (there are several) for "ma." So, just like Chinese, kana is both an
ideogrammatic and a syllabic writing system, only the syllables are Japanese rather than
Chinese syllables. The rules for phonetic spelling, however, were very loose. One could
spell phonetically according to Japanese words or to Chinese words; since a single
syllable could be rendered with several different Chinese characters, one could spell the
same word several different ways.

In the history of Japanese writing, the syllabic characters used in the Manyoshu , a
collection of poetry from the eigth century, is a cornerstone in the history of writing in
Japan. It's use of certain characters to represent syllables (rather than the free-for-all in
normal Japanese writing) was known as the Manyo kana , the "Manyoshu borrowed
words," and became the basis for formal rules of writing syllables in kana . After the
Manyoshu , writing Japanese became much more stable.

In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Japanese invented another writing technology
based on Chinese characters called kana , which means "borrowed words." There are two
types of kana , hiragana (which the early Japanese called onna-de , or "women's
writing"), and katakana . The most important innovation in Japanese writing occurred
with the introduction of hiragana or completely syllabic writing in the Heian period. In
Japanese historiography, hiragana was introduced by the Buddhist, Kobo Daishi, who had
studied Sanskrit, a phonetic alphabet, in India. The alphabet that he invented was a
syllabic alphabet—in part based on Chinese writing, hiragana is made of simple, cursive
strokes in which each character represents a single syllable. Not only is hiragana easier
and faster to write, it also doesn't require a knowledge of Chinese characters. In the Heian
period, hiragana was called onna-de , or "women's writing" and made possible the great
works of Japanese literature composed by women such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei
Shonagon. Through these works and the court culture produced by women's
communities, hiragana eventually became the dominant writing system in Japan.

A little later, Buddhists developed yet one more writing system, katakana . Like
hiragana , katakana is a syllabic alphabet derived from Chinese characters. Hiragana ,
however, was produced by drawing Chinese characters in quick, cursive, fluid strokes—
they are curvy and simple renditions of the Chinese characters from which they were
derived. Katakana , however, takes Chinese characters and draws only one part of the
character, a kind of shorthand. In the example below, both the hiragana and the katakana
characters are derived from the same Chinese character which stands for "woman" (in
Japanese, "onna"):

Reading Japanese, then, requires that the ability to move between three distinct writing
systems. Often a work will be written using a combination of both kanji and kana ; after
the introduction of the European alphabet, a fourth method of writing Japanese came to
be introduced side by side with the other three.

This complex state of affairs resulted from ingenious technological solutions in a rapid
adoption of literacy. There are several problems that the Japanese had to overcome when
they adopted Chinese writing: first, they had to adapt a non-phonetic method of writing to
a completely different language. Second, they had to develop methods of writing to speed
up the writing process, since not only was kanji time-consuming to write out, it also
presupposed a knowledge of Chinese. Like so many other writing systems, the solution to
these problems lay in the development of a phonetic or syllabic writing technology—a
pattern that repeats itself independently across cultures and across time.

The history of women in ancient Japan is, like so much else in early Japanese history,
filled with missing parts. We know very little about Japan before the advent of writing, so
piecing together women's lives and contributions to early Japanese history is as difficult
as piecing together the lives and histories of the early Japanese. In the Nara and Heian
periods, we are fortunate to have a well-developed, thriving, literate community of
women both surrounding the court of the emperor as well as in the lesser courts of
regional governors. This picture, however, is as distorted as our picture of Japanese
society during the Heian period: we are limited entirely to the upper classes, their lives,
and their values. The experience and values of women and women's communities for the
vast majority of ancient Japanese is simply unavailable to us; just as we can barely figure
out the culture and world views of the everyday ancient Japanese, so we cannot even
guess the nature of women's communities and the roles that women played in rural and
village communities and economies.

In the first mention of Japan in Chinese history—the Chinese called Japan,

"Wa"—there is a fairly brief discussion of Japanese women. The Chinese writers claim
that there is no social distinction between men and women and remarks that there have
even been women rulers in Japan. The history also claims that women served as religious
shamans and regularly participated in ceremonials. Its difficult, however, to extrapolate
from this Chinese history to the reality that the Chinese encountered. First, the Chinese
are attempting in their description of "Wa" to define the Japanese as backward; in this
same history, they talk about Japanese lack of decorum. Is their discussion of women an
accurate representation or is it simply a fiction designed to show that the Japanese are
less socially stratified—and hence less civilized—than the Chinese? For instance, in the
same history, the writers claim that the Japanese also practice polygyny, or the marriage
of more than one wife. Nobility, they claim, marry upwards of five women while
commoners typically have two or three wives. Is polygyny compatible with female
equality? Does a culture that allows men to marry more than one woman, but not vice
versa, a culture which does not stratify people based on gender? Does a woman who is a
second, third, or fourth wife feel that she is equal to her husband? Besides this, all
evidence we have indicates that the individual clans, or uji , were ruled by men.

The Shinto religion provides some clues to early Japanese society, but they are fleeting
and somewhat hallucinatory. Because so much foreign material, particularly South Asian
and Chinese religious practices, have accumulated on top of Shinto, its difficult to sort
out original Shinto from its hybrid descendants. The cult of Amaterasu, the creator
goddess, suggests that Shinto before Buddhism was a strongly matriarchal relgion in a
strongly patriarchal culture. While most religions, including Hebraism and Chinese
religions, have their origins in goddess religions, Shinto is one of the few religions in a
patriarchal culture that did not abandon the overall form of a matriarchal religion. This
suggests that female shamanism was highly likely in Japan before the advent of
Buddhism, although there is no physical evidence for it (nor is there evidence for male
shamanism, either—there is only evidence for Shinto shamanism).

One can conclude little or nothing about the status of women in early Japan from the
haniwa figurines from the tumuli period. The only distinguishing feature between most
figurines labelled as male and those labelled as female are that the male figurines
represent some economic function while the "female" figurines are more abstract. These
are more likely modern impositions; figurines representing hunters or othe economic
functions could very well be female figurines, though we naturally assume, from our own
modern perspective, that they're male.

