The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 3: Medieval Japan

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THE TALE OF THE HE IKE 449

These were the epochal years when the Taira and Minamoto con-

tended for military hegemony of the land and a warrior government

(bakufu) was established at Kamakura. But Chomei, the poet, said

scarcely a word about these events, even though at least one of his

calamities - the famine of 1181 - was in part caused by the disruption

of food shipments to the capital, owing to fighting in the nearby

province of Omi, the "breadbasket" of Kyoto.

Against this backdrop of disaster and suffering, Chomei turned in

the second half of Hojoki to an account of his personal quest for

religious salvation. Increasingly he sought to disentangle himself from

worldly ties, both social and material, and in the end sequestered

himself in the ten-foot square hut. Yet pathetically, he was forced to

confess that even his attachment to the tiny hut might hinder his

salvation and rebirth in the Pure Land of Amida.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Hojoki is the conflict revealed

within the author himself who, even as he denounced this existence

and yearned for rebirth in Amida's Pure Land, found beauty almost

everywhere in life, even in his wretched hut. Although the hut was

supposed to represent rejection of material values, it became instead a

focal point for Chomei's aesthetic sensibilities as a poet. Later in the

medieval age, the "hut" became an important aesthetic ideal for many

poets and artists, but few were ostensibly as torn as Chomei was in the

desire to renounce the beauty of the world in order to achieve religious

salvation.

THE TALE OF THE HEIKE AND OTHER WAR TALES

Although Hojoki is one of the finest literary expressions of the intensi-

fied awareness of change that accompanied the advent of medieval

times,

it is not concerned with the larger course of history and Japan's

inexorable descent into the age of mappo. This is the central theme of

Gukansho, but Gukansho is a rather drily written historical record and

does not reflect the popular imagination of its age. Instead, it is the

great war tale, Heike monogatari (Tale of the Taira, or Heike), that

provides us with the richest legends and the most vivid impressions of

the medieval mind at the time when the high civilization of the Heian

court waned and the country was plunged into an age of warriors.

There is no simple definition for the literary genre of war tales

(gunki monogatari) that became so important to the narrative tradition

of the medieval age. In subject matter they deal with warriors and

battle, and by that criterion the earliest war tales are Shomonki (or

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450 CULTURAL LIFE

Masakado-ki), which recounts the rebellion of Taira no Masakado (d.

940) in the Kanto in 935-40, and

Mutsu

waki (Tale of Mutsu), a record

of the Former Nine Years War fought in the northern Mutsu-Dewa

region in the mid-eleventh century. Both of these works, however,

although abundant in the lore and ethos of

the

emerging samurai class,

are written in Chinese and are therefore quite different linguistically

from the war tales of the medieval

age.

In contrast, the language of the

medieval war tales was Japanese (transcribed with Chinese characters

and the native kana syllabary), enriched by a heavy admixture of

Chinese loan words, including many that were used to express Bud-

dhist ideas.

The authorship and dates of most of the war tales are either un-

known or disputed. We do not even know, for example, by whom and

in what order the three major tales of the Kamakura period (1185-

333)

—

Hogen monogatari, Heiji monogatari, and Heike monogatari

—

were written or compiled. Perhaps there was no "order"; for although

the first two tales are relatively short, focused on restricted events (the

Hogen and Heiji disturbances of 1156 and 1159-60), and possibly

written by single authors at specific times, Heike

monogatari

is an

enormously long and episodic record of the rise and fall of the Taira

clan that evolved over a century (from the late 11 oos to the late 1200s)

from both written and oral sources.

Scholars hypothesize that the original

Heike monogatari

was written

in the early thirteenth century by a former courtier named Yukinaga

who came under the patronage of the priest-historian Jien, then abbot

of the Enryakuji temple on Mount Hiei. This suggests that

Gukansho

and Heike

monogatari

(in its first form) were compiled at roughly the

same time and that Yukinaga was strongly influenced by Jien's fatalis-

tic ideas and philosophy of

mappo.

