7.5: Yamato Centralization
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Taming the Clans
Another legacy of the Koguryŏ wars was the centralization of Japan. In Chapter Six we saw how Yūryaku and his Yamato court had begun with symbolic visits, titles, and gifts to win recognition as the top, or center, of a network of chiefs of clans and regions. Centralization might have gone no further. As archaeologist Habuta Yoshiyuki writes, “Because a political system armed with a well-defined territorial boundary and centralized authority is a rare thing in human history, we scholars must be conscientious about avoiding assumptions based on the influence of present-day political systems.”12 That the islands would become one nation was not foreordained, nor was that something that the chiefs and clans envisioned.
By about 600, the Yamato court almost monopolized the prestige goods coming in from Silla and Paekche. The court, recall, coordinated the production of horses and iron in regions well-suited to those ventures. Each statelet or clan sent tribute and family members to serve the Yamato court in specialized ways. The Mononobe had military responsibilities, the Nakatomi/Fujiwara specialized in Shinto ritual. The Kibi no Ama no Atai family may have been put in charge of diplomatic relations with the peninsular kingdoms, because of their long-term connections there.
But each chief still ruled his own statelet. Even after accepting titles and court roles from Yamato, each chiefly clan maintained its own kami (totem, deity, or spirit) and traditions. Each clan had an oral tradition about whichever kami was its ancestor or sponsor – for not all claimed to be descended from the kami. Each clan head kept up sacrifices to that deity, as a claim to nobility and political authority. The adoption of the new gods of Buddhism was also attached to various clans, including the Hata immigrant family of Kibi, who built a Buddhist temple there in about 625 using Paekche-style rooftiles, and the Soga clan. As a method of centralizing power, prestige goods and violence could do only so much.
To increase its power and authority, Yamato imported ideas and organization from the mainland, including Buddhism, Confucianism, and ways to govern. Silla and especially Paekche provided them. The major players at the Yamato court in the late sixth and early seventh centuries were the Soga clan, possibly immigrants from the peninsula (scholars do not agree), who dominated the Yamato line matrilineally: marrying and thus giving birth to Yamato kings. They relied on Buddhism, and their sponsorship of the new religion played a role in their competition with the other clans. The most important Soga figures are empress Suiko (r. 592- 628) and her nephew Prince Shōtoku (574-622). The document known as “Prince Shōtoku’s 17- Article Constitution” introduced Buddhist and Confucian ideas in order to differentiate the Yamato line from all other clans, elevating the king.
Why would the clans accept that? The basic reason was fear.
In 598, as Sui sent troops against Koguryŏ, Wa (probably the Yamato court) sent envoys to Sui, hoping to avoid attack. More missions went to Tang, with the same aim, but that became urgent only in 645, as Tang Taizong, allied with Silla’s Queen Sŏndŏk, hurled his forces against Koguryŏ. At that point, Yamato Prince Naka no Ōe and a clan chief Nakatomi no Kamatari (615-669, later granted the surname Fujiwara) ousted the Soga clan, while implementing the kinds of changes Prince Shōtoku’s “constitution” envisaged. Nakatomi dominated the court as head of the anti-Buddhist Shinto ritual experts. He could see trouble coming from Tang, and despite disliking Buddhism – some thought that the old gods were angry about the Buddhist images and were causing widespread illness – he relied on Paekche immigrants to import bureaucratic methods of government. The Taika reforms of 646 laid out what is called the ritsruryō (律令) system: a Legalist structure that included a bureaucratic division of court administration, the division of territory into “provinces” (kuni 国) and “districts” (郡), and the registration of all residents as taxpayers. The point was to increase the prestige of the Yamato clan and the control of the central government over manpower and resources in much of Japan. The other clans signed on, because they were afraid of attack by the Tang-Silla alliance.
But Tang Taizong lost. Pressure let up. The Taika reforms did not really go into effect for another twenty years. In 663, as allies of Paekche, Wa forces experienced a huge defeat by Tang and Silla. They lost four hundred boats and ten thousand men – probably just meaning “an awful lot.” The military defeat finally convinced the recalcitrant clans to accept a centralized administration under Yamato that could arm and feed enough soldiers to fend off attack. The arrival of large numbers of literate refugees from the peninsula, as well as Tang prisoners, made available the personnel to design and take various administrative measures.
Nakatomi/Fujiwara’s protégé Naka no Ōe, now ruling as Tenji (r. 661-672), oversaw the first systematic registration of households for tax collection and military duty, a survey of farmland and division into standard-sized fields, a new legal code regulating family property and other matters, – and the earliest firmly dateable poems in the Manyoshu, written in Old Japanese using Chinese characters. Tens of thousands of excavated wooden tablets show that bureaucratic control – counting, taxing, measuring, moving people, moving goods – extended to Shikoku, to Kyushu, and halfway up Honshu. As provinces and commanderies were set up across more and of the islands, the Yamato court’s power increased.
