The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (62 page)

B
Y
884,
THE
F
UJIWARA OFFICIAL
Mototsune was the most powerful man in Japan. He had been Sessho, regent for the child emperor Yozei, and in 881 he was appointed prime minister as well. Now, with Yozei well into his teens and capable of claiming rule for himself, Mototsune invented a new title for himself. He would be
Kampaku
, or “Civil Dictator”—a sort of super-advisor to the crown. It was a title that allowed him to have almost the same amount of power over a grown emperor as a Sessho had held over the underage ruler.
¹

Meanwhile, the fifteen-year-old Yozei, who had been a crowned and idle sovereign for ten years, was mutating from bored child into budding psychopath. He had developed a fondness for watching dogs kill monkeys and feeding frogs to snakes; he had also begun to suggest that he should carry out the execution of criminals with his own hands. Mototsune took advantage of this troubling behavior and called a council of palace officials, all of whom agreed with him that the young emperor should be dethroned. The Kampaku then lured his heavenly sovereign into a carriage, promising him a visit to the races, and whisked him out of the city. In his place, the court acclaimed his great-uncle, the fifty-four-year-old heavenly sovereign Koko.
²

Yozei was never imprisoned; his psychopathy took an occasional downward turn (he was reputedly responsible for at least two murders), but he seems to have been allowed to roam through the mountains on horseback, hunting and sleeping out and sometimes appearing without warning at the gates of one or another great landowner, demanding to be let in. He fell in love at least once and wrote a poem to the woman he desired, its imagery drawn from the remote northeastern coast, where the Mina river plunged from the three-thousand-foot Mount Tsukuba into a boiling pool:

There is no record that he ever married.
³

Back in Heian, Heavenly Sovereign Koko paid no attention to politics. Mototsune remained as Kampaku, keeping the reins of the government completely in his own hands. For the first time, the Kampaku openly ruled for an emperor who was an adult at the time of his coronation. It was a turning point in the development of this office, which had never been officially created or sanctioned, and which owed its existence to the ambition and energy of a single family. And Mototsune’s unquestioned dominance continued for another three years, until Koko died.
⁴

He was succeeded by his twenty-one-year-old son, Heavenly Sovereign Uda, who immediately began a careful but determined campaign to get real power back from his prime minister. On the death of the emperor Koko, Mototsune had offered his ceremonial resignation as Kampaku, something that had become (like the resignation of all White House staff at the end of an American presidency) a standard gesture in Japanese politics. Uda was supposed to accept it and, in an equally standard gesture, reappoint Mototsune as his own Kampaku.

Uda accepted the resignation, but then rebelled against the custom. He did not dare infuriate the powerful Fujiwara clan by neglecting to reappoint Mototsune altogether. Instead he wrote a fulsome official letter to the older man, offering Mototsune the post not of Kampaku, but of
Ako
, or “Supreme Minister,” in the new administration.

The title of Ako was old and respected, but largely ceremonial. Mototsune was so furious that he went on strike. He was still prime minister, after all, and as long as he refused to sign papers or answer petitions, the business of the court ground to a halt.

For nearly a year, Heavenly Sovereign Uda resisted the growing pressure from his other officials to pacify Mototsune by giving him back the title of Kampaku. Government business grew more and more snarled, and the scholars at court debated with increasing heat about whether or not the title Ako was an insult. “All affairs of government, great and small, have stagnated,” Uda wrote in his diary. “All the provinces and all the ministries complain ceaselessly.”
⁵

Finally, in November of 888, Uda was forced to buckle. He blamed the offer of the post of Ako on his unfortunate secretary, the scholar Hiromi, saying that Hiromi had misunderstood his intentions and written the wrong title in the letter. This was about all the face-saving he could do; he was embarrassed, Hiromi’s career was sharply curtailed, and Mototsune (with dignity) accepted the appointment as Kampaku and started signing papers again.
⁶

He had proved that he, and not the heavenly sovereign, had the last word at court. But even Mototsune could not live forever. Some years before, the poet Ariwara no Narihira—a man of royal blood, a distant relative of the heavenly sovereign Kammu, who had run afoul of the Fujiwara and had seen his chances of advancement at court go up in flames—had voiced the hope of Mototsune’s enemies: that old age and death would finally bring an end to Mototsune’s lifelong grab for more power.

In 891, his hopes were realized. Mototsune, in the grip of worsening illness, resigned his position as Kampaku and died just a few weeks later.

Mototsune’s oldest son, Tokihira, was barely twenty-one, and Uda refused to award him (or anyone else) the title of Kampaku. Instead he left the post empty and appointed members of other clans to as many official positions as possible. He could not ignore Tokihira, but he gave the young man a junior post and put no reliance in him. His most trusted advisor was Sugawara no Michizane, a poet with an unimportant family background and a talent for scholarship; Michizane, who was in his fifties, had experience serving as a governor in the provinces and had earned Uda’s gratitude by coming out in support of the scapegoat secretary Hiromi during the earlier struggle with Mototsune.
⁸

Uda’s humiliation at Mototsune’s hands made him wary of out-and-out defiance of Fujiwara expectations. Over the next ten years, he promoted Mototsune’s son through the ranks at court at a reasonable rate, but he also promoted Michizane with equal diligence. By 896, the two men held the two highest positions in his government.