If there was an "original" Heike, it was most likely a fairly

brief,

chronological account of the events and developments that have always

constituted the book's principal narrative: the rise of the Taira under

Kiyomori (1118-81) to dominance of

the

Heian court in the late 1170s

and the family's fall from grace and power and

final

destruction during

the Gempei War (1180-5). But the Heike we have today is a vastly

expanded work, containing many miscellaneous stories and legends

from diverse sources. Most important, the

Heike

was extensively re-

vised and reshaped by the contributions of blind itinerant priests who

traveled the countryside chanting their tales to the accompaniment of

a biwa, or lute.

Whereas the opening lines oiHojoki plaintively observe the sadness

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THE TALE OF THE HE IKE 451

of change and the passage of time, the introduction to Heike

monogatari

strikes a much more somber and ominous tone:

In the sound of the bell of the Gion Temple echoes the impermanence of all

things. The pale hue of the

flowers

of the teak tree shows the truth that they

who prosper must fall. The proud ones do not last long, but vanish like a

spring-night's dream. And the mighty ones too will perish in the end, like

dust before the wind.

We are informed that the Taira are fated for a fall, and the text assumes

a tone of tragic inevitability that is sustained until the end. The fall of

the Taira is one of the great themes in the Japanese cultural tradition,

and the reasons for and the manner of their decline, as presented in

Heike monogatari, tell us much about differing attitudes toward the

historical displacement of courtiers by warriors as rulers in this age.

The views of Heike's original author (let us assume it was Yukinaga)

represent those of the courtier-centered ancien

regime.

Kiyomori, the

Taira chieftain, was the vilest of men. Not only was he excessively

proud and haughty, but he also repeatedly breached the tenets of the

unwritten but sacred "imperial law" (oho), violating both the persons

and offices of the emperor and other members of the imperial family.

In a sense, the Heike portrait of Kiyomori - which cannot be accepted

as historically accurate - represents a cri de coeur against the entire

warrior class as usurpers of national power from the emperor and his

court. But the depiction of the Taira clan as a whole, especially after

Kiyomori's death in 1181 (at the end of the first half of Heike), can be

interpreted quite differently. In the sections in the second half of the

book in which the Taira are forced to flee Kyoto and are relentlessly

pursued by the Minamoto to final destruction at the battle of

Dannoura in 1185, they subtly become surrogates for the courtier

class,

and their pitiful fate represents the demise of the courtiers as

rulers in the medieval age.

This portrayal of the Taira as courtiers may be found in the famous

passage in "The Death of Atsumori" in which the Minamoto retainer

Kumagai Naozane, having captured the young Taira general Atsumori

on the beach at Ichinotani, is forced to behead him in order to save

him from cruder treatment at the hands of other Minamoto partisans.

When Naozane discovers a flute in Atsumori's sash, he exclaims in

anguish that not a single member of the myriad forces of the Mina-

moto would have thought to carry such a thing into battle. But it is not

merely the refined courtly tastes in music, poetry, and the like attrib-

3 ibid.,

. 78.

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452 CULTURAL LIFE

uted to the Taira that transforms them into surrogates for the court-

iers.

It is also the tone and literary qualities of certain key sections that

relate the humiliations, agonies, and deaths of leading Taira during the

Gempei War. Whereas most of Heike

monogatari

is written in the

strong, vigorous style of the new genre of war tales, these sections

evoke the mood and feelings of the fictional tales

(tsukuri monogatari)

of the Heian period.

Although the Taira may be viewed as both warriors and courtiers,

the Minamoto who appear in the pages of

Heike monogatari

are, with

few exceptions, clearly drawn as the dynamic military leaders of the

new age. The book's pervasively tragic tone is sustained even in the

treatment of these victors: for example, in the vivid detailing of the

death in battle of the first great Minamoto field general of the Gempei

War, Yoshinaka (1154-84), and in the foreshadowing of the doom of

the second, Yoshitsune (1159-89). But otherwise the Minamoto repre-

sent the future, and indeed some of them and their followers are

portrayed in terms of the exaggeratedly superior prowess and courage

that were to become stereotypical of the war tales of

the

medieval age.

