Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries (review)

It used to be relatively easy to teach the Heian period, at least in history surveys. One assigned some of The Tale of Genji (at least “The Broom Tree” chapter) or gave students a taste of The Pillow Book, mentioned Saichō, Kūkai, and esoteric Buddhism, and perhaps said something about shōen. The court in the era of Michinaga stood in for the entire period, and one focused on the convoluted conventions of aristocratic life: marriage politics, poetry, seduction. The underlying narrative stressed decline. Japanese elites in an earlier era may have emulated China in founding an imperial state, but their Heian successors lacked the will to see the project through. Instead of a public state staffed by a bureaucracy chosen for its competence, they created an inbred oligarchy. Worse, almost from the outset, they undermined the state’s economic foundations, willfully plundering the national land by turning it into private estates. Worse yet, they paid more attention to poetry than to governance, frittering away their days in idle dalliance and endless rounds of ceremony. To be sure, the cultural efflorescence of the mid-Heian marks a kind of high point, but our overwhelming impression of the era is of a court that was out of touch with (and little interested in) the realm it governed.

One legacy of this way of treating the era has been to make it all seem unreal. Only in some strange fantasy land could this regime of effete courtiers and emperors who did not rule have managed to survive for nearly four hundred years. Explanations based on cultural capital and the supposed power that accrues to those who possess rare talents carry only so far. My materialist-minded students are not easily persuaded that the prospect of being initiated into the art of the well-crafted allusion could convince a local landholder to surrender his crops to the central aristocracy. They regularly wonder why it took so very long for warriors to register their dissent and set up a regime of their own; they are further perplexed that even then the warriors did not simply do away with the old system.

These are not questions that a focus on the court and its culture can answer; they are, however, precisely the sorts of questions that motivate this volume. Its fourteen essays show that the ties that linked the Heian center and the provinces were more substantial than the gossamer of cultural influence. Perhaps most significantly, they reject the narrative of decline. They do not deny that the Heian period saw a substantial decentralization of power, but instead of characterizing this as the “collapse” of the center, they describe the multiplication of centers (and corresponding peripheries) linked in new, ultimately more stable ways. The volume also, as the deliberate use of the plural in its subtitle indicates, argues that there are more centers and peripheries to be considered than the familiar geographical one posing the capital against the provinces. The notion of centers and peripheries can be usefully applied to literature, to gender relations, and to class and status. In all the essays places and practices that once seemed unimpeachably central are shown to be less so, while areas or ideas that seemed to belong to the fringes take on greater importance. As a result, Heian Japan becomes a much more multifarious and complex place than previously imagined. This may make the period more difficult to teach, but it may also make the era more interesting and believable.

The book is organized by topic into five major sections. The first attempts to describe the political dimensions of center-periphery relations. Fukutō Sanae investigates the exclusion of women from positions of overt political authority. She argues that while women no longer exercised power as ruling empresses or politically active consorts, changes in the nature of court politics allowed them to wield considerable indirect influence as kokumo, mothers of emperors. G. Cameron Hurst considers the most famous Heian aristocrat, Fujiwara no Michinaga...