This week, we turn our attention to two of the defining institutions of the Heian period, both of which will be very important for us going forward. First are the shoen, or private estates, the growth of which led to the fragmentation and decentralization of the government. The second is the rising power of the warrior class–known to history as the samurai.
Sources
Segal, Ethan, “The Shoen System” and Karl F. Friday, “The Dawn of the Samurai” in Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850
Morris, Dana, “Land and Society” and Cornelius J. Kiley, “Provincial Administration and Land Tenure in Early Heian” and Rizo Takeuchi, “The Rise of the Warriors” in The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol II: Heian Japan
Images
Transcript
When we last left our narrative of Japanese politics, we had just gotten to the rise of one branch of the Fujiwara family–the Hokke, or Northern Fujiwara–to political dominance. By the early 900s, the Fujiwara had managed to secure control of the government via a combination of marriages into the imperial line and monopolization of the twin posts of sesshou and kanpaku–regents to a child and an adult emperor, respectively.
The result was the age of so-called sekkan politics–sekkan being a combination of kanji characters from sesshou and kanpaku–where, for all intents ant purposes, the Fujiwara clan essentially ran the government.
Now: we’re not going to spend too much time on the ups and downs of Fujiwara government, because while these things are interesting I don’t think they’re strictly necessary for a narrative of Japanese history. Instead, I want to focus on a somewhat new subject–the economy–before turning our attention to a new phenomenon in the rise of Japan’s warrior class.
But first: economics! It’s really starting in the Nara era and moving into the Heian period that we start to get a clearer sense of how the economic structure of early Japan worked, and in a certain sense, the picture that emerges is pretty straightforward.
The Taika Reforms of 645 and the half-century of Chinese-style laws implemented thereafter set up a simple concept for the economy: all land in Japan was the property of the imperial state, and of Japan’s emperors. That land was leased, in essence, to Japan’s farmers, who served as lifetime and perpetual tenants, so to speak. They did not own their farms in the sense we’d understand it–they could not sell or exchange them, for example–but were allotted land based on where they lived, based on family size, with a quarter hectare per adult male and 1/6th per adult female (respectively, that’s about 2500 square meters/3000 square yards for men, and about 1700 square meters,2033 square yards for adult women). Lesser allotments were given for children, the elderly, and slaves.
Any land left over once these allotments were handed out was kouden–-state land, managed by local officials and used for the upkeep of the imperial court and the government administration. That land was cultivated either by corvee labor–essentially, farmers paid their taxes by cultivating these state lands part time–or by leasing it out to farmers who had the manpower to work more land, in exchange for a rent of 1/5th of their production.
Finally, farmers could open up new lands for cultivation in exchange for a confirmation of their tenant rights over it for 3 generations as well as a substantially reduced rent–essentially, the goal here was to incentivize opening up new farmlands in order to grow the overall state economy and make it wealthier, since Japan’s economy (and thus the revenue of the state) was overwhelmingly built on agriculture.
On paper, this system worked rather well, but by the late Nara and early Heian years, it was beginning to break down for a simple reason. Lands were supposed to be reallocated every six years based on shifting household sizes, but as anyone who has ever been a census worker knows that job is not easy–and especially not in a pre-information technology, pre-mass literacy era where families that had lost population (and thus could lose land) had an active incentive to sabotage you in order to avoid having their land allotments cut.
Implementing the census proved extremely challenging, and as a result over the course of the 800s the nature of economic administration began to change.
First land redistribution at first slowed and then more or less stopped by 900, with households instead being confirmed as perpetual tenants of their lands. Second, the need to maintain a more stable flow of taxes led to a shift in administrative priorities.
By the 900s, the government had moved away from this whole attempt at managing public lands for taxes–which required an intensive level of bureaucratic management to make sure taxes were collected effectively–into a more decentralized model.