THE AGE OF SHINKOKINSHD POETRY

The nostalgia for the courtier past that we find in both

Gukansho

and

Heike monogatari

(and less explicitly, in

Hojoki)

was not merely a pass-

ing, futile yearning for something that could never be recaptured but

was part of a growing sentiment that endured throughout the medieval

age.

In part, this sentiment was sustained because the courtier class

itself survived the traumatic transition to warrior times. Although

eventually stripped of all political power and most of their economic

wealth, the courtiers retained their unique social status as aristocrats

and their custodianship of the still greatly admired classical culture

that their forebears had produced.

The heart of the classical culture was waka poetry, the art on which

the courtiers lavished their greatest love and in whose cadences they

sought to express their highest sense of beauty. The waka tradition's

range of poetic expression, vocabulary, and social sentiment was estab-

lished in the early to mid-Heian period, about the time of

the

compila-

tion in 905 of

Kokinshu

(Anthology of ancient and modern poems), the

4 See Kenneth Dean Butler, "The Heike Monogatari and the Japanese Warrior Ethic," Harvard

Journal of Asiatic Studies 29 (1969): 93-108. Butler has analyzed how, contrary to the facts of

history, oral-tale singers created stereotyped, "ideal heroes" of famous warriors who appear in

the Heike monogatari.

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THE AGE OF SHINKOKINSHO POETRY 453

first imperially authorized waka anthology. Later court poets deeply

venerated Kokinshu and identified it and other works of tenth and

early eleventh centuries - especially he monogatari and Genji

monogatari

- as models of the aesthetic and cultural values of court

life.

In earlier times the "classical past" had been essentially a Chinese

past; now the Japanese looked back increasingly to the mid-Heian

period of their own history for artistic guidance and inspiration.

Keen awareness of a classical Japanese past was a major feature of

the efflorescence of waka that occurred, ironically perhaps, during the

twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when the court was a declining

governmental institution. This period may be called the age of

Shinkokinshu, as its finest achievement was the compilation of the

eighth imperial anthology, the "new Kokinshu," in 1205. The

Shinkokinshu poets, who included Fujiwara no Shunzei (n 14-1204),

the priest Saigyd (1118-90), and Shunzei's son Teika (1162-1241),

spoke of expressing "new feelings with old words" (kotoba furuku,

kokoro atarashi) and sought to achieve resonance in their poetry by

both alluding to earlier poems (honkadori) and using suggestion rather

than explicit statement. A poem by Fujiwara no Teika illustrates some

of these techniques:

As I look about,

I see neither cherry blossoms

Nor crimson leaves.

A straw-thatched hut by the bay

At evening the Autumn.

Teika alludes to two traditional subjects, the cherry blossoms of spring

and the changing maple leaves of autumn, but instead of celebrating

them directly, he describes a setting in late autumn or early winter in

which they are conspicuously absent. The setting

itself,

a monochro-

matic scene of a lowly fisherman's hut by the bay, is untraditional and

suggests some of the new tastes of the medieval age. It is made familiar

through reference to the blossoms and leaves that poets had always

praised, and our impression of the bleak landscape is enhanced by the

reminder that it has been and will again be suffused with color.

Two aesthetic values that guided the Shinkokinshu poets and set

much of the artistic tone of the medieval age were yugen (mystery and

depth) and sabi (loneliness). I leave the discussion of yugen to the

section on the noh theater in the Muromachi period. Here let me note

some of the tastes connoted by sabi.

