Peace (16 page)

The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary weapons makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings. . . Therefore the heads of provinces, official agents, and deputies are ordered to collect all the weapons mentioned above and turn them over to the government.
²¹

The decree's pivotal words,
unnecessary
weapons, selectively demilitarized the people of Japan for centuries by giving the government full discretion in determining their necessity. Ostensibly, weapons were only needed for external defense. Actually, they were used to subdue and control a close to defenseless internal population. Historically, the use of imported means in maintaining oppressive peace in Ancient Japan long antedated this decree.

While the earliest historical references to Japan are in Han documents of the first century CE, prehistoric remains indicate that game-followers settled on the islands as early as 10,000 BCE. This indigenization period, which lasted until
c
. 300 CE, and its peoples are called the Jomon, who mixed subsistence hunting-gathering with coastal activities such as fishing in small, apparently egalitarian partnership-modeled villages, lacking the resources to sustain intense or prolonged conflict, and so were likely more peaceful than not. Whereas in Ancient India, nomad invasions increased outright and structural violence, a migration of agriculturalists from China and the Korean peninsula did so in Ancient Japan. Along with rice cultivation, they also brought with them metal tools and weapons; each were to become staples. The resulting Yayoi culture (
c
. 300 BCE–250 CE) quickly subsumed the Jomon, keeping its coastal but few of its other cultural traits. The absence of obvious signs of aggression during this transition remains unexplained and highly mismatches their abundance afterwards, including widespread tribal warfare, developed defenses and social stratification, but also the formation of strategic and cooperative alliances between tribes. Han references are to these Yayoi tribes, numbering in the hundreds, certain of which were Han tributaries by 57 CE.

Two centuries later, following years of inter-tribal war, a shamanistic priestess named Himiko is said to have charmed thirty of the Yayoi tribes to confederate in peace for mutual protection and prosperity, Japan's first polity. In 238, she sent gich-03nbearing emissaries to one of China's Three Kingdoms, who recognized her as the region's sovereign. Two years later they reciprocated, initiating a pattern of peaceful exchange between Japan and China that continued intermittently for a millennium. When Himiko died, her brother-military advisor took the throne. His militarism got him
deposed and replaced by a young female relative, Iyo. It was hoped she would bring back the peace of Himiko's reign but she did not. The
Kojiki
(
Record of Ancient Times
, 712) and the
Nihon Shoki
(
Chronicles of Japan
, 720), Japan's earliest native historical records, deal largely with the rise of the subsequent and much more centralized Imperial state.

That the
Kojiki
and
Nihon Shoki
were written in a form of the Chinese script is symbolic of the other mainland traditions which were integrated as Japanese Emperors gained control of the islands, adapting foreign strengths to overcome native weaknesses. Cosmogonies establish the divinity of Emperors by tracing the Imperial lineage back to the sun god Amaterasu, blending natural spirit (
kami
) and ancestor worship in an early form of Shinto, discussed below. Divine Japanese Emperors were unchecked by their Chinese counterparts' Mandate of Heaven, one of the primary differences between the two Imperial systems. The first verifiable Emperor, Suijin (early fourth century CE), was as skilled a negotiator as he was tactician. He and his delegates “relied heavily on negotiation and persuasion – and no doubt threat and coercion – rather than simple military confrontation,” as his predecessors had in annexing proximate Yayoi tribes and centralizing power.
²²
Social ranks and official titles were used as blunt bait in luring them into the Imperial hierarchy, which gave new members an immediate stake in the state's fate. In this way, hostility towards the Empire was reduced when it could not be eliminated, and peace after non-military incorporations was also more secure than after military ones. Suijin's name has been used ever since by Shintoists to refer to a benevolent water kami.

