Asian Miscellany (20)—Housing in Heian Japan

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

[a] Housing 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

Housing in Heian Japan was dominated by a common theme and a stark variation. The divide can be seen between urban and rural locales, where in each case the structures were made to fit the demands of ritual and commercial life, on the one hand, and agricultural productivity, on the other. Housing in Japan’s tenth century began with functionality and moved outward toward more and more refined definitions of space and place. What they all had in common is just as important as the differences, and that is wood. This is also one of the reasons that the oldest housing in Japan having exact origins dates back only to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Various reasons—from climate to disaster and simple desire to rebuild—have been given for the fact that structures in Japan rarely approach the age of those in China or Europe. As we will see, there are many reasons for Japan’s distinctiveness, and its housing combines to this day a balance of materials dominated by wood. 

[b] Wooden RF

Wood Architecture 
Wood has dominated Japanese architecture in a way that is paralleled by only a few world civilizations, and none as complex as Japan’s. Long after other materials were abundantly available, many builders preferred the elegant simplicity of wooden structures, as well as the powerful linkages created by traditional “joinery” of wooden beams, which created a formidable stability that was rivaled by few other materials. To be sure, the elaborate castles of later ages were made of many materials, including wood, stone, and mortar, and the most elaborate palace structures in Heian Japan used multiple materials. Still, wooden beams provided the vast majority of housing materials during this period, and the very connotations of wood have cultural powers rivaled only by a few other items in Japan.  

Rural Housing 
It is difficult to speak with authority about rural housing in Heian Japan, since few documents mention structural details beyond the configuration of housing and fields. Several authors mention the advantage of a village-field structure that mimicked the classical Chinese model of the “well-field” system, in which agricultural fields bordered a central village, whose workers would move out in the various directions to tend to the work of the allied families farming the area. 

The Chinese character used to represent the “well-field” system (井) gives a clear representation of this ideal. Each of the outer fields would be equipped with a boarding house for adolescent boys and working-age men, who would spend significant amounts of time in the late-spring, summer, and autumn working the fields. Whole communities, dominated traditionally by women planting the rice seedlings, would begin the year in the joint effort to create a crop that would culminate in a robust harvest in the autumn.

Architectural designs emerge from social and productive activities. The very facts of agricultural life demanded structures that could store grain, dry it, and allow for processing. It is not difficult to see that these structures needed to be centrally located within the village, and the grains were transported from the outer fields to these buildings in the village center. Residential housing in rural areas was built around these key economic sites. With a combination of “centered” housing and outer “field” housing, the villages were able to integrate a fairly large territory under the labor of a rural community. Above this, however, lay one more integral element: the growing manorial (shōen) system that increasingly linked rural areas to the capital, and eventually would lead to a complete political and economic transformation of Japan.

[c] Beaming RF

Urban Housing
The manorial system (shōen) is the key linkage between urban and rural life, including housing. The revenues that would build elaborate structures in the Heian capital came from the provinces, the rural areas. Even though almost none of the literature of Heian Japan speaks to these matters, a few records show the burgeoning economic life beyond the capital. Many of these revenues were sent to the related and powerful families in the capital, not the least being the imperial family itself and the most dominant family in all of Heian life, the Fujiwara.[1]

The metropolis of Heian Kyō exhibited these tensions between rural and urban revenues. The money came from afar, but the life of the capital was directed toward the inner realm of the palace buildings. Not unlike the schema seen in rural life, the capital formed the center of a conceptual grid, and wealthy or well-connected families encircled the palace grounds. Having a well-placed location near the palace was a sign of wealth and connections, and such things were highly prized. 

Beyond the palace grounds—where disastrous fires led to temporary accommodations every decade or so during the worst conflagrations of the tenth and eleventh centuries—lay the most venerable temple structures. Of these, few can match the Tōdaiji temple, one of the greatest Buddhist structures in all of Japan, and a center for artistic enterprise and Buddhist worship for centuries. Centered in Nara (the capital before Heian times), the Tōdaiji temple’s wooden structure houses a mammoth fifty-three foot “Great Buddha” that has cast a distinctive architectural gaze over the islands of Japan since its “eye-opening” ceremony in 752, which is still known as one of the greatest public ceremonies in all of Japanese history. 

