An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

The most tangible evidence of this resuscitation of Japan can be obtained in the sculpture of the age. The first flourishing period of Japanese sculpture anterior to this is the era of the Tempyô, that is to say, during the reign of the Emperor Shômu. After that the art fell gradually into decadence, and no period could compete with the Tempyô era except the Taira age. The works of Unkei and Tankei, representative masters who made their names at this time, though lagging far behind those of Tempyô sculptors in exquisite softness and serenity, yet surpassed the latter in vigour and strength. What they liked to represent most were statues of deities rather than Buddha himself, and of the deities they preferred those of martial character. Comparing them with the Tempyô sculptures, in which the subject is not so narrowly circumscribed, we can observe the change of the national spirit very clearly.

In painting also, the most important progress of the age is the change in subjects of this art, or rather the increase in varieties of subjects to be painted. Before this time what the artists generally liked to paint were the images of Buddha, Buddhist deities, scenes in Buddhist history, and portraits of celebrated priests. Landscapes were put on canvas, too, though not so frequently as those subjects pertaining to Buddhism. Since then portraits, not only of priests, but also of laymen, such as courtiers and generals, have been treated by our painters. Some masterpieces of the new portraiture, by the brush of Takanobu, are extant to this day. This development of portrait-painting may be interpreted as a symptom of the newly-budding individualism on the nation. As to scroll paintings, formerly we had pictures of consecutive scenes in Buddhist history painted in that manner, but scenes from secular history or genre pictures were rare. From this time onward we have scrolls of a character not purely religious, though Buddhist stories are still used as subjects for painting as before. Moreover, in earlier scrolls the best attention was paid to painting Buddha or deities, and not to delineating the auxiliaries, such as landscapes, buildings, worshipping multitudes of various professions, and so forth, while in the new kinds of scrolls more stress was laid on depicting those auxiliaries rather than the pious personages themselves. Battle scenes in the provinces of Mutsu and Dewa, or those between the Taira and the Minamoto in the streets of Kyoto, were also painted on scrolls. Another and quite novel kind extant of the scroll pictures of this age is the satirical delineation of the manners and customs of the time by the brush of the painter-priest Toba-sôjô. In the famous scroll certain animals familiar to the daily life, such as foxes, rabbits, frogs, and so forth are depicted allegorically, each suggesting certain notorious personages of various callings in the contemporary society.

As to literature, a difference similar in nature to those characteristics of the literature of the preceding age can be observed very distinctly. In the former period, though the essence of the literature in Japanese was profoundly influenced by the Chinese spirit, Chinese vocabularies and phrases rarely entered into sentences without being translated into Japanese. That is to say, the Japanese literature remained pure as to language, and went on side by side with the literature in Chinese. Now the combination of the two kinds began to take form. Chinese words, phrases, and several rhetorical figures began to be poured into the midst of sentences, the structure remaining Japanese as before, so that those sentences may be considered as forming a kind of hybrid Chinese, with words juxtaposed in a Japanese style, and connected by Japanese participles. This change resulted in making a great many Japanese words obsolete, and it has since become necessary for the Japanese constantly to resort to the Chinese vocabulary in writing as well as in speaking. The growth of Japanese as an independent language was thus regrettably retarded. At the same time Japanese literature reaped an immense benefit from this adoption of the Chinese vocabulary, for by it we became enabled to express our thoughts concisely, forcibly, and when necessary in a very highflown style, things not utterly impossible but exceedingly difficult for Japanese pure in form. The use of Chinese ideographs thus increased from generation to generation, until now it has become too late to try to eradicate them. All that which the Japanese nation has achieved in the past, its history, nay, its whole civilisation, has been handed to us, recorded in the language, which is woven of Chinese vocabularies and Japanese syntax, and denoted by symbols which are nothing but Chinese ideographs and their abbreviations, the Kana. A movement to supersede the Chinese ideographs by the exclusive use of the kana, which are very simple abbreviations of those ideographs, was initiated at the beginning of the Meidji era, but was dropped soon afterwards. Another radical movement to substitute the Roman alphabet for the Chinese ideographs and the kana in writing Japanese, was started nearly at the same time, and still continues to have a certain number of zealous advocates. The success of such a movement, however, depends on the value of the civilisation already acquired by the Japanese. If that amounts to nothing, and can be cast aside without any regret, in other words, if the history of Japan counts for nothing for the present and the future of the country, then the movement would have some chance of success; otherwise the attainment of the object is a dream of the millenium.