In this approach, power was instead devolved to the provincial level, where the various kokushi, or provincial governors, were basically given unchecked authority alongside other bureaucrats appointed from Kyoto (the assistant governors, provincial secretaries, and provincial inspectors) to manage the province and procure a fixed tax revenue based on land assessments of the province.
Basically, if you were made governor of, say, Tosa province, you’d be given an amount in taxes you were supposed to hit based on the assessed value of the province, and it was up to you–alongside your fellow bureaucratic appointees as well as the permanent local administrative staff–to figure out how to hit it.
This new approach gave provincial governors a lot of power, balanced by a check on said authority taken from, shockingly enough, imperial China. Governors served fixed terms, and would have to rotate out of office afterwards and be dispatched to new provinces should they return to administration at a later date.
The idea was that governors could not stay in the same area long enough to build an independent base of power from the imperial court, keeping them from becoming strong enough to threaten central authority.
Taxes, by the way, were overwhelmingly paid in kind–that is to say, not in cash, because at this point the Japanese economy had yet to convert to currency. Rice was, of course, the staple crop, and the value of other goods was calculated using rice as the main unit of exchange.
Rice would remain the backbone of the economy and the fundamental measure of value for economics until the downfall of feudalism in Japan in the mid-1800s.
What this meant in practice was that you were either paying your taxes directly in rice, or in other goods (say, other grains like barley, or in dried fish or structural quality bamboo or timber or stone or whatever) the value of which was determined based on rice.
To a lesser extent, fabrics like silk and hemp could serve as a medium of exchange in the provinces, where local merchants would help circulate goods between neighboring villages in market towns–but rice was dominantly the medium of exchange.
Broadly, the economic picture that emerges is very much centered on the imperial capital, with the various provinces producing enough to sustain themselves–and to circulate within the surrounding few square miles between villages–and the excess being lopped off and sent to the capital as taxes.
It was, simply put, a national economy that was entirely focused on Kyoto, and on a non-tax paying aristocracy and imperial court sustained by the labor of the vast majority of the population as farmers.
However, the court’s control over the economy would begin to weaken by the mid- to late-Heian years, leading in a certain sense to the downfall of the imperial court as the center of political power. And to understand why that happened, we have to understand one of the most central aspects of this shifting agricultural economy: the shouen, or tax-free estate.
The origins of the shoen lie in that push for more land cultivation that began back in the 700s–the goal being, remember, to open up even more of the country to agriculture, which was after all the backbone of the economy itself.
Opening up new lands, however, is far easier said than done. Local labor had to be hired to clear out dense forests, deal with bamboo groves–bamboo being notoriously difficult to control at all given how fast and thick it can shoot up–drain swamps, clear out rocks, and level out ground. And of course, all the while the laborers doing the work had to deal with insects, with extreme warmth or cold, with natural disasters–it’s hardly surprising that early records of this land cultivation work show that sometimes, these efforts were either barely successful or failed after just a few years.
This kind of work required someone wealthy to finance it–usually either an aristocratic family or a powerful religious institution who paid the costs associated with clearing land in exchange for being landlords over it. And many of these wealthy backers were able to sweeten the pot for themselves by getting a deal from the central government. In exchange for opening up new areas for agricultural cultivation, they could get part of the land as a perpetual, tax-free estate where the income from the land’s tenants went solely to the estate holder.
This, in essence, is what a shoen is. And despite the incredible difficulties of clearing land, the system proved quite effective at what it was supposed to do: incentivizing the clearing of land.
But that very success was kind of an issue, because tax-free status for the shoen meant that even as the amount of land under cultivation was growing, government revenues were not growing to match. And, as the government continued to expand–and the expenses of the court grew to match–that created something of a money crunch for the Heian state.
That crunch was made worse, by the by, by one other aspect of the shoen system we haven’t talked about yet. There was, you see, one other way to get shoen status besides clearing land yourself: lands pledged to the support of a religious institution like a shrine or temple did not pay taxes.