[d] Meticulous RF

Nearby is the completely wooden Shōshōin, which has been described as a kind of elegant and religious cabin of wooden beams that has been raised almost three meters over the ground on wooden pillars. Maintained and meticulously rebuilt over the centuries, the building houses some of the rarest collections in all of Japan, including the personal items of Emperor Shōmu from the eighth century. It also houses items that break with the common view of Japanese diplomatic history—materials from the Silk Road trade that include objects from central Asia, Europe, China, as well as south, south-east, and northern Asia. The wooden architecture of this simple building speaks to its ability to preserve among the rarest items in the entire country in a housing of wooden logs.

  ***  *** 

The materials came from afar—farthest of all when considering the capital. In each case, housing was built according to a grid that fit the economic, social, and commercial needs of the community. These differed greatly between the outer provinces and the inner capital, but wooden structures dominated and the burgeoning agricultural income from the provinces should never be forgotten when studying the life of Heian Japan. 

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[e] Tree-lined RF

[1] Although even experienced authors vary in their styles, East Asian surnames generally do not take an “s” in their plural forms when rendered into Romanized letters. For this reason, these essays refer to the Fujiwara (not “Fujiwaras”) in plural form.

Asian Miscellany (19)—Language and Literature in Heian Japan

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

[a] Towering 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

Language and Literature in Heian Japan

Few periods from literary history in any society (perhaps Victorian England and early Athens can be considered analogous) have as distinctive and as rich a literary legacy as that of Heian Japan. Not only was the world’s first great extended “fictional” narrative produced (The Tale of Genji), but a wide range of other literary works sprouted from the rich literary soil of this four-hundred year period (794-1185). 

But there is much more to this story.

Language and Change 

It is impossible to understand Heian literary life without studying the process of cultural borrowing from China during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. Few civilizations in the history of the world have borrowed as eagerly and as self-consciously from other societies as the Japanese in the centuries before the Heian period. China was the source, as rich as Greece and Rome were for Westerners from far-flung areas of Europe, Africa, and Asia. A close analysis of Confucius’s Analects was as common for a Japanese reader in the eleventh century was a reading of Plato’s Republic during the Enlightenment. Westerners have seen Greece as a cultural repository (Western tradition), without interpreting as exclusively Greek, just as Japanese readers saw China as their wider “East Asian” heritage. 

[b] Interior worlds RF

The first embassies to China began in the late-sixth century, and appeared at the Sui court. Chinese officials were accustomed to visitors from afar, but it was only after the short-lived Sui (581-617) and the establishment of the Tang dynasty (618-906) that diplomatic relations between China and Japan began to flourish. Of course, the “flourishing” is only from the perspective of the Japanese court. China’s worldview was centered. From this perspective, the world came, bearing gifts, to China, and China bestowed its grandeur on the visitors.

In the ordinary telling, the Japanese borrowed everything. Even this overstatement is only slightly off base. The Japanese “borrowed” the entire Chinese writing system—a monumental perplexity of components that has taken 1500 years to sort out. For example, each Chinese character (there are tens of thousands) was given a “Chinese pronunciation” (or two) and several (often half a dozen) “Japanese pronunciations.” Today, Japanese dictionaries will show one or more pronunciations that still sound similar to many Chinese Mandarin ones (歲Chinese: sui; Japanese sei). The dictionaries will also show a handful (or more) “Japanese pronunciations,” that take the implications of the Chinese characters to entirely new levels.

Almost all of the significant changes and adaptations of the originally “wooden” Chinese characters to a nuanced language of life in Japan took place during the Heian period. The great literature of those four centuries shows in detail the way that these vast borrowing from China were digested in a time of cultural reflection. The embassies to China, and three centuries of enormous borrowing, gave way in the first century of the Heian period to many centuries of inward reflection, with very little travel abroad.

[c] Transformed RF

Literary Transitions 

One of the great mysteries of the Heian period is why (unlike almost any other society in history) we can name almost no male authors of works that we still read today. Even in Japanese literary history, one cannot find a period in which men wrote almost nothing that has been remembered. This is not a matter of George Sand, George Eliot, or Virginia Woolf writing exquisite pieces alongside a large number of male peers. With very few exceptions, all of the writers we read today from the Heian period were women. How is this possible? 

Whether or not men were talented, their energies were diverted to a peculiar kind of literary work that has not been looked upon kindly by later centuries. So obsessed were they by the power of the Chinese written language that the only “reward system” in their world grew out of writing for other male readers who wrote in Chinese. The “problem” (which we can only see in historical retrospect) is that few people could, or would, bother to read such dense writing. Much like modern academia, authors within the small circle of highly educated readers admired each other’s work. The rest of society was unimpressed.