The Imperial state's first phase (
c
. 250–538) is named after its early elites' burial mounds, the Kofun. These are characteristic expressions of the animism dating to Himiko's times, but also indicate the steady increase in structurally violent social stratification since the Yayoi. Elites such as the powerful Soga clan began concentrating in the Asuka region, whence the Imperial state's second phase (
c
. 538–710) gets its name. They had strong ties to the Korean peninsula, especially one of its own ruling Three Kingdoms. For military support against the other two, Japan received Mahayana Buddhism's peaceful religious know-how, adopted by the Imperial court in the sixth century, which the Soga clan used to unite and pacify subjects old and new in the Emperor's name. Another Korean import, important for its uses in both in war, as cavalry, and in peace, as transportation and labor, was the horse. Meanwhile, flurries of envoys called
kentoshi
to and from China sometimes stayed for years before returning, reinforcing centuries-old ties, keeping Japan up-to-date in legal, religious and administrative affairs. One Japanese envoy, Abe no Nakamaro (seventh century), even passed the Chinese civil service examination and became an important government official there. Dozens of
kentoshi were sent during China's Sui and T'ang Dynasties, recorded in the records of both Empires. “The information they brought back was valued highly and their contributions to Japanese culture were incalculable,” not least of which were ways of making, maintaining and celebrating
spiritual peace
.
²³

As mentioned, the divine Imperial lineage is traced back to Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. What has not been discussed is how she came to represent peace and prosperity in general and, in particular, that of the Imperial state. Although Shinto beliefs and practices can be traced back to the native animism of the Yayoi tribes, historical references to them begin with the
Kojiki
in the early eighth century CE when the imperial state was taking shape. The word Shinto was used to distinguish native traditions from foreign Buddhist or Confucian traditions with which they were soon infused. According to the
Kojiki
, Amaterasu's light is what allowed rice to grow, explaining why she was worshipped as the source of all food, ultimately the source of peace. But her brother Susano, god of storms and representative of the warlike tribes the early Empire was struggling to bring into its fold, destroyed all her pacific achievements in a drunken rage. When she emerged from a cave in which she hid herself in reprisal, peace and prosperity returned to the world, implying that the Empire was conceived as the only way for this to happen in the present, notwithstanding its benefits from foreign influences.

By the
Kojiki'
s time, local kami tied to everything from rivers and mountains to animals and elements were already venerated or appeased with offerings and prayers throughout Japan. While no one kami reigned supreme in Shinto polytheism, a hierarchy of deities reflective of the sociopolitical order emerged. Soon after the
Kojiki
, Buddhism was imported and Shinto fables reflect this as well. In one tale, a transgressive fox kami is brought to order by a Buddhist monk depicted as the upholder of justice and peace. Around the same time, the practice of Shugendo emerged, blending Shinto, Buddhism and Daoism. Its ascetic practitioners lived alone or in small groups and sought inner peace primarily through communion with nature, which they believed could also bring social peace to the communities they once belonged. Zen Buddhist methods of attaining inner peace were more popular, of which two main schools flourished in Japan: Rinzai and Soto. Rinzai emphasized enigmatic or non-rational dialogue (
koan
) to gain immediate Nirvana such as, germane to our topic though admittedly my invention: Can peace exist if there is no one around to experience it? Soto master Dogen (1200–1253) emphasized seated meditation (
zazen
) or in daily activities to reach the same end. So “multilayered, coexistent and syncretistic beliefs are found everywhere” in Japanese history, nearly all directly related to up-keeping an inner, socio-political or natural order conducive to collective peace.
²⁴

Another set of supernatural beings called
tengu
, for example, derived from Ancient India and China, came in hundreds of different forms. The most popular was a crow which was thought “to punish those who disturbed the peace of the forest or damaged the trees.”
²⁵
Yet another import, the Jaodori festival which began with Chinese residents of Nagasaki, involved a serpent or dragon paraded in the street to symbolize human “striving after peace. . . amid the noise and hardships,” symbolized by the clamor of drums, gongs and firecrackers.
²⁶
In more personal but no less supernatural terms, it was believed that the spirit of someone who died with wishes for revenge would not find peace unless “rites for the pacification of his soul were accomplished, or until his enemy had been vanquished.”
²⁷
Like the shrines that housed the kami, tombs were places where peace could be made with and for the dead. As late as the seventeenth century, decapitated heads were placed on tombs together with documents stating that the intention was to bring peace to the deceased spirit. Similarly, a common plot of No plays is a ghost who tells the story of their guilt-ridden lives and find not only their own peace of mind with the help of a priest or friends, but that of those who have survived them as well. One may doubt the beliefs upon which such spiritual peace practices are founded, but not that those who performed them believed in their effectiveness regardless of their place of origin.

