**An excellent translation of this has been made by Mr. F. V. Dickins in the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society," Jan., 1887.
In short, an extraordinary love of literature and of all that pertained to it swayed the minds of Japan throughout the Nara and the Heian epochs. The ninth and tenth centuries produced such poets as Ariwara no Yukihira and his younger brother, Narihira; Otomo no Kuronushi, Ochikochi no Mitsune, Sojo Henjo, and the poetess Ono no Komachi; gave us three anthologies (Sandai-shu), the Kokin-shu, the Gosen-shu, and the Shui-shu, as well as five of the Six National Histories (Roku Kokushi), the Zoku Nihonki, the Nihon Koki, the Zoku Nihon Koki, the Montoku Jitsuroku, and the Sandai Jitsuroku; and saw a bureau of poetry (W aka-dokoro) established in Kyoto. Fine art also was cultivated, and it is significant that calligraphy and painting were coupled together in the current expression (shogwa) for products of pictorial art. Kudara no Kawanari and Koze no Kanaoka, the first Japanese painters to achieve great renown, flourished in the ninth and tenth centuries, as did also a famous architect, Hida no Takumi.
INTERVAL BETWEEN THE CAPITAL AND THE PROVINCES
Thus, in the capital, Kyoto, where the Fujiwara family constituted the power behind the Throne, refinements and luxury were constantly developed, and men as well as women amused themselves composing Chinese and Japanese poems, playing on musical instruments, dancing, and making picnics to view the blossoms of the four seasons. But in the provincial districts very different conditions existed. There, men, being virtually without any knowledge of the ideographic script, found the literature and the laws of the capital a sealed book to them, and as for paying periodical visits to Kyoto, what that involved may be gathered from the fact that the poet Tsurayuki's return to the capital from the province of Tosa, where he had served as acting governor, occupied one hundred days, as shown in his Tosa Nikki (Diary of a Journey from Tosa), and that thirteen days were needed to get from the mouth of the Yodo to the city. The pageant of metropolitan civilization and magnificence never presented itself to provincial eyes.
ORIGIN OF THE SHOEN
Much has already been said on the subject of land tenure; but as this problem is responsible for some cardinal phases of Japanese history, a brief resume will be useful here. There were four chief causes for the existence of shoen, or manors. The first was reclamation. In the year 723, it was decreed that persons who reclaimed land should acquire a de facto title of tenure for three generations, and, twenty years later, the tenure of title was made perpetual, limits of area being fixed, however—1250 acres for princes and nobles of the first rank, and thereafter by various gradations, to twenty-five acres for a commoner. But these limits were not enforced, and in the year 767 it became necessary to issue a decree prohibiting further reclamation, which was followed, seventeen years later, by a rescript forbidding provincial governors to exact forced labour for tilling their manors.
That this did not check the evil is proved by an official record, compiled in 797, from which it appears that princes and influential nobles possessed manors of great extent; that they appointed intendants to manage them; that these intendants themselves engaged in operations of reclamation; that they abused their power by despoiling the peasants, and that dishonest farmers made a practice of evading taxes and tribute by settling within the bounds of a manor. These abuses reached their acme during the reigns of Uda and Daigo (888-930), when people living in the vicinity of a manor were ruthlessly robbed and plundered by the intendant and his servants, and when it became habitual to elude the payment of taxes by making spurious assignments of lands to influential officials in the capital. In vain was the ownership of lands by powerful nobles interdicted, and in vain its purchase by provincial governors: the metropolis had no power to enforce its vetoes in the provinces, and the provincials ignored them. Thus the shoen grew in number and extent.
The second factor which contributed to the extension of manors was the bestowal of estates in perpetuity on persons of conspicuous ability, and afterwards on men who enjoyed Imperial favour. Land thus granted was called shiden and enjoyed immunity from taxation. Then there were tracts given in recognition of public merit. These koden were originally of limited tenure, but that condition soon ceased to be observed, and the koden fell into the same category with manors (shoen).
Finally we have the jiden, or temple lands. These, too, were at the outset granted for fixed terms, but when Buddhism became powerful the limitation ceased to be operative, and moreover, in defiance of the law, private persons presented tracts, large or small, to the temples where the mortuary tablets of their families were preserved, and the temples, oh their own account, acquired estates by purchase or by reclamation. The jiden, like the other three kinds of land enumerated above, were exempt from taxation. Owned by powerful nobles or influential families, the shoen were largely cultivated by forced labour, and as in many cases it paid the farmers better to rent such land; and thus escape all fiscal obligations, than to till their own fields, the latter were deserted pan passu with the development of the manor system, and thus the State revenues suffered dual reduction.
During the last quarter of the tenth century peremptory edicts were issued to check this state of affairs, but the power of the Court to exact obedience had then dwindled almost to cipher. History records that during the Ho-en era (1135-1140), the regent Fujiwara Tadamichi's manor of Shimazu comprised one-fourth of the province of Osumi. On these great manors, alike of nobles and of temples, armed forces soon began to be maintained for purposes nominally of police protection but ultimately of military aggression. This was especially the case on the shoen of the puissant families of Taira and Minamoto. Thus, Minamoto Yoshitomo came to own fifteen of the eastern provinces, and in the tumult of the Heiji era (1159-1160), he lost all these to Taira no Kiyomori, who, supplementing them with his own already large manors and with the shoen of many other nobles and temples, became owner of five hundred districts comprising about one-half of the empire. Subsequently, when the Minamoto crushed the Taira (1185), the whole of the latter's estates were distributed by the former among the nobles who had fought under the Minamoto standard.