In the early centuries AD, the Japanese ruling classes became powerful enough to build
large tomb-mounds, called tumuli (this is Latin, in Japanese, they're called kofun ). The
best picture we have of early Japanese life is afforded by the small clay figurines, called
haniwa that were deposited in these tumuli. Their nature or purpose is unknown. Are they
magic? Departing gifts? Needless to say, they provide a valuable picture of early
Japanese life, particularly the haniwa of houses. The figurines also represent men and
women, and the earliest haniwa do not make a clear distinction between men and women.
However, as haniwa artists developed their art, the human figurines became more
differentiated and far more male figurines are produced than female figurines. The male
figurines are highly differentiated—many of them represent clear occupations, such as
farmer, hunters, or farmers. The female haniwa , however, tend to remain
undifferentiated, which implies that in the early Japanese imagination, women do not
occupy a range of economic activities. This was probably not the reality. In all cultures,
women occupy a huge variety of economic functions but are often culturally imagined as
occupying a small range of occupations or existing outside the economic sphere. The
development of haniwa suggest that the early Japanese did not strongly differentiate men
from women in the earliest AD centuries, but slowly developed a cultural imagination
that configured men in a variety of concrete social functions while limiting women to
abstract or socially non-representational roles.
 By the Nara period, writing in Japan had become common in the upper classes,
but writing and literature was largely in Chinese and dominated by men. In the early
eighth century, the emperor's court ordered a series of fudoki , or geographical
descriptions, to be drawn up describing each region. These fudoki give us a tremendous
picture of the overall layout of early Japan, but contain little or nothing about everyday
life or about women. The only pictures we have, however, of Japanese not in the upper
classes are from these fudoki and the portrait they draw implies that economic functions
were divided among everyday Japanese according to gender but that the family was more
or less egalitarian.

Court life, however, seemed a different matter. While the Chinese histories talk about
an Empress Himiko in the second century A.D., the only comparable figure in the Nara
period or slightly before was Empress Suiko (reigned 592-628 A.D.) a few decades
before the Nara period. Even so, she handed the business of running the government over
to her son, Prince Mumayado, who took the title Shotoku. Still, she made important
decisions, such as declaring war against Silla, a kingdom in Korea.

While we know little of early Shinto and women's roles in the religion, the introduction
of Buddhism certainly introduced a pervasive and dramatic gender inequality in religious
life. In the Buddhism imported from China, women were deeply mistrusted; many
Buddhists believed that salvation was out of the question for women. The Buddhist
monastic communities were entirely male and Buddhist monks only accepted males as
their students. The only Buddhist life available to women was that of seclusion as a nun;
such a life, however, deprived the female aspirant of the human community that is the
cornerstone of Buddhist life and philosophy. We don't know how women specifically
responded to Buddhism and its pronounced gender inequality; the women of the Heian
period, however, would forge a distinctly separate Buddhist community and
understanding.
Literary activity in the late Yamato and Nara periods is overwhelmingly dominated by
men. Even though the late Heian and medieval Japanese colllections of poetry would be
significantly represented, if not dominated outright, by women, the Manyoshu is
depressingly bare of female poets. This, for the kokugakushu (Japanese or Nativist
scholars) of the Tokugawa period, would be the sterling highlight of the Manyoshu
collection. For the Tokugawa kokugakushu , the poetry of the Manyoshu represented a
poetic style they called "manly" (masuraoburi ) as opposed to the "femininity"
(tawayameburi ) of the later collections, such as the Heian Kokinshu ). This opinion came
to be adopted in Japanese literary history from the Tokugawa period onwards and was
inherited by Western literary scholars as well. To this day, most Japanese and Western
literary scholars consider the Manyoshu to be Japan's greatest collection of poetry.
However, through most of Japanese literary history, the "feminine" collections of poetry
were considered the great literature of Japan.

In magnificent opposition to the paucity of material on Nara women, the Heian

period represents a virtual window into the lives, both material and interior, of the court
women of ancient Japan. Not only are women discussed extensively in literature and
history, but they overwhelmingly own the literary landscape of the Heian period. While
there are significant and magnificent male writers, the great literature of the Heian period
was written by women: poetry, tales, and literary diaries. More importantly than anything
else, these literary works focus ruthlessly on the interior life of their characters, whether
they're male of female. Because of the relentless interior focus, we have a better idea
about the subjective life of women and the subjective experience of gender by both men
and women in ancient Japan than we do any other culture before the modern period.

Despite this, we know little of women's lives outside the upper classes. At most, only a
couple thousand individuals belonged to the upper classes in some respect. Outside the
imperial court, the upper classes moved in very small numbers in relative isolation. Even
though we have access to the subjective experience of women in a way unprecedented for
early cultures, we are still only accessing the barest of minorities.

Of all the literary forms that were dominated by women in the Heian period, including
poetry and the novel, the most important for understanding women's communities,
experience, and place in society are the nikki, or literary diaries. These are not diaries in
our sense of the word, that is, daily accounts of one's thoughts and life, but rather literary
in nature and intended for distribution. They are, in fact, closer to our idea of an
autobiography. They're composed after the events with a strong sense of how events
contribute to a final outcome. Since they're intended for distribution, it's unclear how
much of these diaries represent the literal truth and how much of these diaries are
fictional. In literary studies, the process of presenting an artificial version of yourself is
called self-fashioning, and these diaries are usually more works of self-fashioning then
straight autobiography. Keep in mind that self-fashioning is not about lying about
yourself: it's a combination of telling the truth, selectively telling the truth, adopting a
pose, and lying outright.

No two nikki are alike; the situations described by each woman and their response to
them all run a rich gamut of experience and understanding. For this reason, there's no
other way to present them except one by one. Cumulatively they give a portrait of female
life and women's communities across all ages and all roles, from youth to old age, from
courtesan to grieving mother.

The Gossamer Years (Kagero Nikki). No other Heian diary explores the subjective
experience of a women's relationship with her husband than The Gossamer Years , which
details the unhappy life of an upper class woman married to Fujiwara no Kaneie (929-
990). The author, whose name we don't know since women were rarely if ever referred to
by their names in Heian court culture, is simply known as the Mother of Michitsuna and
lived from 936 to 995. The diary is less of an account of the marriage then an account of
her own bitterness and unhappiness in what was probably a typical upper class Heian
marriage.

The Mother of Michitsuna considered herself in her diary to be unexceptional in

intelligence and looks (though others contemporary with her claim the opposite). The
diary begins with her love affair as a teenager with Kaneie and ends twenty years later.
She not only suffered from his repeated absences, but bitterly resented his affairs with
other women which he, as other Heian nobles, carried out openly and frequently. While
male critics tend to emphasize that the Mother of Michitsuna is her own worst enemy, the
diary chronicles the sheer loneliness of an upper class woman in a standard marriage. The
Mother of Michitsuna is well aware of romances and love stories circulating in the court
and chronicles how the fiction of the time does not correspond to the reality. For the
reality of life for most married upper class women was loneliness; the cult of love in
Heian Japan stressed extra-marital affairs and the sheer tedium of a cloistered life
amplified the resentment towards one's spouse.

