Japan in the Heian Period and Cultural History: Crash Course World History 227 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course World History
and today we’re going to return to medieval times.
Mr. Green? Mr. Green? Finally, we get to watch
jousting and eat with our hands and root for
the Blue Knight.
Yeah, No, Me from the Past, for starters,
Medieval Times doesn't closely reflect Europe
in medieval times. And furthermore, we’re
not going to be talking about Europe in medieval
times, although we will be talking about kings
and courts and aristocratic intrigue, but
we're gonna be talking about all those things
in Japan.
So discussions of Japanese history often focus
on the Tokugawa period because it's got ninja
and samurai, but much of the foundation of
Japanese culture dates to the Heian period
between 782 and 1167 CE.
And when I say Japanese culture, I do mean
culture, because the achievements of the Heian
period were primarily artistic, especially
in literature. So for most of this episode,
we'll be looking at cultural history as opposed
to like economic or political history.
As a novelist, and also a consumer of culture,
I'm a big fan of cultural history. What I
love about it is that it embraces the human
imagination. I mean, you can't just make up
economic theories. Just kidding, you can.
Anyway, for our purposes, Heian culture is
the high culture of the upper-upper-class
aristocracy, and obviously focusing on this
tiny sliver of the upper class leaves out
the experience of most Japanese people. But
we know a lot more about the elite than we
know about everyone else because it was the
elite who were doing all of the writing things
down and they were writing about the people
they found the most interesting - themselves.
In fact one of the reasons we know a great
deal about the Heian aristocracy is because
of Japan's first great novel: The Tale of
the Genji, by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Now the
historian James Murdoch called the Heian aristocracy
"An ever-pullulating brood of greedy, needy,
frivolous dilletanti - as often as not foully
licentious, utterly effeminate, incapable
of any worthy achievement".
But when you boil all the unnecessarily fancy
words out of that quote, that sounds like
people I'm very interested in learning about.
In fact, I love some fallicentuousness.
So one of the first things we learn from texts
about the Heian aristocracy is that the aristocracy
was dominated by a craze for things Chinese.
Now Chinese visitors to Japan thought the
country was backwards and out of the way and
uncivilized.
But one of the reasons the Japanese seemed
backwards to Chinese visitors is that the
Japanese in the 10th century admired Tang
China, which had flourished a couple of hundred
years earlier. But there was also the fact
that the Japanese blended Chinese ideas, especially
Chinese Buddhism, with native traditions.
In fact one of the most interesting aspects
of Heian Japan was the overall attitude of
the aristocracy, which was characterized by
a love of color, and grandeur, and ceremony,
and ritual, that was tinged with some Buddhist-inspired
ideas. You know, it's sort of like how everyone
in Canada wears powdered wigs and knee breeches
to look like 18th century England.
And one of the central ideas in Buddhism is
that everything beautiful, and also everything
not beautiful, is fleeting. Like historian
Ivan Morris wrote that in the literature of
the time, there was a quote "feeling that
the familiar order of things will soon come
to an end." Which by the way is always an
appropriate feeling.
So the center of aristocratic court life was
the capital, Heian Jyo, which during the Heian
golden age may have had a populations as high
as 100,000 people, making it much larger than
most European cities at the time. It may have
been a glorious capital but we don’t really
know because most of the city was destroyed
by earthquakes, or possibly fires, or possibly
wars, or just the desire for new construction.
We're not sure.
We also know that the Heian aristocracy was
rigidly hierarchical, with society divided
into about 30 grades based on one's birth.
The top 4 grades were reserved for princes,
and the top 3, known as the Kugyō, received
all the most important privileges, including
governmental posts and revenues from special
rice land.
These people in the highest ranks could send
their children to university, wear ceremonial
dress, they were given lighter punishments
when they committed crimes. Can you imagine
a world in which rich people systemically
receive lighter sentences for crimes committed
than poor people?
These rules were so detailed that they even
determined what type of fan you could hold.
The top 3 ranks got to hold 25-fold fans.
But when The Tale of the Genji was written,
this rank system, like all those ranks, applied
to less than 1/10th of 1% of the total population,
so we’re really talking about the elites.
