The Medieval Times does not show much of Europe in ancient times. And moreover, we will not be talking about Europe in ancient times, although we will be talking about kings and courts and the cunning of officials, but we will be talking about all those things in Japan. So the conversations of Japanese history in general. focus on the Tokugawa period because it has ninja and samurai, but a large part of the foundation of Japanese culture dates back to the Heian period between 782 and 1167 CE. And when I say Japanese culture, I mean culture, because the success of the Heian period was mainly art, especially in literature. So for most of this episode, we will be looking at cultural history instead of economic or political history. As a novelist, and also a cultural buyer, I am a big fan of cultural history. What I like about it is that it covers the human mind. I mean, you can't just do economic theories.
Just playing, you can. However, for our purposes, the Heian culture is a high culture of elite officials, and apparently focusing on this minority minority excludes the knowledge of many Japanese people. But we know more about the elite than anyone we know because they were leaders who wrote down and wrote about the people they loved the most - themselves. In fact one of the reasons why we know so much about the Heian dynasty is because of Japan's first great novel: The Tale of the Genji, by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Historian James Murdoch now calls the Heian aristocracy "an ever-present generation of greedy, impoverished, irrational people - often without immorality, perfect achievement, unable to make any real success". But if you boil out all the good words unnecessarily in that quote, that sounds like the people I most enjoy reading about.
In fact, I like some fun. So one of the first things we read in the texts about Heian nobles was that the imperial empire was dominated by the desire for Chinese things. Now Chinese tourists visiting Japan thought the country was backward and out of the way and uncivilized. But one of the reasons why the Japanese seemed to be slipping away from Chinese tourists was that the Japanese in the 10th century favored Tang China, which flourished a few hundred years earlier. But there was also the fact that the Japanese incorporated Chinese ideas, especially Chinese Buddhism, and indigenous cultures. In fact one of the most intriguing aspects of Heian Japan was its complete aristocracy, characterized by a love of color, grandeur, festival, and culture, combined with other inspired Buddhist ideas. You know, it 's like everyone in Canada wears powder wigs and knee-length trousers to look like 18th-century England. And one of the main ideas in Buddhism is that everything good, and everything bad, passes away. As historian Ivan Morris wrote that in the literature of the time, there was a statement that “felt that the normal order of things was about to end.” Which is always a good feeling.
Thus the center of the nobility court was the capital, Heian Jyo, which probably had a population of up to 100,000 during the golden age of Heian, making it much larger than most European cities at that time. It may be a glorious capital but we do not really know because most of the city was destroyed by earthquakes, or perhaps fires, or perhaps wars, or the desire for new construction. We are not sure. We also know that the Heian aristocracy had strong degrees, the society divided into about 30 marks based on human birth. The top 4 grades are reserved for officials, and the top 3, known as Kugyō, receive significant privileges, including government positions and income from specialized rice land. These elite people were able to teach their children at universities, wear decent clothes, and receive light punishment for committing crimes. Can you see the world when rich people get lighter sentences for the crimes they committed than the poor? These rules were so detailed that they could not even determine what kind of follower you could catch. The top 3 positions held 25 fans.
But when writing the Tale of the Genji, this level plan, like all of those levels, operates less than 1 / 10th of 1% of the population, so we're really talking about the elite. As Ivan Morris puts it: "Members of the elite are almost always related to each other. They have no interest in anyone outside of their attractive circle and are extremely sensitive to judging the well-being of each other. very important. "
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