9.1: Hei’an Government 794-1185

From supporting the imperial throne, Nara’s Buddhist establishment became powerful on its own account. A Nara monk even co-ruled with an empress who had retired, become a nun, but then returned to power. Perhaps to reassert imperial independence, the court moved again, settling in its final location, Hei’an, today’s Kyoto, in 794. From then on, emperors were men. Like other East Asian rulers, the emperor spent much of his time in elaborate ceremonies that affirmed his centrality. Unlike mainland emperors, however, Japanese emperors often abdicated at about age thirty. From about 750 to 850 there was energetic direct rule by emperors, including Shōmu, the builder of Tōdaiji. They built Hei’an, barely managing to complete the government center and northern section of the planned Tang-style grid by reusing timbers and tiles. They promoted temple construction and study of Buddhist works within and outside Heian to compete with power of Nara temples. They fostered contacts with Silla and Tang, simplified administrative procedures, and made military organization more effective, using a conscript army until 792, and then hiring professional generals with their own troops. The army pushed the remaining hunter/gatherer cultures further north and east, but the regime still did not hold all of Honshu.

After 850, like most Han and Silla monarchs, the emperor often had little real power over the aristocracy around him. For about two centuries, Fujiwara fathers-in-law made personnel and policy decisions, governing as regents, as Han empresses had done. They made sure that they always had a young son or grandson on the throne by forcing emperors to abdicate as soon as a son was born. Regency became so normal that eventually even adult emperors did not really rule, but had Fujiwara regents. The Fujiwara did face resistance from emperors canny enough to ally with nobles of other clans; the most famous such ally was Sugawara no Michizane (845 -903), who was defeated and exiled. He bewailed his fate in poetry, and his angry spirit caused calamities, so a shrine was established to settle him, and over time he became the patron god of literature. The Fujiwara gradually lost power to abbots, warriors, and other aristocrats, but in particular, from about 1050 to 1180, retired emperors dominated young emperors indirectly in similar ways. Emperor Go-Sanjō was able to reclaim imperial authority for a while by favoring other clans and pitting Fujiwaras against one another.

Even as the aristocratic clans served in a bureaucracy based on Tang models, as ministers at the center, provincial governors in the localities, and even as local officials below them; and even as they became proficient in all the polite arts, and lived a life of luxury, they did not cease competing with one another. But they gave up their horses, iron weapons and armor until many could not ride at all. Their competition moved to the realm of culture. Compared with other East Asian regimes, that court infighting shed little blood. No clan was wiped out (unlike, say, the relatives of Han Empress Lü), and the Yamato line was not threatened with replacement as in the many coups of the mainland. Why?

It was not merely that there were no external military threats, because the relatively safe southern mainland dynasties had still displaced one another quickly in the period of division. What we might call a balance of weakness kept the whole aristocracy – perhaps .01% of Japan’s population – in place for four or five centuries. Only from about 1185, or some say 1250, was aristocratic power overthrown, as a new group – the samurai – rose to power and created an entirely different culture.² Even then the old nobles were not slaughtered as Huang Chao slaughtered Tang aristocrats. They simply lost some power.