As Ivan Morris put it:
"Members of the upper class are almost all
related to each other. They are totally uninterested
in everyone outside their charmed circle and
exceedingly sensitive in judging the precise
social level of each person who does belong.
In Murasaki's milieu, to determine a person's
milieu was no simple diversion, but a matter
of overriding importance."
Now that description reminds me a lot of my
high school experience.
Aristocrats dominated the government, which
over time became more and more ceremonial
and ritualistic. In fact by the 10th century,
much government work was carried out at night
and consisted almost entirely of ceremonies.
The nice thing about doing boring ceremonial
work at night though: there was a lot of wine.
So yeah, that doesn't make for like, excellent
government efficiency. Heian Japan's economy
was not much better than its governance. There
was very little trade and attempted land reform,
which was supposed to grant every citizen
a parcel of public domain land, totally failed.
Meanwhile, aristocrats accumulated vast agricultural
land holdings, and by the 10th century court
nobles were largely supported by these tax-free
estates called manors. Now interestingly,
the nobles didn't technically own the land
outright, as they did in much of Europe. Instead
they owned the rights to income from the land
and then those rights could be transferred
to their heirs, so it was similar to ownership,
but it wasn't quite ownership.
Also different from Europe: upper-class Japanese
women could hold the rights to a manor, and
thus have a rather impressive degree of economic
power. And that matters a lot because women
played a key role in the flourishing of Heian
literary culture that makes this period of
history so interesting to study in the first
place.
Like over all this inefficient corrupt cronyism
of Japan's government and economy definitely
weakened this state. But it also provided
time and money for the aristocracy to make
beautiful and interesting things.
Let's go to the Thought Bubble. Heian aristocrats
were expected to feel melancholy over the
transience of existence.
"In Murasaki's time," according to Ivan Morris
"periodical protestations of melancholy and
gloom were essential for people who regarded
themselves as sensitive," and sensitivity
especially to art was the hallmark of aristocratic
breeding. The aristocratic gentleman is exemplified
by prince Genji himself: quote "With his gentle
nature, his sensitivity and his wide range
of artistic skills, who represented the ideal
of the age and who set the tone for the social
and cultural life of the good people"
Buddhism was very influential on the aristocrats
aesthetic ideal that beauty must be cultivated
because it is so impermanent. This quote from
the tale of Genji illustrates this focus on
impermanence: "'Like the waterfowl that play
there on the lake, I too am floating along
the surface of a transient world' I could
not help comparing them with myself. For they
too appeared to be enjoying themselves in
the most carefree fashion; yet their lives
must be full of sorrow."
Stan, are you sure that's from the tale of
Genji? I think I've seen that quote attributed
to me on Tumblr. But we don't only know about
the emotional state of the aristocracy, we
also know about their pastimes. We refer to
nobles as the leisure class for a reason after
all, they spent a lot of time playing games,
and engaging in contests.
Poetry contests were popular, as were board
games, like Go, and much of their time was
taken up with ceremonies and rituals.
Here is an example from the court calendar:
"18th day: Bowman's Wager, the new year's
celebrations are concluded by an archery contest
which is held in his majesties presence between
officers of the inner and middle palace guards.
This is followed by a banquet during which
court dances are performed and prizes awarded
to the winning side. Members of the losing
side are forced to drink the cup of defeat."
Thanks, Thought Bubble. I'd like to make an
announcement here at Crash Course from now
on whenever we refer to anyone losing anything
we will say that they were forced to drink
from the cup of defeat.
So you know other than pure Game of Thrones
style drama, this highly ritualized very insular
social order of the elites of the elites of
the elites isn't usually the kind of stuff
we'd study at Crash Course.
But first, thinking about the lives of the
Heian aristocracy tells us something about
the lives of the rich and powerful generally.
Like obviously they had to increasingly separate
themselves from each other to feel more and
more wealthy and powerful.
Which progressively led to them being more
and more separated from, you know, the vast,
vast majority of people living in Japan. But
also they produced and consumed cultural artifacts
that came to define the style of the age but
also have continued to shape culture.
Heian aristocracy and the documents that describe
it tell us a lot about women, who as we've
seen are often left out of historical narratives.
The Heian period, at least culturally, was
dominated by women, particularly Murasaki
Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon.