The manifestation of the new spirit of the new age in the sphere of religion is not less remarkable than in that of art or of literature. Since its introduction into our country, Buddhism had been very singular in its position as regards the social life of the nation. Though the imperial family and the higher nobles earnestly embraced the new creed, and worshipped the "gods of the barbarians," this acceptance of Buddhism cannot be called a conversion, because their religious thoughts were never engrossed by it. They continued to pay a very sincere respect to the old deities of Japan as before, while they were adoring Buddha enthusiastically. Shintoism was, if not a religion, something very much like a religion, more than anything else. So long as Shintoism remained as influential as of yore, the Japanese could not be said to have been converted to Buddhism. The Buddhist priests, having perceived this, tried not to supersede but to incorporate Shintoism into their own creed, as I have explained before, and succeeded in it, but could not erase the independence of Shintoism entirely out of the spiritual life of the Japanese. It cannot be doubted that Buddhism was made secure as regards its position in Japan by this incorporation, but in general it gained not much. Assimilation, generally speaking, has as its object, to destroy the independent existence of the things to be assimilated, and at the same time the assimilator must run the risk of causing a condition of heterogeneity on account of the addition of the new element. Buddhism could not destroy the independent existence of Shintoism, and the former became heterogeneous by the assimilation of the latter, so that the raison d'être of Buddhism in Japan was very much weakened by the assimilation. The lower strata of the nation were very slow in being penetrated by Buddhism, notwithstanding the munificent encouragement afforded to it by the government, for example, by appointing preachers not only in the neighbourhood of the capital, but in distant provinces also, or by ordering the erection of one temple in each province at the expense of the government. The common people were in need of salvation indeed, but from the Buddhism which was nationalised, they could not expect to obtain what they were unable to find in Shintoism.

In short, Buddhism, by its transformation and nationalisation, lost universality, its strongest point, and was rendered quite powerless, that is to say, blunted in the edge. Buddhism as a religious philosophy remained of course intact, but the cunning device of priests to make it conformable to our country went too far, and resulted only in weakening its efficiency as a practical religion. There were still to be found some numbers of priests who pursued their study in the intricate philosophy of Buddhism, in cloisters, in the depths of some forest or mountain recesses, but they were almost powerless to act upon society in general. The mass of the people looked on Buddhism only as the worship of an aggregation of deities, not much different from common objects of superstition, or simply as a kind of show very pleasant to see and to enjoy. They were too busy to care for meditation, and too ignorant to venture on philosophising.

Religion as a show! Seemingly what an astounding blasphemy even to entertain such an idea! No foreign reader, however, would be shocked at it, who knows that religious plays made the beginning of the modern stage of Europe, and that in villages in the Alpine valleys there may be found some survivals of them even now. Not only that, the services of the Roman Catholic and of the Greek Orthodox Church contain even to this day not a few theatrical elements. An appeal of this nature to the audience has always the effect of making the religion poetical, and therefore was the method chiefly resorted to by the Church in the Middle Ages throughout all Christendom. The method employed by the Buddhists in our country was just the same. They instituted various ceremonies and processions, each apportioned to a certain definite day of a certain season, and these religious shows served to captivate the minds of the spectators.

Here, however, the difference should be noticed between Christianity and Buddhism. The former as a rule is the religion which finds its foothold first among the lower classes of the people, while the latter, in Japan at least, began its propaganda with the upper circles of the nation, and then proceeded downwards. Though the courtiers could frequently enjoy the gorgeous spectacles carried out by priests clad in rich robes of variegated colours amid heavenly music, such scenes could be witnessed only in and about the metropolis, and were moreover too costly and aristocratic to be enjoyed by the common people. The masses were not only debarred from the salvation of their souls, but from the sight of the pageants, the best pastime which an age devoid of a theatre could afford. Yet those masses were a necessary ingredient of society in Japan, by no means to be neglected. Though very slowly, their eyes were opening, and they were beginning to claim their due. How could this demand, not sufficiently conscious to the claimants themselves, be provided for? Solely by Buddhism, which should have been by whatever means reformed.