Women provided the most important link. With the main avenues to literary status closed to all but a small number of aristocratic men, women began to write in a lively language of “Japanese pronunciations.” They wrote in ways that evoked the spoken language and cultural nuances of life in Japan that the “copied” language of the men could never approach, no matter how learned it might seem. The men gained short-term scholarly style points while we still read the women today.

[d] Genders, gentries RF

Among the few exceptions is a very successful male writer still anthologized today. Unlike our aforementioned George Sand and George Eliot, he pretended to write a travelogue of a journey on choppy seas that arrived in several disparate port towns…in the voice of a woman. Japanese literary history is, indeed, distinctive. Few other civilizations have examples of men writing in the borrowed voice of women in order to gain prestige.

Classics 

Murasaki Shikubu’s Tale of Genji is the most significant work to emerge from the Heian period. No other narrative can approach it for its subtle, yet comprehensive, treatment of life at court. It is sometimes called the world’s first novel, but that leads to quibbling about definitions (“first,” “novel”). It is unquestionably one of the world’s greatest sustained narratives, and stands with everything from Herodotus’s Histories and Plato’s Republic to much later works all over the world, including Chinese narratives such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, as well as Western works such as Don Quixote, Clarissa, and Persian Letters. It was written in the tenth century, and that alone puts it in a class with all but a handful of narratives from Homer and Zhuangzi onward. 

The Tale of Genji centers on court life, as well as the social-psychological journey of its protagonist, Prince Genji. Early on, he takes on a protégée (young Murasaki) of a kind that today’s readers will find vaguely—or much more so—unsettling. Throughout the thousand pages of the three major English translations, the court life of Heian Japan can be seen. This is equally true, but in a rather distinctive fashion, in another great Heian work, the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan. Written, as the title suggests, as a series of journal entries written before bed, Sei Shonagan’s entries range from reportage to highly interpretive and judgmental essays and lists.

***  ***

Throughout these narratives, there is an ongoing tension between male and female, urban and rural. It is as though a changing future that is startlingly clear today was utterly incomprehensible to those in the Heian period. Men, tied to a literary past from another country, would write unreadable prose. Women would be admired as authors of sensitivity and judgment. Yet even they would not sense the growing power of the provinces, which would transform every aspect of literature and politics after the Heian period.

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[e] Changing RF

Asian Miscellany (18)—Work in Heian Japan

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

[a] Built 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

Narratives of leisure dominate the literature of the Heian period. The reader of such narratives often comes to the conclusion that the Heian elite had too much time on its hands. In the narrow sense, this is doubtless true. There are so many tales of court games, displays of fashion, and conspicuous leisure that their descriptions account for quite literally thousands of pages of Heian writing. The careful student of literature, society, and economy, however, will quickly be able to see a picture of work in Heian Japan that is as distinctive as it is laborious. The remaining, albeit far fewer, texts that speak to labor beyond the life of court give us an even deeper picture of what it was to work in Heian Japan. 

Rural Work 

[b] Work RF

Surrounding the capital city like revolving planets were the rural estates (shōen) that supported the refined court life in the capital and would ultimately uproot that very lifestyle. They covered all of the territory in central Japan (the main island of Hōnshū), as well as large swaths of the west and east, at least as far as present-day Tokyo. Although regarded by inhabitants of the capital as boorish and hopelessly countrified, these areas could be said to contain the very approach to labor that over the centuries would reshape the Japanese work ethic. 

The rural estates required farm labor, farm labor supervision, the manufacture of agricultural implements, and many other layers of production and leadership. In time, the estates would require guarding, which led to the creation of entire protective forces that would be the foundation for the samurai culture of future generations. Nowhere is this budding rural work ethic better seen than in a fragment of text from the early Heian period. It shows the devotion of the tato to the lands on which he is employed, as well as the sense of detail he needed to have about everything from field laborers (he is clearly a kind of “foreman”) to his superiors. 