The chiefs agreed to become members of an organized aristocracy, ruled by and serving as officials in a central, Legalist state, because they were afraid that Tang and Silla might set their sights on the islands. To block entry at the easiest, oldest point of access, in 663 the court set up an office in Kyushu, right where immigration from the peninsula had started the process of civilizational transfer many centuries earlier.13
Descent from the Sun-Goddess
The final important steps in Yamato centralization were taken by Tenji’s brother Temmu (r. 672-686) and his wife Jitō (d.702). Temmu was the first Japanese ruler, and when he died Jitō was the second, to use the title “tennō” 天皇 “heavenly shining,” which, like the Qin term huangdi 皇帝, we translate as “emperor” or “empress.” (Empress Wu of Tang borrowed the title).
Temmu and Jitō centralized power with both organization and ideology. In terms of organization, they decreed that only their direct descendants could hold the throne. They rewarded their supporters with Tang-style court ranks and with positions in a Tang-style government structure centered on the court. They convinced aristocrats, the former chiefs, to their acquiescence in central control through bureaucracy in exchange for these honors and official posts. Like the Qin emperor, Temmu and Jitō moved the aristocrats to their new capital city, away from their original territories. They busied the former chiefs with an extensive calendar of Buddhist and Shinto rituals. They set them to learning Chinese, and studying the classics, poetry, painting and calligraphy, music and dance. Legalist government and mainland culture, funneled largely through the peninsula, tamed the clans.
Across East Asia, rulers had claimed to be descended from illustrious figures. For instance, the Tang had claimed descent from Laozi, mythical author of the Dao De Jing, who had become a god. Koguryŏ and Paekche both claimed descent from the royal house of the northern state of Puyŏ.14 Such claims made sense in an aristocratic age, when people’s quality depended on the status of their birth families. So now, to legitimate the principle that only their direct descendants could hold the throne, co-rulers Temmu and Jitō stressed that each clan’s status had originally come from their descent from a god of some kind.
And, the co-rulers stressed, the Yamato line – their ancestors – came from the sungoddess Amaterasu. She had installed her grandson Hononinigi as the first ruler of Japan; his descendant was the emperor Jimmu, who conquered the whole archipelago in 660 BC; and from him the throne had descended within the Yamato family in an unbroken succession down to Temmu, himself a deity. To institutionalize this idea of imperial descent from Great Goddess Amaterasu, she was made top god in a Shinto pantheon that included all the clan deities. In the bureaucracy, the Council of Kami Affairs was placed beside the Council of State, right under the emperor, and given the responsibility for organizing, developing, and administering Great Goddess shrines, rituals, offerings, priests, and patronage. The Ise Grand Shrine to the Goddess hosted the most spectacular rituals conducted by the highest-ranking Shinto priests. A huge amount of ritual regulation about worship of Amaterasu was written into the Engishiki.15 The court rejected the designation Wa, and named their country “Origin of the Sun” (Nippon 日本), or “Japan.”
The Nara Period (710-784)
To impose this false narrative – for as you know there was not even an unbroken Yamato descent line going back to Yūryaku – Temmu and Jitō began sponsoring historiography. Their daughter-in-law (and Jitō’s half-sister) Genmei (r. 707-715) continued the project. The results, both written in classical Chinese, were the Records of Ancient Matters (Kojiki, 712), and Chronicles (Nihon Shoki, 720, a mainland-style official history). Along with other older myths of gods and heroes, and more accurate historical accounts, they embedded stories promoting the unbroken Yamato connection to the goddess. As people died and texts lived, over the centuries those stories came to be ardently believed, like the stories of Yao, Shun, and Yu, dynastic founders across East Asia, and other myths.
As well as overseeing the histories, Genmei built a new capital city between 708 and 712. The Yamato court had gradually moved beyond thatched wooden halls, abandoned at the death of each ruler to avoid pollution. Jitō had built a first Tang-style capital in 694. Genmei’s capital Nara, slightly to the north, replaced it. The new capital housed a centralized administration that, when it took final form with the Taihō Code (701), included household registration, taxation including military service for all commoner men, the minting of coins, and the Tang equal fields system of redistributing fields after a census taken every six years. Coastal and mountain resources, though far more important to the economy than they were on the mainland, were not included, because the Tang model excluded them.