5 Shinkokinshu, vol. 4, no. 363.

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454 CULTURAL LIFE

Heian-period poets had given their attention chiefly to the new and

fashionable (imamekashi) and to nature's more conventionally re-

garded beauties, such as spring's blossoms and autumn's leaves. By

the age of Shinkokinshu, an aesthetic appeal was growing - perhaps

encouraged by the somber sentiments of mappo pessimism and the

mounting awareness that a great era was coming to an end - for the

weathered and withered, the desolate and lonely - sabi. Teika's hut by

the bay at eveningtime in late autumn is a good example of sabi. An

even better example is the following well-known poem by Saigyo:

Even one who has renounced

His worldly feelings

Knows of the pathos of life.

A shrike rises from the marsh;

Autumn at dusk.

Both the Teika and Saigyo poems have the same last line (aki no

yugure, autumn at evening or dusk) and are therefore set at the same

time of day in the same season. Teika's verse is almost purely descrip-

tive,

whereas Saigyo's speaks also, in intensely personal terms, of the

desolation and loneliness of life.

Fujiwara no Teika and his compeers were not only poets but also

scholars. The scholarship they pursued, essential to the "allusive

depth" of their poetry, was itself one of the most important products of

the nostalgia for the past that evolved in the medieval age. Usually

called wagaku, or Japanese scholarship (to distinguish it from

kangaku, or Chinese scholarship), it consisted of two general areas of

study. One was the corpus of «>a&a-centered, classical court literature,

especially the mid-Heian-period masterworks Kokinshu, he monoga-

tari, and Genji monogatari; the other was "court ceremonial and prac-

tice"

(yusoku kojitsu), the accumulated rituals, customs, and minutiae

of court life. Wagaku reached its peak of development in the mid-

Muromachi period in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The compilation of Shinkokinshu in the early thirteenth century was

one of the last major achievements in the arts that was primarily the

work of the courtier class. It is fitting that its leading compiler was the

senior retired emperor Gotoba (1180-1239), who later schemed to

overthrow the Kamakura bakufu and precipitated the Jokyu distur-

bance of 1221. As a result of this brief war, Kamakura military rule

was vastly expanded, and perhaps most important in terms of cultural

history, the bakufu's control over Kyoto was firmly established.

6 Shinkokinshu, vol. 4, no. 362.

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THE REVIVAL OF SHINTO 455

THE REVIVAL OF SHINTO AND THE LATE KAMAKURA

PERIOD

After

1221,

the court ceased to control even its most important affairs.

Major decisions, including the selection of successors to the throne,

were made either directly by the bakufu or through its representatives,

the Rokuhara

tandai.

Under these circumstances, a stultifying atmo-

sphere settled over Kyoto, and for the remainder of the Kamakura

period the arts did not shine as brilliantly as they had during the first

three decades or so of the medieval age. Meanwhile, Kamakura came

under the firm administration of the Hojo shogunal regents

(shikken),

who became ever more confident of their newly acquired status as

rulers and who wished to enhance their seat of power by elevating its

cultural life. This was achieved primarily through the patronage of

Zen Buddhism. The Hojo invited Chinese Zen (Ch'an) priests to

Kamakura and helped them establish major Zen centers, such as the

Kenchoji and Engakuji temples.

Much of the intellectual vigor of the Kamakura period was devoted

to Buddhism, and the finest works in learned writing were those by

the founders of the new Buddhist sects, including Honen, Shinran,

Eisai, Dogen, and Nichiren. But there was also a revival in Shinto in

Kamakura times. Although it did not stimulate much great writing, it

greatly influenced the attitudes of at least the higher levels of society

during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when Japan

was attacked by two Mongol invading forces (1274 and 1281), the

Kamakura bakufu gradually faltered and was finally overthrown

(!333)J and Emperor Godaigo (1288-1339) attempted to "restore"

imperial rule in the Kemmu restoration (1333-6).