The Sarashina Diary (Sarashina Nikki). In distinction to the lonely and bitter interior
life chronicled by the Mother of Michitsuna, the writer of the Sarashina diary chronicles a
young life consumed by romances and their fanciful plots. The author tells of a life from
the age of twelve (1020 A.D.) to middle age that spans her home life to her service at
court. This life, however, is spent reading monogatari , or tales, most of which are
romances. Her whole life in the narrative goes by in a whirl of romance stories; she
seems to have spent every hour of every day reading them. Of all the tales she reads, the
one that most consumes her is The Tale of Genji ; she imagines herself to be the character
Ukifune in that novel—this character suffers tragically from love. She doesn't seem to
have been bothered by men at all; most court diaries tell of strings of males and their
unwanted attentions.

Aside from the whirl of romance stories, the diary faithfully accounts enormous
numbers of dreams the author had. The world she lives in is, quite literally, a world of
dreams and fictions. The author, however, is aware of this and the diary is meant to be a
tale of religious conversion. She eventually learns the disparity between reality and
dreams and, through this, learns the truths about Buddhism. The diary, then, is meant to
be a warning about the perils and seductions of the world.

Even though the diary has a specific argument, it gives us a valuable insight into the
subjective experience of gender among upper class women. For the most part, diary
writers see little contrast between the monogatari circulating at court and their own lives
of adventure in the court. The Sarashina Diary , along with The Gossamer Years ,
however, draws a dramatically different picture. Both writers turn to the monogotari as
refuges from the world: the Mother of Michitsuna turns to them to relieve her ponderous
boredom and sadness and the author of the Sarashina Nikki turns to them as the sole basis
of her identity. For both writers, these monogotari , which were at the heart of women's
culture in the Heian period, are seen as precipitating disappointment and sadness.

The Izumi Shikibu Diary (Izumi Shikibu Nikki). The tone and purpose of Izumi
Shikibu's autobiography couldn't be farther from The Gossamer Years or the Sarashina
Nikki . Izumi Shikibu was a famous author in her own time and notorious for her affairs.
The diary is more similar to the monogotari : it chronicles a romance beween the author
and Prince Atsumichi in the year 1003. Eventually, Atsumichi installed her in his own
household, but the diary emphasizes the sadness of the affair. More than anything else,
the Izumi Shikibu Nikki shows how powerfully fiction and fictional narrative could be
translated into everyday life and understanding. For Izumi Shikibu, the romances
provided a model for living and understanding gender relations; for the Mother of
Michitsuna and the author of the Sarashina Nikki , these romances were a source of
unreality and unahappiness.
The Murasaki Shikibu Diaray (Murasaki Shikibu Nikki). The two best accounts that we
have of women's communities in Heian Japan are Murasaki Shikibu's diary and Sei
Shonagon's Pillow Book > The Murasaki Shikibu Nikki , written by the same author of
The Tale of Genji , considered to be Japan's greatest work of literature, also is rich in the
subjective experience of gender relations in the Heian court.

As in the novel, the life in the Murasaki Shikibu Nikki centers around beauty and
courtliness. However, unlike the characters in the Genji , the male courtiers she describes
are drunken and gluttonous. While the Genji men are courtly, the men in the imperial
court she moved in were clumsy and loutish. Rather than sending love poetry, they make
lewd jokes; rather than gracefully seducing, they drunkenly mash women and pull up
their skirts while singing dirty songs.

Even though she was a famous figure in her time, the portrait she draws of women's
communities shows she felt little support or love from the women surrounding her. The
most frequent fear in court is gossip, by both men and women, and Murasaki Shikibu
describes most of her relationships with women as rival relationships. She herself claims
to be unbearably lonely simply because she can't find companionship at her level. While
she is close to the empress Saisho, the women's community that she describes is
standoffish and hostile. In part, this was due to her own standoffishness, for which she
was famous, but it was also a part of the women's community at the Heian court since it
was composed of a diversity of women from a diversity of ranks and backgrounds.

The Poems of the Mother of the Ajari Jojin (Jojin Ajari Haha no Shu). We end this
survey with a diary chronicling the last years of a woman's life, a collection (Japanese:
shu ) of poems and narratives describing their composition by an eighty year old woman
in 1071. The diary tells us of the great-granddaughter of the Emperor Daigo, which
makes the author the highest ranking Heian woman writer that we know of.

However, like the Mother of Michitsuna, the Mother of the Ajari Jojin chronicles what
she feels is the most unhappy life ever lived. While the Mother of Michitsuna suffered
over the loneliness of her unhappy marriage, the Mother of the Ajari Jojin tells of
suffering wrought by an ungrateful son. She writes in her diary that her old age was made
bearable after the death of her husband with a dream that her two sons would be at her
death-bed reading holy sutras. When her son, Jojin, went to China to study Tendai
Buddhism, she becomes consumed by her grief, hurt and disappointment.

Like all the diaries that preceded it, the Jojin Ajari Haha no Shu , is the story of
loneliness and disappointment. The loneliness, however, is that of age and abandonment.
Throughout the narrative, the theme is the nature of the relationship between mother and
son. The Mother of Ajari Jojin explores all the ramifications of that relationship from
birth to death and the inevitable bitterness and disappointment that relationship entails.
Like the Mother of Michitsuna, the Mother of Ajari Jojin has to come to terms with male
abandonment and, like the Mother of Michitsuna, finds no answers in literature or
religion.

While the introduction of Buddhism irrevocably altered the Japanese religious,

literary, and visual imagination, it also irrevocably installed a pervasive gender
inequality. For the Buddhism that the Japanese imported from China ruthlessly separated
the sexes; it's not unfair to say that Buddhism in its earliest forms is overwhelmingly
male-centered. As with the Chinese, Japanese Buddhists excluded women from most of
Buddhist life, including the monasteries, the priesthood, and rituals. Heian court women,
however, forged their own unique Buddhist practices within this atmosphere, including
the worship of Fugen and the spread of Amidism.

Fugen
It's unquestionable that women's religious life centered on the bodhisattva, Fugen, and
the Lotus Sutra. Of all the Buddhist sutras, the only one that specifically addresses the
salvation of women is the Lotus Sutra, so Japanese court women centered their religious
life around that sutra. Among the bodhisattvas, each of which can be adopted as a
personal deity, Fugen held a special place for women because he was the protector of
devotees of the Lotus Sutra. By extension, then, he was imagined to be the protector and
personal deity of women. Among the most popular Buddhist art, then, were
representations of Fugen; it's quite possible that no woman's chamber or woman's
community in the Heian courts was devoid of such a representation.