Nara housed an imperial academy where four hundred young aristocrats studied the Classics, calligraphy, mathematics, law, and how to pronounce Chinese characters in Chinese. (They could be read in Japanese pronunciation, too, and simplified versions of characters were used to represent Japanese language – a system called hiragana.) Theoretically there were schools in each province, too. But the provincial schools could not find enough teachers, and the academy’s promise of meritocratic advancement proved hollow: not only were government positions dominated by the top clans, but even teaching posts at the academy became hereditary. Probably only 20,000 people out of the population of five or six million could read at all.
As more literate people learned about Confucianism, Empress Kōken in 757 required every household to own the Classic of Filial Piety. But as in Tang, it is quite unlikely that that happened, and impossible that everyone could read it. More likely is that the Classic of Filial Piety was distributed as a kind of magical object. For in 770, Empress Shōtoku also had a million printed copies of a charm written in Sanskrit, each in a miniature pagoda, distributed. Nara-period emperors promoted Buddhism by creating a national network of temples, carrying out Buddhist rituals, promulgated scriptures, and so on.
The Tōdaiji (Great Eastern Temple) built by Emperor Shōmu in Nara is today the world’s largest wooden structure. When we consider that until the reign of Empress Suiko, in 592, the court itself had been living in wooden huts, the enormous temple shows how quickly architectural knowledge had grown. Because of the international Buddhist tradition of grand scale, Buddhism was perhaps even more useful than Shinto for expressing the centrality of the monarch, as the northern mainland regimes had done in the period of division. It could subsume Shinto gods and send political messages that way. For example, the Tōdaiji’s sixty-four-foot high gilded bronze Buddha was accompanied by a small shrine to an important Shinto deity of Kyushu, where a rebel group of Fujiwara was defeated: once they submitted to the Yamato court, they were re-incorporated in a supporting role, as the small statue symbolized. The blazing gold Buddha, surrounded by smaller figures, sent a clear message that the ruler who created it was rich and powerful.
As for the US, that power resided partly in the control of natural resources that had scarcely been tapped. Historian Conrad Totman argues that the temples built in Japan between 600 and 850 required almost four million cubic yards of wood. Building the Tōdaiji temple complex – initially two nine-story pagodas and a meeting hall measuring about 50 by 86 yards – would have taken the timber grown on about 3.4 square miles. After Tōdaiji burned down in 1180, there was little local wood, because so many other temples and mansions had been built. The court had to build 118 dams to create water flows to carry suitable timber from all over Japan. Firing bricks and clay tiles, and making the mortar to hold bricks together, required so much that by the Hei’an period, the kilns had been moved 50 miles from the capital where wood was still available. Quarrying clay and stone meant further environmental costs.16
Buddhism took a huge toll on the landscape everywhere in Asia, not just in Japan. Tang Empress Wu built a wooden tower almost 1,000 feet tall, which housed a statue of Maitreya over 900 feet tall. As well as demonstrating imperial piety, and channeling supernatural support for dynasties, these immense structures vividly communicated the vast power of the donors – the rulers – over land and labor.
Of course, it was ordinary people who built the huge temples and palaces. Totman has argued that workers were gathered and settled in labor camps to build the temples, and suffered from all the ills that living away from home in temporary shelters brings.17 Wooden statues could be gilded pressing gold leaf onto a sticky lacquer layer. Craftsmen under Empress Wu Zhao of Tang shaped a huge Buddha (so large its pinky finger could hold many people) of clay, wrapped it in cloth, painted it with layers of lacquer, and then shattered and removed the clay core.18 But the Tōdaiji’s large figure, and many other Buddhas across East Asia, were of bronze. Gilding bronze is an arduous ten-step process that involves painting the figure with a mixture of mercury and gold, and slowly burning off the mercury as gas. Not only did gilding the Tōdaiji Buddha take five years (752-757), and use yet more wood, but the craftspeople, even if they were protected by masks, inhaled the mercury gas, which of course left nerve and organ damage.19
When we consider that these artisans, and the lumberjacks and carpenters, and the specialized craftspeople who made the gold, silver, silk, items for those elaborate temples and their ceremonies, and the monks and nuns themselves, and the musicians – when we consider all those people who had to be fed by someone else, we can see that imperial Buddhism must have pushed forward riziculture in Japan. Historian Amino Yoshihiko argues that the Nara and Hei’an textual stress on rice as the center of the economy, including the rituals around rice production and the key role of rice in the myth of Amaterasu and Susano-o, was ideological, as much as factual. It represented adoption of the high-prestige Tang model of the state. People were growing millet, barley, buckwheat, and root crops, and given the long coastline and mountainous forests, people found it much easier to eat fish, seaweed, and nuts and other things growing in the forests. Rice had come to the archipelago from the peninsula by about 900 BC, but it requires a lot of work every season, even after forests have been cleared and marshes drained. On the other hand, rice feeds a lot of people – it offers more calories per bowl than other grains, and a higher yield per bushel of seed. Both the association of rice with the Tang system and the state’s need for labor probably pushed forward the adoption of rice.