Meanwhile, the heavenly sovereign had been working hard to improve the relationship between the court at Heian and the outer provinces. Aware that the noblemen in the outer reaches of the kingdom were collecting taxes for the crown and then keeping them for themselves, he passed a series of reforms to prevent those noblemen from seizing the land of the peasants under their power. And then, when these reforms were well underway, he abdicated.
⁹

He was only thirty-one, and the abdication was a risky and bold move. His oldest son Daigo had just turned thirteen and could rule without the supervision of a Sessho. By stepping down and allowing Daigo to be crowned as heavenly sovereign in his place, Uda could supervise the transfer of power. In any case, Uda had no intention of giving up his power. Although he went through the formal steps of putting off his royal robes, taking up the study of Buddhism, and applying for entrance to a monastery, he kept his hand in court politics so heavily that he became known as “the Cloistered Emperor.” His fight against Fujiwara power had not exactly been intended to restore the real political power of the heavenly sovereign; that position remained relatively passive, a vital but highly ceremonial connection between the people of Japan and the divine order. Instead, it had been a struggle to resist the overwhelming ambitions of a single family, and he had placed Michizane in the front lines of that battle.

Michizane found the position uncomfortable. In 899, two years after Uda’s abdication, he petitioned the young heavenly sovereign Daigo to be allowed to resign. He had got wind of a plot against him, led by Fujiwara no Tokihira, and he was frightened.
¹⁰

Daigo, directed by his father, refused to accept the resignation. In 901, Tokihira struck. He convinced Daigo, who was (after all) not quite seventeen and suffering the usual teenage anxieties, that his father was plotting with Michizane to remove him and place one of his brothers on the throne instead. Daigo was persuaded to issue an imperial decree, without notifying his father, that would exile Michizane from the capital city for life.

As soon as the boy set his name to the decree, Tokihira ordered his rival and his family arrested and hauled off to the outer limits of the empire. As soon as the arrest was made, the cat was out of the bag; officials loyal to Uda ran to the monastery where he lived and told him what was happening. Uda rode to the palace at once, but Tokihira had locked the doors. He was unable to get in and spent the night standing in the street. By morning, Michizane and his sons were already well out of Heian, on their way to exile on the southern island of Kyushu.
¹¹

Uda’s gamble had failed, and Sugawara no Michizane paid the price; he died in exile two years later, without ever returning to the capital. With young Daigo under his thumb, Tokihira began to make himself as powerful at court as his great father had been. He did not try to claim the title of Kampaku, but he once again filled the ranks of courtiers and officials with Fujiwara noblemen and their flunkies. Uda, in his monastery, was cut off from his son, from authority, and from the role he had hoped to play in the government of his country.
¹²

Tokihira’s rise was cut short by his premature death in 909, but his brother, Mototsune’s younger son Fujiwara no Tadahira, took over as his successor. When the heavenly sovereign Daigo died in 930, at age forty-six, the court elected Tadahira as Sessho to the emperor’s seven-year-old son. A year later, Uda also died: still in his monastery, still excluded from the palace. When the new heavenly sovereign Suzaku reached the age of responsibility, Tadahira claimed the post of Kampaku. He had regained his father’s position, and once again the Fujiwara clan held almost every important post in Heian.
¹³

T
HE JOSTLING FOR POWER
in Heian did not erupt into assassination and civil war, as it did in China, or in Byzantium, or in the kingdoms farther west. For one thing, the heavenly sovereign of Japan had no standing army. When the heavenly sovereign needed troops, they were drafted from the civilian population of free men older than twenty and younger than sixty. Even these draftees lived, when not actually fighting, as “on-call” civilians. For the most part they remained in their own homes, living in their own provinces, carrying on their regular lives as farmers and merchants, and generally giving no more than thirty-five or forty days per year to military service. And so the Fujiwara (or other ambitious noblemen) did not have the option, so popular to the west, of pursuing a career as a general, gaining the army’s support, and using it to overthrow the sovereign.
*

62.1: The Rebellion of Masakado

What they
could
do was gain legislative power at court, like the Fujiwara, or else use their own private armies to control an outlying region, away from the capital city.

In 939, a landowner named Taira no Masakado followed the second path. He lived in the fertile northeastern area known as the Kanto; he was skilled at fighting on horseback and ambitious for his family’s honor, and he could boast descent from the emperor Kammu himself. The men of his clan, the Taira, held various official positions in the Kanto, and Masakado himself had spent time at the court in Heian as a young man. There he had seen firsthand the power of the Fujiwara clan; the sight, perhaps, fired his ambition.
¹⁴

His climb to power began as a local squabble. On his return home from the Heian court, Masakado quarrelled with several of his neighbors over land rights, and the quarrel escalated into a fight. The armed retainers of the battling landowners began a small local war, which tipped Masakado’s way.

Encouraged by his success, Masakado directed his private army—now numbering over a thousand men—to follow him in attacking the nearest provincial governor, the royal official in charge of the province of Hitachi. The governor’s office, not designed to hold off an army, surrendered quickly. Masakado, even more impressed by his own might, declared himself to be a monarch in his own right: the “New Emperor.” He captured the surrounding royal outposts as well and started to appoint court officials of his own to help run them.
¹⁵