The theory here was that shrines and temples were taxed, in essence, in the form of their spiritual duties on behalf of the state–that prayers for the safety and success of the throne were their spiritual “rent”. Thus, they did not have to pay a physical rent to go along with it.
And so long as temple and shrine lands were fairly confined, this worked ok–but there were ways to exploit this system as well in an age where rapid communication between provinces and capitol was not possible, and where recordkeeping could be a bit uneven. More than a few landholders located near provincial estates held by shrines and temples cut deals with those religious establishments–they would pay rent to the temple or shrine, and exchange said temple or shrine would claim this land as a part of their estate, meaning it was not subject to taxation.
As long as the rent paid to said temple or shrine was less than the taxed amount would have been, this was a pretty good deal–well, a good deal for anyone other than the local provincial governor with a target to hit in terms of annual taxes, who had just lost one more source to pull from.
Recordkeeping was, in fact, one of the main challenges of the shoen system. Given the relocations of the capital in early Japanese history, plus the fact that construction was primarily wood and paper (and thus the archives of state bureaucracy were subject to the occasional fire), plus just good old fashioned human error or loss, it was not uncommon for the “paper trail” of a given estate to be hard to track down. And in the absence of a paper trail, it became very hard to “control” the amount of shoen estates out there.
That was even more true by the late 900s. By this point, the amount of reclaimable land left within Japan’s borders had–even with the expansion of those borders north thanks to the wars against the Emishi–shrunk to almost nothing. Those looking to expand their incomes by building new estates had to find other ways to do so.
One of the common tricks used in the 900s and 1000s was a process called commendation. Say you’re a member of the Fujiwara family who is looking to boost your personal income so that you can climb the ranks at court. One way to do this was to send your agents out into the provinces to look for an estate or two that had, shall we say, some dubious paperwork and offer them a bargain.
In exchange for a fixed income from said estate, you’d extend your patronage to the owner–confirming them as manager of the estate lands, and protecting them from any challenge from the provincial governor to their tax-exempt status.
For example, take Kanokogi shoen, a tax free estate in what was then the Akita district of Higo province–now it’s more or less the Northern part of Kumamoto City in Kumamoto Prefecture, on the northern part of the island of Kyushu.
The lands of said estate were cleared by the order of a Buddhist acolyte named Jushou in the early 1000s–but within a few generations, his descendant Takakata started to feel he was in danger of losing his tax free status. And so, when Fujiwara Sanemasa, a mid-ranking member of the Northern Fujiwara family, reached out to him in 1086 with an offer to protect his estate, he took it–commending the estate to Sanemasa in exchange for protection.
And by the way, these “commendation” chains could go quite far. For example, Fujiwara no Sanemasa’s descendants lost much of their political influence at court, and had to cut another commendation deal for Kanokogi shoen as a result: commending it to the imperial princess Kaya no In in exchange for a cut of their profits. Kayanoin’s share in turn was eventually passed on to a powerful temple (Ninnaji).
This sort of approach was not just used to protect existing shoen; there are records of new shoen being carved out of existing public lands (in other words, the territories used to cover the expenses of the government and court), using the influence of powerful protectors at court (overwhelmingly though not always from the Fujiwara family) to provide legal cover.
Essentially, the power of the Fujiwara by this time was such that they could simply get away with doing blatantly illegal things and relying on their familial wealth and connections to get away with it.
And the hell of it is, this pretty much worked. There were attempts by more independent-minded emperors to stop this as early as 902, when the Dajokan, or Supreme Council of State, briefly banned the creation of new shoen during a short interval when it was not controlled by the Fujiwara.
But this attempt was pretty handily ignored–there was simply too much wealth on the table, and it was very hard to actually force estate proprietors to pay taxes, particularly when they had the backing of the Fujiwara or a wealthy temple or shrine.
I mean what were you going to do? Mobilize an army to go occupy the estate? That could well end up costing more than the revenue you’d gain and probably wouldn’t even work then–and in doing so, a provincial governor could alienate someone with a lot of power at court to help or hinder their political career
Similar attempts to ban new shoen were put into place in 985, 1040, and 1056, but all ultimately failed to accomplish anything of note.