Silla State Structure
Silla, last of the Three Kingdoms to begin consolidation, arose from the Chinhan tribal confederation in the southeastern peninsula. It centered on six villages or clans – the most important being Hwe and Sahwe – but the chiefs came, armed and mounted, from the north, and never fully integrated with the locals they dominated. Silla adopted mainland knowledge primarily from Koguryŏ, secondarily from Paekche, and only indirectly from the mainland before the mid-seventh century. The Silla ruling husband and wife Naemul (r. 356-402) and Poban (r. approx. same) sent envoys along with a diplomatic mission from Koguryŏ to one of the mainland regimes, and this seems to have been part of very early stages in consolidating Silla power; shortly thereafter Silla rulers took on a new title. In about 500, Silla formed as a duarchy, with a primary ruler from the Hwe and a backup from the Sahwe clan. Buddhism – a measure of the openness to mainland ideas – was declared an official religion in Silla only in 535, a century and half after Paekche and Koguryŏ and about the same time as Yamato.
Despite its late development, Silla was the kingdom that unified most of the peninsula. But that unification, scholars agree, was only a surface phenomenon, when compared with Sui and Tang, on the one hand, and the later Koryŏ on the other. More on this in the next chapter.
Silla monarchs remained weak, barely elevated above the aristocracy descended from earlier clan chiefs. Like Yamato, Silla did adopt the junxian system of Legalist rule, dividing the whole conquered part of the peninsula (Parhae held the northernmost part of the peninsula) into nine commanderies (called “provinces”) with counties below them. Recent discoveries of village records suggest that a central fiscal ministry counted and controlled households and the land they worked. Silla set up a postal system to carry imperial commands, and bureaux for classical and Confucian learning and astronomy. It carried out ambitious irrigation projects to promote agricultural productivity. One point on which preserved sources and the Samguk yusa agree is the details of Buddhist ceremonies to protect the state, which continued to be very important right through the Silla period.20 The court built both wooden Buddhist temples in mainland style and temples cut out of rock (most famous is the Sŏkkuram Grotto), and deployed its artisans’ old skills with gold to create graceful, elegant gold images of bodhisattvas. These were all methods that other East Asian monarchs had deployed to centralize power. But few Silla monarchs could stand up to the aristocrats at court, who blocked almost all attempts to admit to high office newcomers, or even men of slightly lower aristocratic rank.
Not the monarch alone, but a council of high-ranking aristocrats made policy. Stone steles from the early sixth century refer to a decision by the highest-ranking seven men of Silla settling a property dispute, and record a public announcement by the council. More than two centuries later there is a record of the council deciding policy by unanimous vote (surely preceded by long discussion). When the monarch left no heir, it was the council that decided on the next monarch, and such lapses of course provided the greatest opportunities for aristocratic factions to maneuver at court. The fact that King Muyŏl left a competent first son to become King Munmu (文武 r. 661-681), and that he in turn left a competent eldest son, made it easier for these monarchs to centralize, for they were not beholden to the council for their thrones.21
Munmu completed the defeat of Paekche, Koguryŏ, and Tang. To rein in both Buddhist wealth and aristocratic display, he prohibited donations to Buddhist temples without government approval. He set up an “Office of the Great Religion” through which secular officials managed monks, as had been done in Northern Qi and in Japan.22 He vowed to become a dragon, protecting Silla’s eastern coast, so after death he was cremated, scattered at sea, and commemorated with an undersea turtle-shaped marker on a rocky crag along the coast. His successor, King Sinmum (681-692), managed to purge the most powerful aristocrats from government, appoint lesser nobles to important positions, and choose his own cabinet of ministers. This attempt to separate inherited rank from state authority and elevate the king lasted for about a hundred years. King Kyŏngdŏk (r. 742-765) tried to strengthen Confucian learning and a meritocratically-recruited bureaucracy, but with little success. Compared with Tang, Silla monarchs were relatively weak vis-à-vis the aristocracy.