The introduction of Amidism did not immediately result in its furious spread, as it did
in medieval Japan. The unique aspect of Amida or Pure Land Buddhism is that it is an
explicitly salvation religion; by devoting oneself to the Amida Buddha, one gains
entrance into the Land of Pure Bliss at one's death. Amidism became very popular in the
upper classes and representations of the Amida coming for one's soul after death were a
popular visual genre in Heian Japan. Women were integral in the spread of Amidism in
the upper classes; because all other forms of Buddhism put up significant obstacles in a
woman's religious life, the exoteric or democratic nature of Amidism offered access to
religion and salvation—an access that esoteric Buddhism did not offer.

In the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), the early literature of Japan occupies a special
mythological place. The central concern of Tokugawa poets and scholars was the
distillation of Japanese culture from all its Chinese and Asian accretions. Since so much
of Japanese culture—religion, philosophy, political theory, painting, ceramics, music,
writing, and so on—derived from Chinese models, the only source of "real" Japanese
culture they could find were the earliest specimens of literature. These early specimens,
however, were deeply influenced by Chinese models as well.
 We know little or nothing about Japanese literature in the earliest periods before the
introduction of writing. This period was largely dominated by popular songs and stories
told in pantomime. It wasn't until the introduction of Chinese writing the the very first
Japanese work of literature was composed, the Kojiki , or Record of Ancient Matters ,
around 620. This work, along with the Nihongi written a few decades later, is the earliest
account of both Japanese history and Japanese mythology. While both works borrow
heavily from Chinese historiographical styles and in part from Chinese mythology and
religion, from the Tokugawa period onwards both Japanese and Europeans have regarded
these two works as the best source of indigenous Japanese literature.

In the West, we are inclined to think of history as something like a bare recitation of
facts, but in reality history is closer to something like literature. History's least important
aspect is factuality; history, rather, is important in that it selectively remembers and
orders past events to give a culture in the present an identity. History as literature is
called historiography, or "the writing of history." Early Japanese historiography is
dominated by mythical tales and unverifiable events. The writers of early Japanese
history are not concerned with verification in the same way the modern historians are;
they are, rather, concerned with setting out the special character of Japanese culture in the
Yamato and Nara periods. This special character is laid down in the mythological
foundations of Japan and the Japanese people; both the Kojiki and the Nihongi compose
narratives that make the Japanese a special people in creation with a special kinship to the
creating goddess. The history of the Japanese becomes in these narratives the central
events in human history and, like the historical writing in so many other cultures,
including our own, the narratives create a myth that various developments in Japan are
origins of practices throughout the human world.

More important than the two epic early histories to understanding Japanese
culture is the Manyoshu , or "Collection of Myriad Leaves," the first collection of
Japanese poetry. Written down somewhere in the first half of the eighth century, the
Manyoshu represent a form of literature as close as we can get to a native Japanese
literary tradition.
In the eighteenth century, the group of scholars and poets that dedicated themselves to
kokugaku , or "Japanese Studies," considered the Manyoshu to be the single most
important work of literature in Japan. Within this work, they discovered what they felt
were the essential characteristics of both Japanese literature as a whole and the Japanese
mind. Chief among these characteristics was mono no aware , or a sense of the sadness of
things. What does this mean? For the kokugakushu , the poems of the Manyoshu are
distinguished by their perception of how all objects, no matter how inconspicuous, betray
the ultimate sadness or tragedy of life on earth. This isn't a "teenagers dressed in black"
kind of tragedy that you see all around you, but rather a calm, sedate, and meditative
sense of the universality of loss and sadness. In addition, the kokugakushu found that the
essential spirit of Japanese poetry was one of sensitivity (aware ) to the things of the
world. For the kokugakushu , the Manyoshu showed that the Japanese mind had a special
connection to the things of this world and their beauty and meaning. This understanding
of the Manyoshu in the eighteenth century made this collection of poems one of the most
significant works of Japanese literature in the pre-modern and modern times. The
aesthetic of aware and mono no aware became one of the dominant principles of modern
Japanese writing and film.
The poetry itself deals with simple events described in a simple and direct style. The
Manyoshu poetry, like that of the Nara and Heian poets which it greatly influenced, does
not have many of the characteristics of European and European-derived poetry. It is not a
poetry of complicated sound schemes—there is no rhyme, heavy alliteration, or
complicated meters. Early Japanese poetry had only thirty-one syllables per poem in five
lines (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 7 syllables). As pointed out by the
kokugakushu , the primary aesthetic principle is the evocation of a mood, emotion,
feeling, or realization in a description of an event or an object—often an object unrelated
to the cause of the mood or emotion. In the Manyoshu poetry and all its derivatives, the
whole world can be writ small in a single, inconsequential event, such as the falling of a
leaf of the blossoming of a cherry tree. The principle mood is one of a sense of the
passing of things, a kind of sedate understanding of loss and sorrow. This interpretation,
however, is very narrow—the Manyoshu poetry and its derivatives betray the entire range
of human experience and emotion.The style is simple and direct, evoking meaning not
from florid language or elaborate metaphors, but from the object or event being
described. In T'ang China at this time, a debate was raging among poets about style: one
camp believed that florid language and elaborate metaphor made good poetry while
another camp believed that poetry should describe concrete events in simple and direct
language. In Japanese poetry, the emphasis on concreteness and simplicity was always
the norm.

The writing of poetry, however, was severely hampered by the adoption of the Chinese
writing system. The Japanese did not have a native writing system and so adopted
Chinese writing which was, at the time, partly a pictographic writing system and partly a
phonetic writing system. The Japanese used Chinese characters to develop a new writing
technology they called kana , which means "borrowed words." In some cases they used
Chinese words in their pictographic meaning—for instance, the Chinese character for
"mountain" (shang ) could serve as the Japanese character for mountain. However, when
the Japanese came to unique Japanese names or concepts, they had no Chinese characters
for these names or concepts. In these cases, they used the Chinese characters
phonetically. So, if one is writing "Yamaguchi" in kana , you would use the Chinese
character for "mountain," which is yama in Japanese, to write the first two syllables of the
name. In early Japanese writing, however, there were no formal rules for phonetic
spelling, so the first two syllables of "Yamaguchi" could also be spelled by using the
character for "ya" and the character for "ma." The Manyoshu is extremely important in
the history of Japanese writing because the principles of writing in the work, called the
Manyo kana , became the basis of the formal rules of kana writing.

The literature and culture of the Heian period is dominated by women and
women's culture. This literature, whose greatest and most lasting work was the Genji
monogatari , or "Tale of Genji," was also dominated by the long novel. Poetry, despite
the example of the Manyoshu , became largely based on imitations of Chinese,
particularly T'ang, poetry. The flowering and proliferation of literature in the Heian
period was in part made possible by the introduction of a new writing system that was
purely phonetic, hiragana . In Japanese historiography, hiragana was introduced by the
Buddhist, Kobo Daishi, who had studied Sanskrit, a phonetic alphabet, in India. The
alphabet that he invented was a syllabic alphabet—in part based on Chinese writing,
hiragana is made of simple, cursive strokes in which each character represents a single
syllable. Not only is hiragana easier and faster to write, it also doesn't require a
knowledge of Chinese characters. In the Heian period, however, the two writing systems
became gendered—kana was associated with men's writing and hiragana was associated
with women's writing.