The last big attempt to reign in the shoen was made by Emperor GoSanjo, one of very few Heian period emperors who did not have a Fujiwara mother and thus did not align himself closely to that family. In 1069 GoSanjo declared all shoen created after 1045 invalid, and demanded all others submit documentation of their tax free status to a new government office created to manage the issue. However, shoen estate holders dragged their feet on compliance until Gosanjo’s death in 1073.
Future members of the imperial family would abandon attempts to reign in the shoen system, instead adopting the time honored political strategy known as, “if you can’t beat em, join em.”
In other words, they would set about trying to sustain the income of the imperial house not by defending public lands used for taxation, but by carving out shoen estates of their own.
As a result, by the year 1100 the shoen system had become the focal point of a fierce economic competition for control of lands (and therefore profits) between three groups: first, wealthy peasants and other local powerholders, who within the bounds of a given shoen were (in a time honored human tradition) trying to avoid paying taxes to their nominal overlord as much as they could.
Death and taxes may be the two universal human constants, but I’d argue tax cheats are a close third.
Second were provincial governors, desperate to stop the advance of the shoens for two reasons. First, of course, was to actually do their jobs; they had to draw tax income from public lands to meet their taxation quotas, and the extent to which they were successful would have a big impact on their job prospects going forward. Second, and less public-mindedly, far more of a provincial governor’s income came, not from their salary, but from taxes–in particular, from collecting more taxes than were owed, forwarding what was needed to Kyoto, and pocketing the rest.
Bureaucratic corruption may, after all, be a close fourth constant as well.
And then, finally, there were the great houses and religious institutions of the imperial court, fighting to protect their own shoen holdings and expand them.
The various sides weren’t always in conflict; for example, canny provincial governors could work out deals with powerful shoen holders whereby lands were not officially converted into shoen–but in exchange, the person or institution with the claim to those lands would get a tax break, owing less than the normally assessed amount for their holding.
Of course, deals like that were only good while a governor was in office, and when they left, well, time to start trying to cut a new deal.
By the end of the Heian era in the late 1100s, somewhere between 40-60 percent of the nation’s agricultural land had been converted into shoen. This, of course, made little difference if you were a farmer–you still paid taxes either way, it just depended who you paid them to–but for the nation’s finances as a whole the shoen became a major issue.
And they would remain one for the next several centuries–we’re not done with the shoen yet!
But we are going to turn our attention to the other subject of today’s episode: the rise of the warrior class. As we covered a few episodes back, the origins of the samurai, as they came to be known, lay in the wars against the Emishi aboriginals of northern Honshu that took place during the very early years of the Heian era. The conscript levies of the imperial state proved insufficient against the hit-and-run tactics of the Emishi, and so a series of reforms both abolished the old conscription model and began to set up permanent territorial warriors stationed in the provinces (especially in the still somewhat untamed east) to pacify the region.
The process here was ad hoc; there’s not a single law or policy one can point to as establishing the samurai class specifically. Instead, provincial governors, realizing the need for armed forces to police their territory against bandits, Emishi raids, and other threats to the peace, increasingly came to commission professional fighters as a part of their entourages when they took up office in the provinces.
Potential fighters were recruited with various incentives including steady income or land grants in exchange for professional military services.
Most of the people who took up the call to become warriors were from what we might, somewhat anachronistically, call the Heian middle-class–not middle class in the sense we use it today, but the middle to lower aristocracy of the capital city at Kyoto.
These were families that were technically aristocratic, but not of particularly high rank and lacking in connection–they could not really hope to climb up the ladder of government administration as a result. So a career as a provincial warrior, while it meant leaving behind by far the best developed part of the country for the frontier, was economically a good option.