One aspect of the Shinto revival was renewed interest in Japan's

origins. Jien began his history in

Gukansho

with the first earthly em-

peror, Jimmu, and the so-called age of humans. But others began to

study the long-neglected history of the "age of

the

gods," thus prepar-

ing the way for articulating the concept of

kamikaze

during the period

of the Mongol invasions - the "winds of the gods" that arose at times

of great peril to protect Japan. This concept asserted the primacy of

Shinto over Buddhism, which for many centuries had been viewed as

the supreme "protector of the state."

Another aspect of the Shinto revival was the commencement of new

research into the history of the imperial institution. This research

7 Chingo kokka.

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456 CULTURAL LIFE

coincided with disputes over succession to the throne that erupted

among the descendants of the senior retired emperor Gosaga (1220-

72) upon his death in 1272. The most important product of this re-

search was Jinno

shotoki

(Chronicle of the direct descent of gods and

sovereigns), a history of Japan written in 1339 by the courtier-general

Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293-1354). To understand the historical set-

ting of Jinno shotoki, it is necessary first to note the circumstances

surrounding the failure of the Kemmu restoration and the subsequent

founding of the Ashikaga bakufu (1336-1573).

The Kemmu restoration was essentially a futile, ahistorical effort

to reinstitute the conditions of an age some five hundred years earlier

when emperors supposedly exercised personal rule over the country.

Probably the most grievous failure of the restoration government in

Kyoto was its inability to meet the demands for rewards by warriors

who had aided in overthrowing the Kamakura bakufu. The restora-

tion government was also divided from its inception by intense rival-

ries among the chieftains who were its principal military supports. In

1335 one of these chieftains, Ashikaga Takauji (1305-58), the head

of a major branch of the Minamoto clan, turned against the govern-

ment and occupied Kyoto, forcing Emperor Godaigo and his backers

to flee to Yoshino in the mountainous region south of the capital.

Thus began the period of war between the courts (133S-92), an

unprecedented time in Japanese history when there were two rival

seats of emperorship: Godaigo's "Southern Court" at Yoshino and

the "Northern Court" in Kyoto headed by emperors of another

branch of the imperial family. The Northern Court was a mere pawn

of the Ashikaga bakufu, which Takauji established in Kyoto in close

proximity.

Kitabatake Chikafusa, a follower of Emperor Godaigo, became the

de facto leader of the Southern Court after Godaigo's death in 1339. It

has long been speculated that he wrote Jinno

shotoki

to instruct the

emperor's son and youthful successor, Gomurakami (1328-68). Re-

cently, however, it has been suggested that Chikafusa intended his

history primarily as a means to recruit support for the Southern

Court.

Whatever Chikafusa's purpose may have been, Jinno

shotoki

mainly remembered as

history whose author argued the legitimacy of

the Southern over the Northern line of emperors during the war be-

8 I have discussed this new interpretation in H. Paul Varley,

trans.,

Jinno

Shotoki:

Chronicle

Gods and

Sovereigns

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp.

30-31.

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THE REVIVAL OF SHINTO 457

tween the courts. Yet even more fundamentally, Chikafusa emphasized

the continuity of imperial succession, which in his mind set Japan

apart from other countries and made it superior. Whereas Jien began

Gukansho with the reign of the first human sovereign, Jimmu,

Chikafusa traced a line of unbroken rulership from the age of the

gods.

A principal theme in Gukansho is the interrelationship between oho

(imperial law) and buppo (Buddhist law) in Japanese history. Jien be-

lieved that imperial law was headed toward extinction and had, in fact,

been propped up for centuries by the imported law of Buddhism. By

contrast, Chikafusa eschewed the use of the term

oho

with its connota-

tions of imperial decline and extinction.

Although he said a great

deal in Jinno shotoki about Buddhism, he did not acknowledge that it

exerted any influence on the imperial institution. Chikafusa, whose

thinking emerged from the Shinto revival of the late Kamakura pe-

riod, also rejected the concept of mappo. Although recognizing the

debased state of civil war into which the country had fallen in his own

time,

he insisted that it could be revived through the restoration of

proper (i.e., time-honored and legitimate) principles of rule and that

the imperial institution would endure eternally through the mandate

of Amaterasu.