The great classic work of Japanese and world literature, the Genji monogatari , was
written in the first two or three decades of the eleventh century with additions and
accretions added over the next two centuries. It was written by Murasaki Shikibu (not her
real name), a court lady who was the daughter of a regional governor (Shikibu was the
title of her father—the Genji shows nothing but contempt for regional governors). In the
mid-level courts, women developed strong and educated communities that were in part
integrated with courtly life. Two of the most important works of the Heian period, the
Murasaki Shikibu Diary and the Pillow Book of another middle court lady, Sei
Shonagon, chronicle the lives of women in the court.

The Genji monogatari is a series of loosely connected stories detailing the life and
maturation of Genji. The son of an emperor, Genji goes through a series of setbacks in his
quest for favor and love. About 3/4 of the way through the novel, Genji dies and the rest
of the novel concerns his son.

There are two principle aesthetics operating in the Genji. While the novel ostensibly
deals with the course of Genji's life at court, it's principle theme is the passing away of
good things, such as love, refinement, beauty, and ultimately life. It is, then, a novel
about aware , or sadness. It is also, however, about Genji's attempts to refine himself, to
pursue beauty and refinement. This aesthetic, miyabi , was an aesthetic of the upper
classes and distinguished life at court from everyday Japanese life. Miyabi means an
appreciation of fine things and beauty; one of the objects of miyabi is the beauty of
women. Even though the novel was written by a woman, women in the novel are
presented in their highest forms as objects of perfect beauty and symmetry. However,
since the novel primarily concerns the knowledge that things pass away, the refinement
chronicled in the novel is seen from a nostalgic point of view, a way of life or a shining
moment in Heian culture that, at the time of the writing of the novel, had passed away.

The second great work of Heian literature was the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon written
around 1000 AD. Like the Genji, the Pillow Book chronicles life in the Heian court and
the pursuit of miyabi as it is made concrete in everyday life at the court. However,
whereas Genji monogatari is governed by the aesthetic of aware , the sense that good
things ultimately pass away, the Pillow Book is governed by another aesthetic, okashi ,
which means something like "wit." The word in Japanese actually refers to anything
which causes one to smile or anything which causes delight or amsement. The Pillow
Book largely concerns events at court which are amusing, delightful, and often witty.
Unlike Genji , it does not deal with the sadness of life and, when it deals with sad events,
it often does so in an ironic way. Properly speaking, sad or tragic events are not okashi
and making light of them is a violation of literary decorum. In practice, however, if a
writer is subtle and ironic enough, even sad events can be turned into an occasion for
amusement. Together these two works, the Genji monogatari and the Pillow Book ,
which developed out of strong women's communities and cultural practices, became the
defining literary models for the aesthetics of Japanese literature in the remainder of
Japanese history.

Like so much else in early and Nara Japanese culture, it's very difficult to reassemble the
musical life of the Nara and Heian periods and before. To be sure, Japan most certainly
had a vigorous musical tradition before the advent of Chinese and Korean influence in the
sixth century. This tradition persisted in part in popular songs, most on political and
social issues, and in Shinto ritual and chant—and possibly in the court music and dances
that are handed down from the Nara and Heian. How much, however, of this music is
Japanese in origin is difficult to determine.

By the time the Japanese begin to write about music, they seem to have developed a
sophisticated musical theory that categorizes music largely on its provenance or
geographical origin. While both Japanese and American musical historians classify early
Japanese music as Buddhist, Shintoistic, popular, court music (gagaku ) , military music,
and so forth, the early Japanese thought of music as regional styles. So, if you were to
somehow transport yourself back to an educated, ancient Japanese experience of music,
you would hear distinct cultures in your music rather than hear distinct uses of the music,
which is how modern musicologists and audiences hear ancient Japanese music.

The Japanese classified music as gigaku , Togaku , To-sangaku , Koma-gaku , and

Rinyu-gaku . Unfortunately, we have no musical notation from this period in Japanese
history, but we have some idea of what this music sounded like based on written
descriptions.

The dominant secular musical style of ancient Japan was gigaku or Kure-gaku . This
was the style of music for the popular dances and pantomimes of southern China and
northern Indochina imported into Japan. It is, as near as we can tell, the most popular
official music in the late sixth century. Later, however, it fell to become the lowest form
of official music

Both Togaku and To-sangaku were musical styles derived from T'ang China. The
musical life of the T'ang court was extremely varied and multicultural; a formal set of
rules, called the "Ten Styles of Music" governed the hierarchy and use of Chinese and
foreign musical styles in court. When musical performances followed the academic rules
and types of music of the "Ten Styles of Music," this music was known as Togaku , or
T'ang music. When, however, the music consisted of popular music from T'ang China,
this music was classified as To-sangaku , or "unofficial T'ang music." Sangaku was the
most active and exciting of the early musics—interspersed between songs were
acrobatics and energetic pantomimes.

Finally, Koma-gaku was the music of the three Korean kingdoms and Rinyu-gaku was
the music of Southern Asia. The latter always involved dances and pantomimes.

In the official music of ancient Japan, music was not a separable element from any
other components. It was story, pantomime, dance, and acrobatics and all the musical
styles were understood as music and some other component. Perhaps the most persistent
fallacy that we, as moderns, bring to the experience of music is to somehow think that
music can be separated off from other aspects of a performance—in nineteenth century
European musical aesthetics, this is called "music alone." Ancient Japanese court music,
however, makes no sense without performance, pantomime, story, or dance.
We know next to nothing about the music associated with Shinto. The first
religious music we know anything about in Japan is the music introduced with Buddhism,
which largely consisted of chanting the Buddhist canon. Now, the historical Buddha
himself seemed not to approve of music; other sutras have the historical Buddha spelling
out strict rules for chanting prayers and sutras .

There are several characteristics of Buddhist chant. It's purpose is largely to produce
peace of mind and a loss of the self. As such, any display of musical talent is out of the
question as is any competition between singers or performers. It is an exoteric music, that
is, it's meant to be easily comprehended and performed by anyone with little musical
training.