Others came from the local elite of the provinces; if you were a wealthy provincial but lacked the aristocratic background for politics in Kyoto, taking some family wealth and investing it into making a spare son a professional warrior was another way to bolster the social prestige of your family.
The other source of warriors–and particularly, of elite well-connected ones–was from branches of the imperial house. We’ve covered this before, already, but one of the issues with a system that endorses polygamy (allowing men to have multiple female partners) is the sheer number of children you end up with. Which is great in terms of making sure there’s always an heir and a spare (and several more spares) floating around, but it can get messy. After all, you have to find something for all these kids to do. And in the case of the imperial family specifically, you have to worry about some obscure cousin or whatnot getting it into their head they’d make for a better emperor, or being seized upon by opportunistic politicians looking to prop up a potential figurehead emperor of their own.
So every so often, you have to prune the family tree–removing branches from the imperial line, in other words, in order to keep things from getting too complicated (or in some cases, as a way for, say, the Fujiwara leadership to remove troublemaking branches of the imperial family).
One of the distinct things about the imperial family is that legally, even today, members of said family do not have a surname–so when they leave the family, they had to be granted one. There was a stock of surnames used for ex-imperial family members, of which the two best known are, of course, Minamoto and Taira–because people using those surnames would come to dominate the warrior class in the coming centuries.
The Minamoto name was given to 17 different branches of the imperial family, and the Taira one 4, with each branch being distinguished by the emperor they shared a common ancestry with.
For example, the most prominent Minamoto branch were the Seiwa Minamoto, descended from the Emperor Seiwa, while the Kanmu Taira were the most prominent of their surname.
Members of these branch families of course needed new employment, and fighting as warriors in the provinces was a good option–particularly because of the luster of their imperial ancestry and the fact that many family members still had useful political connections in Kyoto.
Regardless of background, the main function of these warriors was the protection of property claims in the provinces. These warriors would serve whoever they had contracted with–a local estate-holder, the provincial governor, a powerful religious institution, and so on–and fight on their behalf to defend their holdings from bandits, Emishi raids, peasant revolt, or anything else.
This was, in essence, war as a form of business; early samurai resemble, at least to my eye, nothing so much as professional mercenaries who defended the claims of the highest bidder.
Over time, of course, some warrior families were more successful at attracting patronage–and thus became extremely wealthy and influential. And naturally, the most successful at this were those Taira and Minamoto families whose elite pedigrees connected them back to the court at Kyoto.
For example, over the course of the 900s the Seiwa Minamoto became a powerful family out in eastern Japan–primarily because they allied themselves to the Northern Fujiwara regents of the capitol and received substantial benefits from their Fujiwara masters in exchange for defending the Fujiwara shoen.
The Kanmu Taira, meanwhile, built their base of power in Kazusa and Shimosa provinces (now both a part of Chiba prefecture in the eastern Tokyo metro area), where one of the family’s early founders served as suke, or vice governor–and while doing so, secured himself several shoen and intermarried with the local elites to create a political network of supporters.
The independent power of these warrior families could and did pose a threat to the authority of the state, and indeed it’s no coincidence that the emergence of the warrior class as a distinct political force in Heian Japan is often dated to a pair of anti-government rebellions
The most famous of these is of course the rebellion of Taira no Masakado, one of many members of the Taira family who had by the 930s made their home in what’s now the Greater Tokyo metro area (specifically, what’s now Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures).
Masakado first emerges onto the historical stage in the 930s, when the Taira base of power in the east was wracked by a series of disputes between provincial governors (looking to collect taxes) and shoen estateholders (looking to avoid them).
Masakado was an advocate for the estateholders (unsurprisingly, as many of them were either his relatives or political allies), and in 935 the dispute turned violent, resulting in skirmishes between bands of Masakado’s followers (provincial warriors who had pledged themselves to him, or conscripted men from Taira-held estates) and those of the provincial governors.
However, this provoked little response from the state; skirmishing of this kind was not uncommon in the rough and tumble east of the country, and so Masakado received little more than a slap on the wrist.