Shintoism, though it has had a very tenacious grip on the national spirit of the Japanese, is deficient in certain particulars, and cannot be called a religion in the strict sense, so that it was difficult for it to march with the ever-advancing civilisation of our country. If there was a need, therefore, for something which could not be obtained outside of religion, it was to be sought elsewhere than in Shintoism, that is to say, in Buddhism, which was then the only cult in Japan worthy to be called a religion. To seek from it anything new, which it could not give in the state it had been, means that it ought to have been reformed. It is true that there had been repeated attempts, since the beginning of the tenth century, to make Buddhism accessible and intelligible to all classes of the people, and this kind of movement had become especially active at the end of the eleventh century. What was common to all of these movements was the endeavor to teach the merit of the nem-butsu, that is to say, the belief that anybody who would invoke the help of Buddha by calling repeatedly the name of Amita, one of the manifestations of Buddha, would be assured of the blissful after-life, and that the oftener the invocation was made the surer was the response. Most elaborate among them was an organisation of a religious community resembling in its character a joint-stock company. A member of this community was required to contribute to the accumulation of the blessing by repeating its invocation a certain number of times, like a shareholder of a company paying for his share. This community is in a great measure analogous to those societies of Europe in the later Middle Ages, which tried to accumulate the virtues of the Ave Maria sung by their members. The most striking characteristic of this community was that it extolled its own unique merit which lay in having as its members all the Buddhist deities, whose celestial nem-butsu would be sure to augment the dividends of the earthly shareholders!

To organise such a community was not to undermine the traditional edifice of Buddhism in Japan, but to support it, just as those mendicant orders, Benedictine, Augustine, Franciscan, Dominican, and so forth, were formed but in behalf of the Church of Rome. The intention of those who emphasised the nem-butsu was very far from that of becoming the harbingers of the reform movement of the following generations, though the latter aimed at nearly the same thing as the early promoters of the nem-butsu did. Yeshin, a priest in the temple of Yenryakuji, became the precursor of Hônen, who was born more than one hundred years after the death of his forerunner. The former would not and could not become a reformer, though he was highly adored by the latter for his saintliness, who styled himself the only expounder of the former. The latter, too, was very modest and never ventured to proclaim himself a reformer. Hônen was one of the meekest Buddhists in Japan. Yet he was forced against his will to become the founder of the Jôdo sect, which has continued influential to this day. All the religious reformers of the Kamakura period ran in his wake.

Religion, art, and literature were all thus transforming themselves almost at the same time, and that very time coincided exactly with the moment in which the most important change in the political sphere was taking place. Such a coincidence in the development of the various factors of civilisation cannot be lightly overlooked as a mere chance happening. Surely it must have been actuated by a common impulse, which was nothing but the urgent demand of the Zeitgeist. The régime matured by the Fujiwara nobles at Kyoto had already come to a standstill. Japan had to be pushed on by any means whatever. It is this necessity which allowed the Taira to get the upper hand of the Fujiwara. The rise of this soldier-family cannot be attributed merely to the merit of its representative members. But its fall owed much to their incompetency in not having become conscious of their position in the history of Japan. No sooner had they grasped the reins of the government, than they began to tread the path which their predecessors had trod, the path leading only to the stumbling-block. Too quickly they were transforming themselves into pseudo-courtiers. "The mummy-seekers were about to be turned into mummies," as a Japanese proverb has it. It was just at this juncture, the last phase of the transformation of the Taira warriors, that they were overturned by the Minamoto. In short, the course on which the Taira steered was against the current of the age. If the family had remained in power longer than it actually did, then the just budded spirit of the new age would have dwindled away, and to Japan might have fallen the same lot as befell to other oriental monarchies. For our country it was fortunate that the Taira were no longer able to stay at the helm of the state.