It's perhaps useful to review the distinction between exoteric and esoteric music. All
music is based on two fundamental human activities: speech and movement. Speech is
the basis of music in its rhythms, tones, and cadences; music, in part, is an exaggeration
of basic tonal and rhythmical qualities of human speech. Movement is the basis of music
in that music gives sound to the movement of the body—it's not overly simplistic to say
that music is the sound of the human body in motion. Exoteric music, that is, music
designed to be comprehended and performed by a large number of people, tends to be
closer to the origins of music in speech and movement. Esoteric music, that is,
specialized music designed for an elite audience that cannot understand or perform the
music without special training, such as a Beethoven symphony, tends to be farther away
from the origins of music. In other words, exoteric music tends to sound more like speech
and movement and esoteric music sounds very little like speech or movement.

The foundation of chant is the spoken word—chanting is an exaggeration of the

patterns, tones, and rhythms in speech. Because Buddhist chant is rooted in the spoken
language, it is improvisatory. Chant performace in the early Buddhist tradition was
largely governed by qualititative rules: "keep the tones without fault" or "read quietly."
 Buddhist music arrived in Japan when the first Chinese teachers of Buddhist music
arrived in 719 and 735; the Japanese categorized this music as shomyo . These teachers
brought with them two distinct Buddhist chant styles—tendoku , or a shortened reading
of the Buddhist sutras , and bombai , or a complete sutra reading in Sanskrit. In addition,
they brought a very florid and musically complicated style of chanting called san , which
could be performed in Sanskrit, Chinese, or Japanese. The life of Buddhist monks were
surrounded by these chants; in fact, much scripture lecturing was done in chants. In
addition, all official functions involving Buddhist monks involved lengthy and florid
chants.
Shinto chant was in part a counter-reaction to Buddhism and, like so many other
aspects of Shinto, an incorporation of Buddhist practices in Shinto. Unlike Buddhism,
however, Shinto had no canonical scriptures; chanting was performed largely in prayers,
the norito , or "divine words." Like Buddhist chant, Shinto musical performance was
exoteric, designed to be performed and comprehended by anyone with little musical
training.

Perhaps the most permanent musical culture developed in early Japan was the
gagaku , or court instrumental music, developed at the Heian court. As in so many other
areas of cultural achievement, the long-lasting peace of the Heian period allowed for the
development of a distinctly Japanese style of music.

In Japanese, gagaku means "refined" (ga ) "music" (gaku ) and so is perfectly in line
with the Heian cultural value of miyabi , or "courtly refinement." Since the emphasis is
on refinement or taste, gagaku was largely experienced in the Heian period as an elite or
esoteric music, a "high culture" music in contrast to other Japanese musical traditions.
Like other early Japanese musical traditions, gagaku is not "music alone" but rather
music and dance or pantomime. The entire gagaku experience, from the music to the
singing to the story to the dance was regarded as refined and elegant. It's important,
however, to understand that gagaku is not a distinct musical classification, like
"Baroque," but is a category that subsumes several musical and performance genres. It is
largely a distinction between music for refined, courtly tastes, and all other types of
music.
Like ancient court music, gagaku is largely divided up according to the origin of the
musical style. The highest style is the Togaku , or T'ang courtly music, following the
programmatic rules of the "Ten Styles of Music." Next to the Togaku was the
Komagaku , or musical styles from the Korean kingdoms.

Distinct from this group were Japanese vocal music accompanied by elaborate, masked
and costumed pantomimes. Finally, the last group of gagaku music were the saibara , or
Japanese folk songs (sung in Chinese) and roei , or courtly songs written in T'ang style.

The daily life of the Japanese imperial court was filled with gagaku and, occasionally,
shomyo . All ceremonies, weddings, funerals, affairs of state, all would be accompanied
by the musical style most appropriate to the occasion with Togaku and Komagaku
reserved for the most solemn or serious events. It was during the Heian period that the
Japanese began to develop a distinct music theory as well, mainly in trying to distinguish
between gagaku , the music of the court, from shomyo , the music of the Buddhists.
Music theory was housed in an official Imperial department, the gagaku department, that
had as its task the formal training of gagaku musicians.

Now, even though music theory was not highly developed in the Heian period, it's a
significant development. For music theory as a cultural practice has one and only one
function: training both performers and audiences how to listen to music. Music theory is
the way that cultures formally make esoterism a primary value in music—without proper
training, one cannot properly perform or listen to music.

Japanese music theory was wholly derived from Chinese musical theory which dated
back at least to the fifth century BC. In Chinese music theory, the five tones of the
musical scale (called a pentatonic scale) were intimately related to all the other "fives"
based on the five material agents: the directions, the seasons, organs, animals, etc. The
five material agents were a sophisticated theory of change: all change, including musical
change, was governed by the relationship of the five material agents either as they
engendered one another or conquered one another. These two possible relationships—the
sequence of the five material agents as the either engender or conquer one another—in
part governed the sequence of notes in the scale.

In addition, the five material agents were collapsed in a larger notion of yang and yin,
the male (creation) and female (completion) principles of change in the universe.
Likewise, the pentatonic scale was divided into a male scale and a female scale, or ryo
and ritsu in Japanese. The most important note in the pentatonic scale is the third note of
the scale, called the "cornerstone"—in the correspondences with the five material agents,
the "cornerstone" corresponds to the agent wood (and so to Spring and the East, or
beginnings, and jen , or "benevolence, humaneness," the most important of the virtues).
While in the West we define tonal scales based on the first note of the scale (called the
tonic), in Chinese and Japanese music, the scale is defined by the cornerstone, or third
note. If the relationship between the first note (kung , which corresponds to the earth
agent and the center) of the scale and the cornerstone form a perfect third (if you play
middle C and E on a piano, you're playing a perfect third), the scale is male; if these two
notes form a perfect fourth (like middle C and F on a piano), the scale is female. Here,
check this out. Go to a piano and play only the black keys—that's a pentatonic scale. If
you play a scale starting at C sharp, you're playing a male scale—the first note is C sharp
and the cornerstone is F sharp, a perfect third. If you play a five note scale starting at D
sharp, you're playing a female scale—the first note is D sharp and the cornerstone is G
sharp, a perfect fourth.

Finally, Chinese and Japanese musical theory were based on the eight categories of
sound (Chinese: pa yin ): metal (bells), stone (stone chimes), earth (ocarina), leather
(drums), silk (stringed instruments), wood (double reed wind instruments), gourd (sho ,
or mouth organ), and bamboo (flute).
 So, what does that mean for you? If you really want to listen to early Japanese music
the way, it seems, that a cultured audience would listen and understand it, you'd
understand the music in all these aspects: how are the notes of the scale related to one
another? Is the piece in a male or female scale? What are the relationships between the
categories of sound?