     The husband of the third daughter is a man by the name of Tanaka Hōeki. He is 
     diligent in his farming occupation and entertains no other ambition. He owns 
     several chō of land, and is called the daimyō-tato. He provides his own spades 
     and hoes to cultivate the rich and poor fields, and prepares ahead for dry seasons. 
     He repairs his own domestic-style and Chinese-style plows. He is skillful in his 
     handling of workers…In spring he wastes not a single grain of seed, but in the fall 
     he receives ten-thousandfold in return. From the time he beings planting in the 
     spring to the time he completes his harvest in the fall, he commits not a single 
     faulty step...[1] 

Urban Work 

[c] Modern tato RF

Life in the urban center that was Heian Kyō differed from what we have just read of the rural tato. It is not at all difficult, however, to stretch our historical imaginations and to envision the text above through the eyes of an urban shopkeeper devoted passionately to the family operation. Indeed, there are many texts that show glimpses of this kind of urban work ethic, and most readers will certainly have seen examples (all over the world) of shopkeepers who rise early, work hard, and close late, devoting almost all of their energies to the operation.  

[d] Kyoto carrying (today) RF

Still, we have only glimpses that tell us of shopkeepers, street cleaners, food producers, and other occupations in Heian Japan. It is not hard to see that a wealthy elite could not survive without multiple layers of a service economy to meet their needs. Wealthy people who merely travel from home to court, or court to temple, need transportation, clothing, foodstuffs, offerings, prayer books, and the like. All had to be produced, and almost all of the production took place in the eastern sector of the Japanese capital. The wealth came from the provinces; the production of aristocratic daily life took place in the city. 

Occasionally, a cook or palanquin carrier appears in a Heian narrative. Our best example of the vast gulf between rural and urban work, however, might best be seen in a short historical document from the first century of Heian rule. Already, the provincial economic changes were altering society. It can be seen clearly in a document forbidding Heian nobility from leaving the capital to become local samurai—the protectors of landed estates.
     Lately, those people whose domiciles are in the capital city [of Heian], and who are 
     the children and heirs of princes and of important court officials, reside outside the 
     capital region. Some intermarry [with people from outer provinces] and others 
     engage in agriculture or commerce, and are no different from the people in the
     provinces…If they persist in their disobedience and do not mend their ways, 
     regardless of any connections they might have, they must be banished to distant 
     places.[2]
That moving to the countryside to find work in agriculture (or commerce) would lead to serious penalty should give readers a perspective on how great the gulf was between urban and rural culture. 

Court Work 

[e] Li'l samurai RF

Emperors worked, and often much harder than most of the other members of courtly families. Their “handlers” worked even harder. This could well seem amusing, given the fact that court life was rarely very exhausting for anyone except those who truly were running the operation. “Those” were the Fujiwara family. During the height of Fujiwara power in the Heian period, no figure was greater than Fujiwara Michinaga (966-1027). From the time he came to power within his clan, he struggled to gain more and more influence for himself and his family. This required a peculiar kind of “work.” To begin, a family that controls the imperial family (but does not supplant it) needs daughters. Part of the Fujiwara family’s “work” was to provide daughters to the imperial family who would become the mothers of emperors, making the powerful outsider family inextricably connected to court power. No one was more successful in the history of Japan at this kind of family and political control than Michinaga. He was the father of several empresses, the grandfather of emperors, and the most powerful figure in all of Heian history. 

On top of it all, there were the emperors themselves, with their own very challenging kinds of work. By the time that the Fujiwara family had taken control of the political life of Japan, it was in their best interest to make sure that emperor’s “ruled” only until early adulthood. A more mature emperor could learn the nuts-and-bolts of court politics well enough to challenge his handlers, and a few did, giving pause to the Fujiwara controllers and new ideas to the imperial family. 

The ideal model from the perspective of the “handlers” was to exhaust a young emperor in court ritual (often many different ceremonies every day, requiring painstaking changes of clothing and memorization of ritual texts) before giving way to another emperor who was also related to the “handler” family. In time, the former emperors—many of whom were alive at any one time—gained the upper hand, but not before the entire work and political structure began to crumble, and power moved to the provinces. 

***  *** 

If we only think of “work” as manual labor, we cannot begin to get a full picture of life in Heian Japan. To be sure, manual labor made up the vast bulk of daily life both within the capital cities and throughout the villages and small cities on the rest of the islands. Work exists on many levels, though, and political work figures prominently in Heian life. When we begin to think about the many layers of labor, our picture of Heian society becomes ever richer and more complex.

Click here for other posts in the Heian Japan mini-series:
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Education        Family Life     Work-Labor     Language-Literature     Housing-Shelter

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[f] Fighting works RF

Notes
[1] David Lu, Japan: A Documentary History (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 100.

[2] Lu, 103.

Bibliography

Lu, David. Japan: A Documentary History. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

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.

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[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.