Yamato (Imperial Japan)

A single delegation from Korea

formationDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Tradition placed Japan's imperial line on the throne from 660 BC, tracing its descent from the sun goddess through a first emperor, Jimmu, whose historicity the sources that carry his story cannot themselves confirm. For twelve centuries afterward the court kept genealogies and reign lengths that grow steadily less plausible the further back they reach - one sovereign credited with a hundred-and-one-year reign, a chief minister said to have served five emperors across three and a half centuries of life.

A court already old when its history becomes legible

By the reign of Kimmei in the mid-sixth century, the pattern of implausibly long reigns had already given way to something closer to ordinary succession, and the record itself becomes correspondingly more trustworthy. Kimmei's own reign supplies the moment continental civilization arrived at court in a form specific enough to date and describe rather than merely assert.

One shipment, three disciplines

In 552, a single delegation from Korea brought doctors, diviners, astronomers and mathematicians to reside at the Japanese court, and Buddhist missionaries travelled with them. The court that received this delegation had no writing system of its own, no calendar science, and no organized medicine beyond what earlier scattered contacts with the continent had supplied piecemeal. What arrived in 552 came as a single coherent package - religion, technical knowledge, and the literacy needed to record both - rather than as another isolated gift of tailors or horses of the kind earlier annals note in passing.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Chris 73 · CC BY-SA 3.0

The first of three waves

Japanese history would receive two further waves of comparably transformative foreign contact - from Western Europe in the fifteenth century, and from the wider world after Commodore Perry's arrival - but this sixth-century wave from China by way of Korea was, by every measure of lasting influence, the most powerful of the three. It gave the Yamato court the tools of a literate, Buddhist, continentally-modelled state at exactly the moment its own succession was finally settling into a form later generations could actually verify.

The prince who ruled by not ruling

formationDrafted from Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910)

For twenty-eight years the throne of Yamato belonged, in name, to an empress, and in substance to her nephew - a regent who governed a court he never sat at the head of, through a chief minister who could have crushed him and instead deferred to him for the whole span of his life.

An empress raised to keep the peace

The assassination of the Emperor Sujun in 592 - killed by an agent of the Great Minister Soga no Umako, whose family's power the throne had begun to threaten - left the succession in the hands of the very man who had arranged the killing. Umako passed over a score of eligible imperial princes and raised his own niece to the throne instead, as the Empress Suiko. A few months later Suiko named her nephew Mumayado - Prince Shōtoku - heir apparent, and with that nomination the claims of her own seven children to the succession were set aside for good.

Shōtoku was twenty-one, already known for the zeal in which he had fought, at fifteen, in the battle that annihilated the Mononobe clan - the court's last serious internal opponents of Buddhism. From this appointment he held, in the record's own words, "general control of the Government, and entrusted with all the details of the administration," for the rest of his life.

Imperial Household collection · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Unknown · Public domain

Governing through a murderer

That Umako, described elsewhere in the record as a liar and a murderer, submitted to a twenty-one-year-old regent's ascendancy for twenty-eight years without open contest is itself the measure of what Shōtoku had built. The prince is credited with a genuine scholarly command of Buddhist doctrine and of Chinese classical and political philosophy that outstripped his contemporaries, Umako included, and by turning the older man's own energies toward the study of sutras and the classics, he appears to have kept Yamato's most dangerous man occupied with something other than mischief for nearly three decades.

Seventeen articles, and one theory of the state

In 604 Shōtoku issued a set of seventeen articles of moral and administrative guidance for officials - not a constitution in the modern sense, but a direct importation of Chinese political theory into a court that had never before had one written down. Article Twelve states the claim plainly: "In a country there are not two lords; the people have not two masters. The sovereign is the master of the people of the whole country." Provincial officials, the article goes on, had no standing to levy their own exactions on top of the crown's.

It was an argument for a single, centralised sovereignty at a court still organised as a confederation of clans under a first-among-equals chieftain - and it went unchallenged only because the Soga's own interests, tangled by marriage into the imperial house itself, were not yet threatened by strengthening a throne their own family effectively controlled. Two years after the prince's death, Soga no Umako's own descendants would flout the article's plain words and seize an imperial estate for themselves; two decades further on, his grandson's contempt for it would help bring the whole Soga house down.

What outlasted him

In 620, the year before his death, Shōtoku worked with Umako himself to compile a history of the emperors, a history of the country, and a record of the great clans and their subordinate houses - Yamato's first attempt at a written account of its own past, and the direct ancestor of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki that would follow a century later.