So in some ways at least, unlike almost everything
we've studied, our view of the period is dominated
by women's perspectives, although it is the
perspective of the most privileged women.
And what we see is consistent with a lot of
upper-class mores: these women are obsessed
with their looks, and especially with their
clothes which were cumbersome and heavy. They
were expected to wear their hair very long,
preferably reaching to the ground. They had
to powder their faces and blacken their teeth
and they lived the circumscribed lives typical
of upper-class women throughout the world.
Although there were some legal protections
that they enjoyed: like we talked about how
they could have income from property. Laws
also protected them from physical violence,
specifically prohibiting a husband from beating
his wife, which might not sound like that
big of a deal but compared to women's lives
in Europe, that was a big improvement.
And upper-class women in Heian Japan were
all literate and educated, although their
education was limited to the types of cultural
skills that would make them attractive to
men: poetry, music, calligraphy, maybe some
literature. Disciplines like history and law
and philosophy were mostly off limits.
And that brings me to something I want to
talk about: all of these privileges: from
the heavy, cumbersome clothes that make it
difficult to move to the kinds of education
women could have or the kinds of limited legal
protections they could have, all of that is
evidence of a patriarchy.
So we see through these women's stories the
way that they were able to express themselves
and their philosophies and the way that they
lived in the world. So women like Murasaki
Shikibu lived constrained, cloistered lives,
but of course there were opportunities available
to them that weren't available to men. And
that's what's so exciting about being able
to read their narratives. We just don't have
many equivalents to that in Europe at the time.
That noted, these women, like their male counterparts,
spent most of their lives indoors, and communicated
mostly by intermediaries or letters. Women
couldn't show themselves to men or make conversation
with them. But there was a great deal of interest
and intrigue around love and romance, not
least because Heian gentlemen were expected to be
polygamous and also to engage in extramarital affairs.
But just because sexual relations were often
divorced from marriage and love affairs were
common doesn't mean that they lacked emotional
consequences. In the stories you read about
Heian Japan everybody is always worried that
they're going to like, fall out of favor with
their lover or their husband or their whatever.
It's so exciting! To read about, I mean, I'm
sure if you're living inside of it it would
make you very anxious.
Also when courtship and marriage had political
dimensions, as they did in the highest noble
ranks, women were often in danger of being
displaced by a more advantageous match.
And we know from the stories that all of this
combined into pangs of jealousy and fear of
being abandoned and then pain when you actually
were abandoned. And those kinds of stories,
I'm sure I don't have to tell you, have a
kind of universality about them.
The last thing I want to say here is that
power works differently when you're not in
power, right? Like if you're a student in
a high school classroom the teacher has the
power, but you have some power.
And the most interesting thing about the stories
from the Heian aristocracy is the ways that women
used the power that they did have to bring about
change in their own lives and in their communities.
So by looking at history through the lens
of literature we get a very different perspective
than if we were to focus on government documents,
or archaeology, or descriptions of war. This
helps us to try to develop a sense of how
people at the time felt, although we're only
dealing with a very limited group of people,
obviously.
The cultural achievements of the Heian Period,
described and exemplified by The Tale of Genji,
were considerable, especially when compared
to what Europeans were accomplishing at the
time. And it's another reminder that we need
to be careful when we talk about the 9th and
10th centuries as the Dark Ages.
It's also interesting that the Heian Period
in Japan wasn't particularly successful politically
or economically, but that it did lead to great
cultural achievements. And almost all of the
literary achievements were made by women,
which as Morris points out is "a rare, if
not unique, phenomenon in cultural history."
For Heian Japan the historical record was
written primarily by women. And while The
Tale of Genji doesn't discuss politics or
economics the way that we usually imagine
them, and while it describes a world that
leaves out 99% of Japanese people during the
period, it has a lot to tell us about the
way that at least some people felt and lived,
which is more than can be said for a lot of
history books.
And that's a type of history that most of
us can relate to more than stuff with generals
and kings in it. For instance when I look
at the history of my own life I find that
generals and kings have played a very minor
role. Jealously on the other hand: not insignificant.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad & Stacey
Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis. Thank you
for watching and as we say in my hometown:
don't forget to be awesome.