And that apparently emboldened him further, because in 939 Masakado gathered up his allies and proclaimed himself the shinnou, or new emperor, of the eight provinces of the Kanto plains in what’s now Tokyo.
He began appointing new officers to fill out a government, and wrote to the Fujiwara regent in Kyoto at the time (Fujiwara no Tadahira) asking to be recognized in his newfound control of the east and promising (in essence) an alliance between the Fujiwara and his own branch of the Taira family to divide and rule Japan.
That offer was, in the end, not accepted–Tadahira had Taira no Masakado condemned as a rebel against the state, and in the end the rebellion was suppressed.
Importantly, however, it was suppressed not by an army marshalled by the Kyoto government, but by other warriors–Tadahira publicly proclaimed there would be substantial rewards for anyone who successfully brought Masakado to justice, and so it was Masakado’s own cousin–Taira no Sadamori–who alongside an envoy from the Fujiwara succeeded in hunting down and killing Masakado.
Masakado’s rebellion was a watershed moment for a couple of reasons. First, it has some great spooky ghost stories associated with it; supposedly, his severed head was taken to Kyoto, but flew off mysteriously under its own power (possibly because his daughter Takiyasha was rumored to be a necromancer) to return to what’s now Tokyo where it was buried by the locals. The site of his grave has all sorts of fun ghost stories associated with it.
More importantly for us, however, Masakado’s rebellion marked the emergence of the warrior class as an element capable of challenging the central government (and this was not the last time that would happen by any margin).
It’s also important that what brought Masakado down was, in the end, the intervention of other warriors–not a government army, but another private force that had been raised to deal with him.
In other words, it was only other samurai who succeeded in bringing a renegade samurai down.
To be fair, it’s not like the government had no independent military capacity; while Masakado’s rebellion was going on, another separate anti-government faction led by a renegade member of the Northern Fujiwara (Fujiwara no Sumitomo) was making moves in Kyushu. Sumitomo had forged an alliance between his own followers and the pirate clans that dominated Japan’s inland sea (terrain very favorable for them) to seize control of a part of Kyushu simultaneously with Masakado’s rebellion.
And Sumitomo’s force was defeated by a central government army sent to deal with him, not by local warriors enticed by the promise of reward.
Still, government forces were also unable to bring anything approaching peace or stability, particularly in the eastern part of the country–where warrior power was at its strongest. The battles of the east were driven by a combination of One official in Shimosa province in 950 lamented: “Lawless bands rage everywhere in the eastern provinces, looting and inflicting injury, so that there is no peace day or night.”
And rebellions or lawless behavior by members of the warrior class would indeed remain an issue throughout the remainder of the Heian era–the independent power of the warrior class made it consistently difficult for central authorities to exercise any sort of control over them (at least, not without bringing in other warriors–who were not, unsurprisingly, altruists about it and always wanted something in return).
The East in particular would be the sight of continuous unrest–we’re not going to have time to cover all of it, because my god do some of the tangled webs get complex (and wrapped up, especially in the northernmost provinces, with the ongoing attempts to subdue the Emishi population).
The webs of alliance and counteralliance were further entangled by the fact that, in addition to their relationships with the local governors and the Kyoto government, these independent military families of course had their own alliances and allegiances with each other, with more powerful families. Indeed, the power of warrior families was largely contingent on their ability to call together allies, as the expense of equipping an early samurai–the armor, the horses, the bow and arrow (at the time the foremost samurai weapon) and the years of training required to use them all meant that even the wealthiest families couldn’t afford more than a few dozen followers, plus maybe a couple hundred conscripts off their estates.
It was when these families joined together to form armies in the hundreds or thousands that they became truly dangerous.
Broadly, what we’re dealing with here is an emerging independent power base for Japan’s warriors–and a growing threat therefore to the authority of the existing government. It was, at this point, still nascent–but the threat was growing.
And we’ll see, before long, just how much of a threat that emergent warrior power will be.