Empress Wu Zhao
Song historians looked back in amazement at the career of the Tang’s only woman emperor, Wu Zhao (Wu Zetian) (624/5-705). In amazement – and distaste. Song gender roles were more clearly differentiated. To explain how the brilliant poets and scholar-officials of Tang could have worked under a mere woman, Song intellectual invented tales about her ruthlessness – just as the patrilinealists of Latter Han had smeared Empress Lü. Given the patterns of East Asian rulership described in this chapter, Empress Wu was not so very odd in her own time.
Wu Zhao was the daughter of a merchant who had been an early supporter of the Tang founder and of a high-ranking woman from the Sui royal family. She entered palace life as a teenager in 637, officially married to Tang Taizong as a very low-ranking consort. He paid little attention to her, but when he died, she entered a nunnery with the rest of the palace women. Taizong’s ninth son and successor, Gaozong, married her in 650 as a secondary consort. Despite opposition from many aristocrats, he elevated her to Empress in 655 after she had borne three children. The pair ruled jointly from 660 to about 673, as Temmu and Jitō were doing at the same time in Japan, and as Naemul and Poban had done earlier in Silla. When Gaozong became ill, she ruled for him until he died in 683, and then continued to hold power as several sons tired and failed to push her aside. In 684, some Tang princes (not her sons) rebelled, but the army supported Wu Zhao. In 690, Wu Zhao crowned herself emperor of a new dynasty. She called it “Zhou” to underline her claim to be descended from Zhou royalty going all the way back to King Wu, King Wen, and ultimately to Jiang Yuan, who became pregnant with Lord Millet, ancestor of the Zhou dynasty and inventor of agriculture, after stepping in a god’s footprint.
Like other medieval rulers, Wu and Gaozong drew on many different ideas to strengthen their rule. First, Confucianism. The pair presented themselves as serving the popular welfare so as to hold onto the Mandate of Heaven, and were called “the Two Sages.” Wu Zhao created a public role for herself that accorded with gendered roles, by instructing women and worshiping the silkworm deity, for instance. In ruling for Gaozong when he was ill, she displayed wifely loyalty, and won the support of officials in taking control of the reins of government (and managing the alliance with Silla). After Gaozong’s death, officials supported her continued rule in the role of wise mother when the heir-apparent, Li Xian, proved himself feckless: he had been stockpiling armor for a coup d’etat and supposedly offered the throne to his father-in-law. Wu Zhao built up further legitimacy in the six years after Gaozong’s death by linking herself with classical magic architecture and omens, all within a Confucian framework. And she promoted use of the civil service examinations, hoping to promote talented men from lower-ranked aristocratic families through a meritocratic process.
Second, Gaozong and Wu Zhao continued Tang sponsorship of Daoism. Both wrote prefaces to accompany a vast collection of Daoist scriptures. They awarded the deified Laozi (supposedly Gaozong’s ancestor) new titles. Their youngest daughter, the Taiping princess, was ordained as a Daoist priestess. They made a pilgrimage to a Daoist mountain together. And they decreed that the civil service examinations had to include questions on the Dao De Jing.23
Third, Wu Zhao was firmly embedded in the international culture of her time: A team that included Korean and Persian architects cooperated to build one of her monuments.24 So of course, like monarchs all across Asia, Wu Zhao believed in and drew on Buddhism. Throughout her public life, from 651-704, she associated herself with Buddhist virtue and deities, stressing mercy and compassion. She publicized a Buddhist sutra that prophesied the incarnation of Maitreya, Buddha of the future, in the form of a woman, as a legitimation of her own dynasty. In 693, she proclaimed herself a čakravartin, wheel-turning king, like Ashoka. One scholar has argued that her vow to promulgate hundreds of thousands of Buddhist texts led to the invention of printing, based on ancient pattern-stamp technology.25 (Wu Zhao also invented special Chinese characters used only in her reign.) The earliest extant precisely-dated printed book in the world is a copy of the Diamond Sutra made on May 11, 868.
Wu Zhao was indeed ruthless – like male rulers. Her first husband, Tang Taizong, after all, had killed his brothers and nephews when he forced his father to cede the throne in 626. She did remove sons whom she found stupid or disobedient, but the later stories about killing her own children do not appear even as vague rumors in sources close to her time. She implemented a reign of terror between 683 and 697, arresting and even killing real and potential political enemies among the aristocratic families. But she never expanded terror to the whole population (unlike twentieth-century fascist and communist regimes), nor did she abandon the broader goals of good government. While more successful than most male rulers, she was not more brutal.
At the age of about 80, Wu Zhao retired. One of her sons took the throne, and rejected the Zhou dynastic name, reestablishing Tang.26 Song historians regarded her as unique, and portrayed her as demonically clever and ruthless. But in her own time, she was not the only female ruler in East Asia, and her activities fit well into in East Asian ruling patterns.