Asian Miscellany (17)—Family Life in Heian Japan

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

[a] Naginatakaboto 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

Family Life in Heian Japan

[b] Moderno-traditional RF

The earliest Japanese family organizations were said to be matrilineal (reckoned by descent through the mother), although such matters are almost impossible to decipher today. By Heian times—and many centuries before—all kinship reckoning took place along patrilineal lines. The father’s genealogy was the dominant one in deciding marriage and all of its related social goals. The “nuclear” family that most Westerners today regard as “normal” was anything but that in Heian Japan. It was common for at least three generations at a time to be living under one roof (children, parents, and grandparents). It was not particularly unusual to find a fourth or sometimes, far more rarely, a fifth generation all living together. Dating back to a distant ideal originating in China, the five-generation family (often called a “round” family) was the ultimate ideal, even though lifespans rarely made such a thing possible a thousand years ago.
 
Rural Life
In rural Japan, whether in Heian times or in later periods, it is impossible to view family life except through the lens of agricultural work. The rhythms of the seasons and the fields dominated all aspects of family life, from child rearing to daily lessons. During the all-important planting season in spring, women from rural villages would arrange the seedlings (often with the help of daughters and sons too small to do other work) and then begin the aching process that has dominated rural life in Japan for many centuries—planting each seedling between the wet, muddy ridges of the ride fields. These fields are evoked even in the earliest Japanese sources, and the spring planting was one of the two overwhelmingly significant points in the year when all members of the community—everyone except the very youngest and very oldest—would band together to start the natural cycle of the rice crop. 

During the summers, women and men separated for much of their work, with men tending the fields and women engaged in household chores. In the autumn, whole families would unite—one with another—to complete the harvest. Only those physically incapable of labor would be exempt. After the work was completed, the winter months were spent (quite unlike those of summer, while crops were in the fields) with whole families and villages back together, enjoying the one stretch of time during the year—from what we might call “November” until “March”—together. 

[c] Fujiwara Family RF

The very few documents we have that speak to family life in rural Japan in this early period highlight this part of the year as the most significant for family interaction and village get-togethers. Today’s urban dwellers, not to mention those even in Heian Japan, often forget the fundamental importance of the agricultural calendar in the shaping of family life. It does not take a very great leap of imagination to see that there are many parallels even today to family life on the farm. 

Urban Life 
The life of urban families in Heian times bore several resemblances to those in rural areas—most notably that there were times of the year and even the day in which families would disperse and others when they would spend significant time together. The stark variations required by an agricultural life, however, were muted by the rhythms of the daily and “weekly” work cycle. A shopkeeper in Heian Kyō, for example, would not require enormous help in spring and autumn, as would the rural farmer. More likely, the family demands would be for help in the store during busy times of the day, or during the occasional times of the year (nearing festivals, for example) when the demands for services were greatest. Indeed, the pressures of the calendar for urban and rural families differed markedly. The life of rural families was geared more toward the natural patterns of the seasons, while urban families were guided powerfully by the ritual and festive demands of the social and cultural calendar. 

Although even rural families were divided by income level, the aristocratic families in the provinces were usually quite starkly set off from villages, which had relative equality of wealth or poverty. Urban centers, however, often saw vast differences between families even on the same block of houses. Variation could be profound, and this shaped the way that families interacted both internally and externally. 

Aristocratic Families

[d] Heian Shrine today RF

Although they are not even close to being “representative” of Japanese society in Heian times, most of the literature that has passed through the ages from Heian Japan deals with the rarefied airs of elite society. The pictures that emerge of family life are decidedly different from those we can reproduce of life on the farm many hundreds of kilometers away from the capital. The stories center on a nuclear cluster of parents and children, but a rich array of grandparents and kinfolk figure in the stories as well. With regard to rural family life in Heian Japan, we have very few documents. On the other hand, the family life of the wealthiest fraction of society is the focus of many hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of writing. One small glimpse of it can be seen in the Sarashina Diary, written in the eleventh century by a daughter of a court official. It is quoted here to show the enormity of difference between family life “in the fields” and in a situation where a “family” is forced to negotiate the world of the imperial court.

1037: In the tenth month we changed our abode to the capital. Mother had become a nun and although she lived in the same house, shut herself up in a separate chamber. Father treated me as an independent woman rather than as his child. I felt helpless to see him shunning all society and living hidden in the shade…My old-fashioned parents thought the court life would be very unpleasant, and wanted me to pass my time at home, but others said: “People nowadays go out as ladies-in-waiting at the court, and then fortunate opportunities for marriage are naturally numerous; why not try it?[1]

It is scarcely imaginable that a farm family could have a mother retired to the inner quarters of the house to live the life of a nun and the father engaged in quiet contemplation. Clearly, Heian society—at least at the level of the court and the people who lived near it—provided a level of abstraction that was different in kind from the rural life of the provinces or the economic life of urban shopkeepers. Although the family of the Sarashina Diary’s author is hardly “typical,” it speaks to the powers and temptations of urban, aristocratic life in Heian Japan.

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] Family (in-) fighting RF

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[1]Keene, Donald, Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 156.

Bibliography

Donald Keene. Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York: Grove Press, 1955.