He died in 621. The obituary the record preserves for him describes a mourning that reached every rank of society at once: "the old, as if they had lost a dear child, had no taste for salt and vinegar in their mouths; the young, as if they had lost a beloved parent, filled the ways with the sound of their lamenting. The farmer ceased from his plough, and the pounding woman laid down her pestle." Court obituaries are conventionally suspect, written to flatter the dead man's descendants - but Shōtoku left no dynasty of his own to flatter, and the breadth of the grief recorded for him has outlasted every reason to doubt it.

The family that remade the court

expansionDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

A century after Buddhism and continental learning first arrived, the mikado Kotoku's regent Kamatari began reshaping the court's own administration along Chinese lines. The reform's own name, still used to mark the start of Japan's chronological year-period system, dates the change precisely: 645, the first of the era-names Japanese court records would use continuously for the rest of imperial history.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Tsukioka Yoshitoshi · Public domain

A regent who founded a dynasty of his own

Kamatari's regency lasted only four years, but its consequences outlived him by centuries. He is remembered as the founder of the Fujiwara line - said to descend, through a servant of Jimmu's own grandfather, from the earliest strata of the court's own mythology - and within a few centuries ninety-five of the empire's hundred and fifty-five noble houses would claim Fujiwara descent. The office of imperial regent itself, the highest position a subject could hold, would become the Fujiwara family's own hereditary possession.

Nara National Museum · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

An administration built to outlast any one reign

What Kamatari's reforms actually changed was less dramatic in the moment than what they made possible afterward: a court organised well enough to survive the ordinary business of governing an expanding realm without depending entirely on one strong ruler's personal authority. Where earlier government had been, in practice, whatever a mobile military chieftain and his retinue could manage from camp to camp, the reformed administration could function as a standing bureaucracy - the same kind of institution that would, within another century and a half, make a single permanent capital both possible and necessary.

The tool that outgrew its makers

The Fujiwara family's own rise from this reform is the clearest sign of what had actually changed. A single regent's four-year tenure had created an office durable enough that his descendants would go on to staff it almost exclusively, eventually using it not merely to serve the throne but to select who sat on it. The centralising reform meant to strengthen the imperial house ended up building the instrument that, within a few more centuries, would let a subject family govern in the mikado's name more completely than the mikado governed himself.

A replica of Hsian

expansionDrafted from Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910)

In 710 the court laid out its first true city: a permanent capital at Nara, built as a deliberate copy of the Chinese capital of Chang'an, with seven great Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, a palace and public buildings enough to give it, almost at once, an appearance of real magnificence. It held the court for seventy-four years, long enough that the whole eighth century in Japanese history and literature is simply called the Nara epoch.

Writing the country down

It was near the start of that epoch that the court committed its own origins to writing for the first time. The Kojiki was set down in 712; the Nihon Shoki, more elaborate and more consciously shaped to fit Chinese historiographical models, followed in 720. Between them the two books gave Yamato what it had never had before - a fixed, written account of its own gods, its founding emperor, and the line of sovereigns descended from them, compiled from court tradition Prince Shōtoku and Soga no Umako had already begun assembling nearly a century earlier.

Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Ken'yu · Public domain

The compilers' own ambitions ran further than mere record-keeping. Chinese theories of centralised, absolute imperial sovereignty were worked back into the account of eras centuries before Yamato had any contact with China capable of transmitting them - a court in 534 addressing a subject in language stolen wholesale from a Chinese dynastic chronicle nobody in Japan could have read until decades later. The Nihon Shoki's authors were not simply recording what had happened; they were arguing that the centralised state Kamatari's generation had only just built had, in fact, been Yamato's arrangement from the beginning.

The Great Buddha

The epoch's most physically ambitious undertaking came under the Emperor Shōmu, whose own devotion to Buddhism was unmatched by any sovereign before him. When smallpox, carried by a fisherman returning from Korea, swept through the Nara aristocracy in 735 and killed four Fujiwara brothers among its victims, Shōmu resolved on a colossal Buddha to answer it - work interrupted by a revolt in Kyushu, resumed in 743 with an imperial edict calling on the whole population to contribute funds, and completed only after seven failed castings.

The eighth attempt succeeded in 749: a seated bronze Buddha fifty-three feet high, built up in forty-one separate layers rather than cast in a single shell, consuming five hundred pounds of gold, nearly seventeen thousand pounds of tin, close to two thousand pounds of mercury and almost a million pounds of copper. No country in contemporary Europe outside Byzantium could have managed an undertaking on that scale. The following month Shōmu himself, attended by his empress, his daughter and the whole court, went to the temple and knelt before the finished image - the sovereign of Yamato, in the position of a subject at an imperial audience, professing himself the servant of Buddha, the Law and the Priesthood.

Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Gilles Desjardins · CC BY-SA 4.0

What the choice of Nara cost, and bought

A permanent capital was not free. Building it, and later moving away from it, strained the treasury in ways a mobile court on campaign never had to reckon with, and the era's own land and tax records show a steady erosion: a district that had twenty thousand taxable adult males around 600 counted fewer than two thousand by 767, the rest absorbed into tax-exempt estates held by temples, courtiers and local strongmen the central government could no longer reach.

But it was Nara, not a moving military camp, that made a standing bureaucracy possible at all - officials who specialised, records that accumulated in one place across reigns, and a literate court capable of producing the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and the Great Buddha within the same two or three generations. Kyoto, when the court finally moved there in 794, inherited an administration and a documentary tradition that Nara had built first.

A court that stopped moving

peakDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

For as long as the Yamato court remained, in substance, a military chieftaincy ruling a few provinces and a scatter of tributaries, it had no fixed seat. Government was conducted by the sword rather than the sceptre, and a ruler who needed to be in camp or on the march as often as on a throne had little use for a permanent capital. Nara, and several sites in the Home Provinces before it, served the purpose only as long as the purpose itself stayed modest.

A choice made for the shape of the realm, not for a ruler's taste

Under Kammu, whose reign spanned the last two decades of the eighth century, that calculation changed. As the court's territory grew and settled, the sheer volume and complexity of government business made a divided labour, and therefore a permanent seat, a practical necessity rather than a luxury. In 794 the capital moved to the city that would become known as Kyoto - chosen not for sentiment but for position, sitting near the narrowest neck of land between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific, close to the centre of the country's habitable and populated area by any practical measure of geography.

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Nagoya Taro · CC BY-SA 4.0

A name that outgrew its origin

The city was founded as Heian-kyō, but the more formal name fell out of common use almost as soon as people started simply calling it the miako - the capital - and from there, Kyoto. The name would remain attached to the city as Japan's seat of government for the rest of the imperial court's independent political life, through every later century in which real power drifted elsewhere while the throne itself never moved again.

What permanence actually bought the throne

A fixed capital let the reformed administration Kamatari's regency had begun a century and a half earlier finally operate at full capacity: officials could specialise, records could accumulate in one place across reigns rather than travelling with a mobile court, and the business of governing an expanding realm no longer competed directly with the business of campaigning to hold it. It was this same settled, layered bureaucracy - built to run itself regardless of who occupied the throne - that would make it possible, within a few more generations, for a family of court officials to run it without occupying the throne at all.

Four daughters

peakDrafted from Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910)

For more than thirty years, one Fujiwara regent's word was law in the capital, if not always in the provinces - and the arrangement he perfected was simple enough to state in a single fact: Fujiwara no Michinaga became the father-in-law of four successive emperors and the grandfather of as many.

Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Unknown · Public domain

Thrusting aside the rightful heir

The regency should have gone, in 995, to Michinaga's nephew Korechika, the acknowledged head of the clan after his father's death. Michinaga, the fifth son of the previous regent, set him aside and took the office himself. He held it, and the office of chancellor after it, without serious internal challenge for the rest of his life.

The method was marriage, applied with a thoroughness no earlier Fujiwara had managed. In 999 his eldest daughter married the reigning Emperor Ichijō. When Ichijō died in 1011, Michinaga raised his own cousin to the throne as Emperor Sanjō and married him to his second daughter. Sanjō went blind and abdicated in 1016; Michinaga's own grandson succeeded as Emperor Go-Ichijō and had to marry his aunt, the regent's third daughter. A fourth daughter went to Go-Ichijō's brother, the future Emperor Go-Suzaku; a fifth was married to a prince who had briefly stood heir presumptive to the throne himself - a prince already married to a Fujiwara lady from a rival branch of the family, who returned to her own father in such fury at being supplanted that his hair is recorded as having turned grey from the shock. He is said to have gone to work at once trying to destroy Michinaga by magic. It did not work. No other noble family in the capital dared offer a daughter as a candidate empress again while Michinaga lived.

Nails and teeth

None of this would have held without force behind it, and the imperial guard - by Michinaga's day a rabble of bribed placemen who blockaded the palace gates over unpaid rice rations and had to be bribed with drugged sake by an exasperated provincial governor before they would disperse - could not supply it. Michinaga built his own: the Minamoto general Yorimitsu and his retainers, known at court as the regent's "nails and teeth," a private military household whose loyalty did not depend on the crumbling machinery of state service at all. It was an arrangement that solved Michinaga's own problem and created a much larger one for his descendants - the same Minamoto and Taira houses that would, within two centuries, stop taking Fujiwara orders and start giving them.

What Michinaga's court produced

The court Michinaga ruled from behind was, by the same tradition's own account, also the court that produced the Tale of Genji. Murasaki Shikibu, a provincial governor's daughter serving in the household of Michinaga's own daughter, the Empress Shōshi, is said to have shut herself in a tower overlooking Lake Biwa and, on a night when the full moon lit the water, written two chapters of the tale in a single sitting - the beginning of a fifty-four-chapter work she is said to have finished within weeks and presented, through the empress, to the throne itself.