Kitabatake Chikafusa's thinking was more significant to the Shinto

ideologues and nationalists of later centuries than it was to his contem-

poraries. With his call for the restoration of "proper principles,"

Chikafusa was already an anachronism in his own lifetime. We know

in retrospect that after the failure of the Kemmu restoration, there was

no real chance of reviving imperial rule in the sense of returning

political power to the emperor or his ministers.

The warriors' long

process of displacing the courtiers as the ruling elite, which began in

the late twelfth century, was complete by the fourteenth century.

9 This emphasis on continuous rule from the age of the gods is announced in the opening lines

of the Jinno

shotoki:

"Great Japan is the divine land. The heavenly progenitor founded it, and

the Sun Goddess bequeathed it to her descendants to rule eternally. Only in our country is

this true; there are no similar examples in other countries. That is why our country is called

the divine land."

10 Rather than imperial law (oho), Chikafusa stressed imperial succession.

11 The mandate given to Ninigi by Amaterasu in the Jinno

shotoki

when she bestowed the regalia

upon him and sent him down from heaven to rule Japan was, "Go there and rule. Go, and

may your line prosper eternally, like heaven and earth."

12 The emperor and ministers of the Northern Court were dominated by the Ashikaga bakufu.

The emperors and ministers of the Southern Court seemed to have had no real chance of

reinstalling themselves as leaders of the entire country.

458 CULTURAL LIFE

THE EARLY MUROMACHI PERIOD

A major result

the founding

the Ashikaga bakufu

and the

com-

mencement of the Muromachi period (1336-1573) was the reestablish-

ment

Kyoto

as the

country's unchallenged administrative

and

cul-

tural center. With

the

bakufu located

Kyoto instead

Kamakura,

courtiers

and

warriors began

intermingle socially

to a

much greater

degree than before

and to

share patronage

of the

arts.

addition,

Kyoto replaced Kamakura

as the

focal point

Zen,

and the

Kyoto

Zen temples assumed

a new

leadership among

the

religious institu-

tions

the central provinces

encouraging

art

and learning.

This period also witnessed the emergence

Kyoto as a commercial

center and the rise

newly affluent merchant class that increasingly

participated

in the

city's cultural life. Until

the end of the

Heian

period, culture and the arts had been monopolized by the courtiers.

was

sign

of the

dynamic social changes that occurred

in the

early

medieval age that by the beginning of

the

Muromachi period, not only

warriors

and

merchants

but

also members

the lower orders

in the

provinces came

play meaningful roles

cultural development.

truly national culture was taking shape

for the

first time

Japan,

culture that derived from both elite

and

popular sources

and was

increasingly shared and enjoyed by all classes.

The

war

tale

Taiheiki

(Chronicle

great peace)

is the

single best

source describing

the

political, social,

and

cultural changes that

oc-

curred during the Kemmu restoration and the first three decades or so

the

Muromachi period.

This lengthy chronicle covers

the

time

from Godaigo's accession to the throne in 1318 until about 1368, when

Yoshimitsu became

the

third Ashikaga shogun,

and

ranks wkh

Heike

monogatari

as one of the two

most important medieval

war

tales.

literary terms, however,

Taiheiki

is far

inferior

Heike

monogatari.

The first third

Taiheiki deals with Godaigo's plot against

the

Kamakura bakufu

and is

reasonably well structured

and

presented.

But later sections

are

loosely organized

and

full

digressions, trivial

anecdotes,

and

repetitious

and

stereotypical battle scenes. Taiheiki

lacks a great unifying theme. Whereas

Heike

monogatari,

from its open-

ing lines until

its

somber closing pages, narrates

the

tragically

por-

tended decline

and

annihilation

of the

Taira family,

Taiheiki

comes

closer

to a

simple narrative

events.

One

theory

that "great peace" expressed

the

wish

for

termination

the strife that

the

Taiheiki,

fact, records.