By the end of the Heian period, the T'ang dynasty in China had fallen (907 AD) and
Japan had more or less cut off diplomatic and economic relations with China. As a result,
Chinese music became less important at court and the saibara and roiei began to
dominate. In the early tenth century, the Imperial court officially set up a "Native Music
Department" whose task it was to formally lay down and adhere to rules of native music
performance and composition. As with the gagaku department, the "Native Music
Department" formally elevated some indigenous music to the status of high culture.

The ancient Japanese thought of musical instruments as two distinct categories:

percussion and all others. When the gagaku department was set up, the Heian court also
set up a percussion department which in the course of the period became a separate guild.
The instruments associated with gagaku were stringed instruments and wind instruments
similar to the flute; the percussion instruments, however, were seen as lesser instruments.

Principle among the stringed instruments was the biwa , which, like so much else in
Japanese music culture, was imported from China (in China the instrument is known as
the pi'pa ). It not only seems to have been the most important instrument in court
orchestras, the biwa was also a work of fine art as the ancient biwas that come down to us
are among the finest crafted works of the Heian period. The biwa is a four-stringed
instrument whose tonal range occupies the whole of the European bass clef; it is tuned to
six "modes' of five tones. While it was the premier solo instrument in T'ang China, in
gagaku orchestras it was common but tended to be used for the grunt work—the bulk of
the musical work was done by the six-stringed wagon and the thirteen-stringed koto with
their more complex and rich modes.

Among the wind instruments, the principle instruments seem to have been the
shakuhachi , a bamboo flute, and the sho , a mouth organ built of seventeen bamboo
pipes arranged in a circle, both of which are derived from either Chinese or Korean
musical instruments. The shakuhachi flute is played with the flute dangling down in front
of the performer; in the Heian period, transverse flutes (flutes which point out to the side
when played by the performer like the Western flute) were all the rage.

Percussion was a standard part of both Chinese and Japanese ensemble music. Three of
the tonal categories in Chinese and Japanese musical theory were taken up by percussion:
metal, stone, and leather. From Chinese music, the Japanese employed three percussion
instruments: a side drum (kakko ), a bronze gong (shoko ), and a large, hanging drum
struck by two large, heavy drumsticks (taiko ). In later Japanese music, the taiko would
become an important solo instrument in its own right and taiko ensemble music became
some of the most spectacular "music alone" performance in Japanese tradition. As with
most percussion, taiko music is very close to the origins of music in the movement of the
body and a real experience requires seeing as well as hearing the performance. Taiko
performance is based on the modulation between the "female" (left hand) and "male"
(right hand) strokes of the drumsticks—the female stroke is always soft and the male is
always a strong stroke. The modulation between soft and strong is the primary
component of taiko performance.

In addition to court music, percussion was a vital part of Buddhist ceremonies and
processions. The instruments and rhythms were different than court music, but Buddhist
life and ceremony was filled with percussive richness.

The visual arts in Japan begin at a remarkably early period—in fact, over twelve
thousand years ago. Unlike any other people that we know of, the Jomon culture that
inhabited Japan developed ceramics long before any other culture. It is traditional in
anthropology to consider pottery to be a human development that occurs only after the
invention of agriculture around the world. Pottery, along with agriculture, is what
traditionally separates mesolithic from neolithic cultures. However, several thousand
years before any human being ever engaged in any activity remotely resembling
agriculture, the hunter-gatherer Jomon were not only crafting pottery, but crafting pottery
of incredible design. The pottery was built from stacked coils and the raised lines that
mark the boundary of these coils give the pottery a "roped" look—hence the name Jomon
or "roped."

Despite the very early appearance of pottery, the Jomon peoples very slowly developed
different visual designs, using their fingers or string to impress repeated designs on the
surface. In the Middle Jomon period (2500-1500 B.C.), the Jomon people became more
settled and began producing figurines. The simple decorations of their ceramics develop
into highly energetic decorations in this period. While the figurines of the Middle, Late
(1500-1000 B.C.) and Final Jomon (1000-300 B.C.) periods are identifiably human, they
remain abstract and highly stylized.

In architecture, we know that from the Middle Jomon period onwards, the people lived
in pit-houses dug about four or five feet into the ground. The pit-house would be standard
architecture well into the Heian period, and all the legends of the gods recounted in the
Nihongi and Kojiki have gods living in muro, or pit-houses.
As has been discussed in more detail in the section on the Yayoi, this short period
in Japanese history, lasting from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D., introduced the most dramatic
cultural changes in Japanese society. The culture changed from a semi-agricultural
kinship based culture to a class-based culture. The Yayoi lived in settled agricultural
communities, cultivated rice, and worked in bronze and iron (making them officially
"modern" humans).
 The development of settled communities and agriculture changed Japanese architecture
from a pit-house dominated architecture to a raised building architecture. It also allowed
for the development of purely ceremonial objects, such as bells. The pottery and metal
vases evidence elaborate and sophisticated designs, many of which were imported from
China. Like so much else in Japanese culture, much of the arts and technologies of the
Yayoi period were imported from Korea and China.
More than anything else, the visual art which stands out from the Kofun period
are the massive tombs built for powerful emperors and others, some immensely long.
Many cultures, including cultures in the New World, developed some kind of similar
funerary architecture, but we seem understand its origin in Japan. The Yayoi traditionally
buried their dead on hillsides overlooking farmland; the great hill-tombs built by the
Kufun are probably an extension of this practice. Rather than burying important dead on
a hillside, the Kufun Japanese simply built an entire hill for them.

As with some of the very best tomb-mounds, the Japanese kufun can be truly
spectacular. Shaped either as a circle or a keyhole, these hills were built over burial
chambers. By the fifth century, massive artificial hills surrounded by moats were being
built. The largest of them, built for Nintoku Tenno, is over 1600 feet long and 90 feet
high—the entire tomb, including its three moats, takes up almost 460 acres!

We know much about Kufun visual arts because the dead were accompanied by objects
that, supposedly, they would carry into the next world. Besides food, these objects
included iron tools and weapons, jewelry, pottery, mirrors and, most intriguing of all,
clay figurines we call haniwa.

The exact nature and purpose of the haniwa remains a mystery, but the Kofun Japanese
produced them in prodigious numbers. These small clay figurines were almost always
representational of Kofun people and material culture to some degree. Some are of
houses, shields, tools, and humans. The Kofun people are representing the world around
them to some degree, and their representations allow us to glimpse not only how they
lived, but how they thought of how they lived.

As haniwa crafstpeople improved their skills through the Kofun period, the human
figurines begin to be recognizable on the basis of their economic function: soldiers,
hunters, singers, dancers, and so on. The largest number of human figurines show men in
armor, which suggests that either the period was one of constant warfare (confirmed in
part by the Nihongi and the Kojiki, the first Japanese histories of Japan) or else that the
intended audience prized warfare in some way.