Fujita Art Museum, Osaka · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Unknown · Public domain

Court life in these decades ran on the same currency throughout: poetry composed on a subject the emperor himself set, a felicitous verse or a graceful turn of phrase enough to make its author a minister or a maid of honour, an empress or a councillor. It was a society that had turned literary accomplishment into a form of political capital, at exactly the moment one family had turned marriage into the same thing - and the Fujiwara regency at its height and the flowering of Heian court literature were not two separate stories happening to share a generation. They were the same court, doing the same kind of work, in prose and in politics both.

Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya · Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (1910) · Unknown · Public domain

A family that could empty a throne

contractionDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

The office of Kuambaku, or imperial regent, became the Fujiwara family's own hereditary property, and with it came a power more durable than any single reign: the ability to decide who actually wore the crown. Because the imperial succession ran on a wide and indefinite basis rather than a single fixed rule, a family positioned to manage the throne's vacancies could simply arrange to have one occur.

Choosing an heir by choosing an abdication

Fujiwara regents compelled sitting emperors to abdicate whenever it suited the family's own interest to install a more pliable successor, and by long custom the throne passed to whichever candidate the regental family judged most useful rather than to whoever inheritance alone might have favoured. The mikado remained, in every formal sense, the empire's only sovereign. In practice, for generation after generation, the Fujiwara decided which mikado that would be.

An arrangement no rival family broke - until one tried something different

What eventually ended the Fujiwara monopoly was not a rival claim to the regency itself but a different kind of power emerging alongside it: the military households the court's own earlier consolidation had helped create. Two clans in particular, the Taira and the Minamoto, had risen from comparative obscurity into the same social prominence long enjoyed by the court nobility, and for decades the two lived alongside each other in Kyoto without serious conflict, sometimes even as allies on distant campaigns.

The battle that changed what victory meant

That peace ended in 1156, when the two clans backed rival claimants to the throne in an armed contest fought inside the capital itself. The Taira won, and their victory delivered something the Fujiwara's own regency had never quite required: physical possession of the imperial palace, and with it, control of whichever policy the emperor now issued in his own name. The Taira leader, Kiyomori, used that advantage to fill court offices with his own relatives just as thoroughly as the Fujiwara ever had - proof that the throne's own kingmakers had changed, but the underlying arrangement of a nominal sovereign and an actual one had not.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Unknown · Public domain

Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Fujiwara no Gōshin · Public domain

A grandmother, a child, and the sea

endDrafted from Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883)

Kiyomori's death in 1181 did not end the war his own rise had provoked. The Taira, driven from the capital, regrouped in the south and west while the Minamoto general Yoshitsune pursued them without pause - burning one fortified retreat after another, driving the survivors from Fukuwara to Yashima and finally to the straits at Shimonoseki, where both sides committed their entire remaining strength to a naval battle that would settle the war outright.

A prearranged signal decides a fleet action

The battle, fought in the fourth month of 1185 at Dan-no-ura, turned on treachery within the Taira's own ranks: a captain named Shigeyoshi, secretly loyal to Yoshitsune, had agreed on a signal marking which ship in the Taira fleet carried the prize Yoshitsune most wanted, and when the signal appeared Yoshitsune's own vessels swarmed it at once. The Taira commander Tomomori and six of his fellow leaders died fighting hand-to-hand rather than surrender.

Akama Jingū, Shimonoseki · Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (1883) · Tosa Mitsunobu (attributed) · Public domain

A grandmother's last choice

Kiyomori's widow, a Buddhist nun, chose the sea over capture. Holding her five-year-old grandson - the boy emperor Antoku, enthroned as a Taira puppet since infancy - she leapt overboard with him in her arms. The child's own mother tried and failed to save him; both drowned together. The sacred regalia the boy emperor carried went into the strait with him, and the head of the Taira house, along with a great number of nobles and court ladies, was taken captive rather than following his own family into the water.

A throne that survived, and a war that decided who ruled beside it

The imperial line itself did not end at Dan-no-ura - Antoku's own brother, Go-Toba, had already been recognised by the victorious Minamoto and remained on the throne the court had never actually risked in battle. What the war settled instead was which military house would now stand over that throne. In 1192, Yoritomo received the title Sei-i Tai Shogun from the same court his own family's victory had just rescued and reshaped - an office that would outlast, in one house's hands or another's, every dynasty that held it for the next six hundred and seventy-six years. The mikado kept his throne. What ended in this single generation, first by battle and then by title, was any remaining question of who actually ran the country beneath him.