Socio-politically, Confucian Legalism soon became Japan's Imperial state policy. Prince Shotoku's Seventeen-Article Constitution of 604 made Confucian morality the basis of Imperial society. His successor's Taika or Great Reform of 645–6 made Legalism the ideology of the Imperial state. The Taika was in part a response to the Soga dominance of the Imperial court, whose patriarch was killed in a conspiracy involving the Emperor the year before. In short, the Taika abolished private landholdings, which the Emperor would thereafter own and allot on a per-capita basis; ordered regular censuses for tax and policy purposes; put in place the
ritsuryo
,
ritsu
being the penal code and
ryo
the administrative code, and the bureaucracy required to effect it; and, for the first but not the last time, outlawed weapons not authorized by the state and called for a conscripted army to be levied from across the empire and centrally directed. Oppressive peace in various degrees, broken by wars to remove or impose it, was the norm in Imperial Japan from the Taika onwards, though this did not dry springs of peace in other forms.

A new capital built on the Chang'an model was established at Nara in 710, the start of the next phase of the Imperial state. Emperor Shomu's reign (724–749), who lived as a Buddhist monk after abdicating, is known as the Era of Tempyo or Heavenly Peace, for his bolstering of state and religious institutions. Temples like the Todaiji were given tax-exempt status, adding economic to religious clout by the “donations” they
received from wealthy families for cost-effective safekeeping. Reacting to this religious loophole, the capital was moved to Heian-kyo (“Capital of Peace,” modern Kyoto) in 794, beginning the final phase of the early Imperial state that lived up to its capital's name until the eleventh century. Rivalries between clans once located outside the Empire were now internalized in the form of courtly influence on the Emperor. In the words of one modern historian, “The Heian period was characterized by peace and prosperity. . . there was no large-scale general warfare in the country.”
²⁸
Regencies set in place by the powerful Fujiwara clan eventually reduced Heian Emperors to nominal sovereigns, and the Taika eroded as Chinese influence waned with the fall of the T'ang. Diplomatic documents now referred to Japan as the “Land of the Rising Sun” and China as the “Land of the Setting Sun,” suggesting an equal or even superior footing, infuriating the former hegemons, and the last kentoshi was sent in 838. Increasing isolationism reduced external warfare, but also weakened cultural and commercial links with the mainland that had benefited internal peace in the past.

Towards the end of the Heian period, Imperial lands were increasingly privatized by an elite minority and their tax-sheltered temples while the vast majority became their vassals. These lands, known as Shoen, were exempt from Imperial law and taxes by the tenth century. With the revenue reduction and jurisdictional limitations Shoen entailed, the conscripted Imperial army that had maintained oppressive peace since the Taika had by the eleventh century become one levied by provincial governors on their own account without counterbalancing forces. A distinction thus materialized between
public wars
fought on behalf of the state and
private wars
instigated by and fought between governors' armies.
²⁹
At first, all private wars were punishable by the Imperial state by banishment or death. But as the forces called upon to enforce these punishments for breaching the peace were increasingly involved in private wars themselves, the legitimacy of the Imperial state doing so waned with its authority. “This placed the state in the ironic position of depending on the very group most active in outlawry to preserve the peace,” and ultimately led to its inability to preserve peace altogether, a lesson that costs much to relearn.
³⁰
By the twelfth century, Shoen needed protection not only from brigands and bandits, but from each other and the Imperial state itself. An emerging class of warriors, the samurai, was eager to provide them both for profit and glory. Shoguns, warlords who ruled or tried to rule Japan until they were overthrown in the nineteenth century, did so based on the Shoen and samurai systems. Shoen lords, Daimyo, to whom the samurai owed allegiance, in turn owed allegiance to Shoguns. Their struggles for supremacy, in the Emperor's name or not, precluded the oppressive peace they sought to achieve, if and when they did at all.
Among their many maxims was that “It is a good maxim for the samurai in peace time never to forget war.”
³¹