There's another intriguing aspect to the haniwa—they not only represent economic
function, they often represent the figure's state of mind. Warrior figures, for instance,
tend to have neutral features. A haniwa of a farmer found in Gunma has instead a huge
smile on his face, suggesting that the craftsperson intended to represent peasant life as
relatively free from care.
 From the Yayoi period onwards, Japanese visual arts are not easily separable
from Korean or Chinese arts. The tumuli and the haniwa of the Kofun period are notable
exceptions, but on the whole the visual arts were derivative of continental models. This
derivative nature would seem to become outright slavishness in the seventh and eighth
centuries when the Japanese visual imagination began to explode into a variety of visual
genres.

This explosion of the visual imagination in Japan was at its most dynamic in the
buiilding of temples. From what we know of early Shinto, very little emphasis was placed
on buildings in its practice. At most, some places were considered sacred and small
shrines were built, but full-out temple worship and architecture seems to have been alien
to early Shinto. The contact with the mainland introduced the idea and practice of temple
worship, mainly through Buddhism, and this initially was applied to Shinto.

If you were to identify one and only one radical departure in the visual world of the
ancient Japanese, this building of temples would probably be your best candidate. While
the Japanese certainly drew on some Chinese models, the overall architectural model that
they followed was that of the granary, an indigenous architectural development in the
early Yayoi period. The granary was an elevated wooden structure designed to house rice
well above the ground. The granary was built on a scaffolding that elevated the granary;
steep steps led up to an entrance.

The very first Shinto temples would follow the granary model closely. The greatest of
these temples is the Grand Shrine at Ise, which became the center of the national Shinto
cult. The center of these architectural complexes is the honden, or main hall. The
architecture of Shinto, unlike that of Buddhism, is almost entirely an architecture of
ritual. The shrine complexes are about a series of purification rituals—one, you might
say, proceeds through the architecture in stages until one is pure enough to get close to
the precincts enclosing the honden (only priests could enter these precincts. The
architecture of these shrines is closely integrated with the natural surroundings. The
Shinto gods are primarily natural forces, so the architecture gives way to natural
formations, such as rivers and forests, as part of the spatial organization of the ritual. For
instance, at the shrines at Ise, worshippers follow a path with torii , or basins, available to
wash and purify the mouth and face. These give way, however, to a river, which in
ancient Japan had to be waded through to continue the complex. Wading through this
river purified one even more completely then the torii .

This is important to understand. From what we gather about the architecture of Shinto,
the human made materials were meant to be an extension of the natural world. The
artificial distinction that we make between human architecture and the surrounding
natural world did not seem to operate in the visual imagination of Shinto. It's quite
possible that the worshippers at these large shrine complexes saw little distinction
between human architecture and natural formations.

As earlier indicated, temple building was largely introduced through Buddhism. This
religion, however, got off to a shaky start in Japan. It wasn't until 593 that the first
Buddhist temple, the Shitennoji, was built in Nara (present-day Osaka). These early
temples were almost slavish imitations of Korean Buddhist temples, consisting of a
central pagoda surrounded by three buildings (kondo) with everything surrounded by a
roofed corridor.

Not only was temple building introduced into Japan with Buddhism, but sculpture as
well. The first large sculptures produced in Japan were those of the Buddha. These early
sculptures, produced in prodigious number from the seventh century onwards, drew their
visual language almost entirely from Chinese and Korean models.

By the beginning of the Nara period (710-794), Japanese visual arts were almost
totally dominated by Buddhism and by Chinese subjects. The Nara period did not
fundamentally challenge this state of affairs. Marked by ferocious building, sculpture,
and painting activity, the arts of the Nara period largely served the expanding Buddhist
culture centered around Nara and later Mount Hiei.

It wasn't until the Heian period (794-1185) that the visual arts began to change.
Paramount among these changes was the development of yamato-e, or Japanese painting.
The yamato-e depicted Japanese subjects and scenes from Japanese life. Once this genre
of painting was created it also created retrospectively the genre of kara-e, or "Chinese
painting." While yamato-e would not have the same prestige as kara-e, the depiction of
Japanese scenes required a different visual imagination.
This development in the Japanese visual imagination was a highly gendered one. In the
Heian court culture, women's communities were the most significant culturally creative
centers of Japanese society. In addition to literature, women also influenced the nature of
painting until two distinct painting styles were recognized: otoko-e, or "men's paintings,"
and onna-e, or "women's paintings." Otoko-e was characterized by strong calligraphic
outlines on figures with washed colors so that these strong lines would not be
overwhelmed by the color—the illustration below, from the illustrated manuscript
Shigisan engi emaki , beautifully represents the style of otoko-e. Onna-e was
characterized by rich colors and subtle outlines. The otoko-e was the medium for action
subjects involving war or conflict; the onna-e was the medium for communicating, or
courtliness, appropriate to the literature of miyabi, such as The Tale of Genji. The most
interesting aspect of onna-e is the "cutaway" painting, in which interior scenes are
painted by "cutting away" the roof. The viewer seems to be looking down into a house or
room from which the roof has been removed. This unique illustrative device points out
the dominant aspect of onna-e: it is primarily concerned with the Japanese life that goes
on inside the court or house, while the otoko-e is primarily concerned with the public life
outside the court or house. Both of these painting styles emerged as a means to represent
specifically Japanese subjects and the cultural ideas represented in these subjects.

The greatest artistic medium of these new painting styles was the illustrated manuscript,
or emakimono, developed in the late 900's. The emakimono ("painted scrolls") were
really scrolls that one rolled out. Illustrations would occupy the full height of the scroll;
beside the illustration would be the story. The greatest of these scrolls is the Genji
monogatari emaki , an illustrated scroll of The Tale of Genji from the early 1100's.
 Buddhism during the Heian period underwent some dramatic changes. Among these
was the introduction of Pure Land Buddhism, a salvation religion based on a bodhisattva
(manifestation) of the Buddha called Amitabha or Amida in Japanese.

The late Heian nobility eagerly adopted Pure Land Buddhism, which promised its
adherents entrance into a Land of Pure Bliss, or Paradise, on their death if they had faith
in Amida. Pure Land Buddhists believed that the death of a believer would be
accompanied spiritually by a great celebration, called a raigo , in which the Amida
Buddha would come to the newly released spirit with twenty-five Buddhas and thousands
of bodhisattvas, all accompanied by a purple cloud, flowers, perfume, and music.

Among the upper classes, raigo paintings and sculpture became very popular, as they
depicted the Amida Buddha coming down in celebration in relation to dead relatives or to
one's own house. Some of these paintings are clearly yamato-e , or Japanese paintings in
that they gave artists a chance to paint Japanese landscapes.