Asian Miscellany (15)—Sports and Games in Heian Japan

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Asian Miscellany.

[a] Games RF

My last few posts in "Asian Miscellany" have been driven by deadline—and many of them will follow in the coming weeks and months, since I have signed contracts to deliver a whole passel of encyclopedic material to various publishers before a self-imposed deadline of January 30th. As I explained in the introduction, this series of posts allows me to try out a few ideas that I plan eventually to include in various encyclopedias or on-line sites that have asked for my input. They are not the same as the pieces that will eventually be published, but constitute more of a "long draft," meant to work through a few ideas as I work on brief essays that often mandate strict "word counts" of 250, 500, 1,000, or 2,000 words. 

For the next dozen or so posts, I have been asked to write about Heian Japan (794-1185). It is one of the most fascinating periods in world history, so I trust that the topics will "connect" for readers of the first ten "Asian Miscellany" posts (almost all of the topics—children, family, urban/rural—are the same). They work well for people interested in a brief introduction to Heian Japan or for people interested in comparative issues. Although an introduction to the Heian period in Japan would require its own introduction, I trust that a reading of these "Heian Japan posts (11-20 in Asian Miscellany) will encourage a few of you to read a bit of the literature of the period.

Click here for other posts in the Heian Japan mini-series:
City-Country    Children         Food-Drink      Entertainment               Sports-Games
Education        Family Life     Work-Labor     Language-Literature     Housing-Shelter

Sports and Games in Heian Japan

Although nothing remotely of the kind of “sport” known in today’s world can be found in Heian Japan (or, indeed, almost any other civilization a thousand years ago), the combination of competitive energy and audience that we all recognize as “sport” was most definitely to be found there. In both the rural countryside and in the capital, competitions provided both entertainment and opportunities for cheering certain competitors and jeering others. There were several games that resemble an early form of kickball, and the beginnings of sumo wrestling had already appeared several centuries before, even though the form in which it is known today would take many centuries to develop. Students of culture sometimes forget that it is almost always—at all levels—contested, and we can see that theme clearly when studying sports and games. 

Competitions in the Countryside 
One of the most intriguing pictures of rural competition can be found in tales of spring festivals in which a farmer and a fisherman were said to engage in a kind of sumo wrestling match, with the winner “determining” which fundamental element of Japanese life would dominate for the year (a winning farmer foretold a fine harvest, for example). Although such particulars cannot be documented, the tales have been told for centuries, and it is another sign of the close connection between “cultural” activities such as entertainment, sports, and games with the fundamental grounding of life according the rhythms of the agricultural year.

[b] Evening recreation RF

It should not be forgotten that, especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a new kind of political order was coming to the fore in Heian Japan. The manorial estates (shōen) in the countryside would come to dominate all of Japanese society, and change the economic and military calculation of Japanese society profoundly after the end of the Heian period in 1185. That process was already well under way by the beginning of the Heian’s four centuries, and the development of what would become a warrior class of samurai lay at its foundation. 

Many centuries later, competitions between highly skilled swordsmen would become a major form of entertainment—very often with life-and-death implications. In the Heian period, such matters were far less organized and limited to the various estates these proto-samurai guarded. Nonetheless, these competitions between swordsmen were a form of skill building that should not be underestimated. The rural Heian matches would eventually spawn a wide array of martial arts for which Japan is well known today. 

Competitions at Court

[c] Verse RF

The literature of Heian Japan is filled with competitive spirit, and a wide array of games could be found among aristocrats at court. One of the most famous, from which an entire genre of poetic writing would develop, had highly educated men and women competing in a number of different ways. One version was for a person to complete half of a lyric called a tanka, after which another would complete it in a kind of match-play contest judged (carefully or not, depending on the seriousness of the enterprise) by the larger audience. The most exotic of these leisurely and learned competitions had various writers separated (with attendants and amply plied with fortified beverages) from each other along a winding artificial stream in a vast garden. The first writer would take a sip from his cup, write a line of poetry, and put the text in a little vessel that would float down the little stream to the next writer, who would do the same, and so on, in an elaborate and almost impossibly intellectual gamesmanship. Such contests could be argued to form the foundation for a rigorous and highly celebrated form of literary and social competition in later centuries called renga or “linked verse” poetry. 

One of the most famous competitions in all of Japanese history is known to us only because of its literary fame. It is preserved in the classic set of personal reflections called The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, and it recounts the frenzied competition behind the building of rival “snow mountains” among a number of Japanese court women in the late-tenth century.

From the tenth day of the Twelfth Month it snowed very heavily. I and the other ladies-in-waiting gathered large quantities of now and heaped it in lids; then we decided to build a real snow mountain in the garden. Having summoned the servants, we told them it was on Her Majesty’s orders, and so they all got to work…When the mountain was finished, [Her Majesty asked] ‘how long is that mountain likely to last?’ Everyone guessed that it would be ten days or more. ‘And what do you think?’ the Empress asked me. ‘It will last till the fifteenth of the First Month,’ I declared. Even Her Majesty found this hard to believe, and the other women insisted that it would melt before the end of the year.[1]

[d] Lastsnow RF

The “competition”—a friendly one between predictors of thaw and icing—goes on for many pages, in one of the longest of Sei Shonagon’s memoir-style essays. Although it would be unfair to give away the ending, suffice it to say that such court competitions were taken very seriously, and (as in the case of poetic games) sometimes led to new forms of gamesmanship in subsequent eras in Japanese society. 

***  *** 

In Japan, or any other society a millennium ago, there was nothing approaching the competitive organization and even “league competitions” that we take for granted today as “sports and games.” Even a game with an extraordinarily long history, such as chess, is played today with world rankings, international matches, and rules of both etiquette and play. We have to think historically and culturally if we are to understand what sports and games meant in pre-modern societies. As we have seen, we only need scratch the surface to see enormous competitive similarities to our own world, as well as highly specific cultural and historical differences in a world ten centuries away. From chess to sumo wrestling, the games in Heian times—although vastly different in form and process,—shaped many of the competitions we enjoy today.

Click here for other posts in the Heian Japan mini-series:
City-Country    Children         Food-Drink      Entertainment               Sports-Games
Education        Family Life     Work-Labor     Language-Literature     Housing-Shelter

[e] Not Heian (hokusai..nai) RF

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[1] Ivan Morris, translator, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 102-103.

 

Bibliography

Morris, Ivan, translator. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.