Bad Monks, Temple Warriors: The Spectrum of Japanese Religious History

please join me in welcoming back to the museum professor Gary loop thank you very much this is the second of my talks the last one I had to curtail somewhat because of lack of time I'm going to try to keep a close watch on on the time today again as Lois said this is a broad set of surveys and so much of what I talked about will be revisited by others in the next eight sessions so don't worry if you're not getting all the details down what I'm interested in doing is leaving with you certain patterns and a certain general grasp of trends over time where we left off last time was the beginnings of what I look upon is the third cultural stage in Japanese history that is to say there is the period of the the court in Heian with its marvelous literature and its artistic productions followed by an era in which the samurai and their ethos and their aesthetics dominate and then from the Tokugawa period or Edo period Edo referring to the locus of power the city of Edo today known as Tokyo or it's known as the Tokugawa period because that's the name of the the family of show goons in power throughout this time during this period you see the rise in the influencing culture of the bourgeoisie of the urban common or class now this is at a time when society is formally being divided into the three classes that you see here which is to say the sama died at the Acne followed by the peasants who are valued because they produce foodstuffs followed by artisans whose work is invaluable in terms of agriculture and so on and at the very bottom of society the merchants why is that because merchants simply purchase things cheaply in order to sell them at a profit that is they're seen as somewhat morally questionable and not of great value to society now in China the top class and this is all derived from Chinese philosophy specifically neo-confucian philosophy in China at the head of the classes is the the sure or the the the landed intellectual the literati in Japan you have no class comparable and so instead the sama de ir made the leaders of society even at a time when as I mentioned last time they're being confined to castle towns they have no opportunities of showing their martial prowess still they are regarded as at the head of society and all others are inferior nevertheless this is when the commoners come into their own in this edo street scene we see primarily merchants and artisans and so on one of the many aspects of bourgeois culture that emerges in the 17th century is in music the shamisen is introduced from Okinawa from the Duke use and quickly becomes used in the Kabuki theater a new form a very vigorous visual theatre that is the caters to the merchant class the shamisen is used by the courtesans of the Yoshiwara and other brothel quarters this is a great brothel quarter in Edo all the castle towns add them these were not sleazy places but these were venues where you would find the the finest cuisine and entertainment as well as the sex they tended to be located near the Kabuki theater wards because in Kabuki theater there was quite a culture of male prostitution but these were conflated together in popular culture from the 17th century the antics of a type of samurai referred to as yokel or kabuki mano these are celebrated in dramatic interpretations and in literature these were samurai who were impoverished often or dissatisfied with their lot in life and with no way of showing their martial skills because the country is at peace they would often vent their frustration against commoners who were more affluent than them attacking them on bridges and stealing their purses and so on and then commoners band against them and form their own teams of gangsters and the exploits of these gangsters become very popular as depicted on the Kabuki stage a more elegant form of violence took place among the samurai the famous episode in 1701 has been recounted in countless works of literature in that year a daimyo that is one of the 250 feudal lords in Japan was called upon to wait upon the show boon in the Ed apalis as taking part in a certain ceremony and he had to be trained in in order to take part in that ceremony and the master of ceremonies assigned to him very dignified official insulted him and his response to that verbal insult was to pull out his sword which is a no-no in the in the show Boone's palace and lightly Nick his antagonist before being subdued and as a result of that transgression he was ordered to commit suicide and so he did the honorable thing and slit his belly whereupon his vassals his retainers conspired over more than a year to to get revenge and pretending that they were not at all interested in pursuing a vendetta they carefully laid plans and in January of the 1703 attacked the the castle which is where the mansion which is what you see here and killed the man subsequently this act of heroism of heroic vengeance caused them to be lionized among the masses and innumerable plays were performed celebrating their exploits they themselves however were ordered by the Shogunate to commit mass suicide to take responsibility for their actions which they did happily and so they are celebrated as symbols of martial valor of the Bushido code of loyalty to one's master even during a period of national peace now I've mentioned kabuki a number of times so let me step back and note that this is a dramatic form that begins in the early 1600s when a shrine priestess known as Oconee innovates a new dramatic style and travels around the country with her troops of actors who perform skits often with an erotic dimension part of the appeal was that the performers cross dressed in Japanese dramatic history you will find this particular emphasis upon cross-dressing for whatever reason here you see okuni dressed as a boy with the adult male haircut and swords and you notice here the the Christian cross worn as a kind of accessory which were popular for a time even as Christianity was being banned but the kind of personification of eccentricity meanwhile the boondock uu theater comes to compete with the Kabuki drama this is probably the most sophisticated puppet theater in the world that dates back to this era no time to go into detail but let me just note that this period of time the Gendo ku era from 1688 to 1704 sees a very dramatic surge in the production of a commoner urban or urbanite art everyone knows the name Bosco the great haiku poet he actually came from samurai ancestry although derogated became a common or most of the great art at this time is coming from the commoners the important thing about Bosco is that he popularizes the genre of haiku which are probably all familiar with he takes it to the masses and in his poetic Diaries he refers to sharing poems and he records many of them of fishermen and peasants and all classes of people from this time on it's not uncommon to find in urban neighborhoods right next to the green grocer and the indigo Dyer the bookseller a haiku poet a teacher of haiku poetry selling lessons to students so we see the kind of popularization of poetry he had a psychic ooh is the best-known prose writer of this period who wrote an amazing amount of poetry but also novels in three categories some that deal with the exploits of the samurai very often instances of violence homosexual love triangles being a particularly important theme his second genre of work pertains to well it's his erotic material the life of an amorous man the life of an amorous woman these are not pornographic in any sense but psychological depictions of the life course of a man and a woman in terms of their sexuality and finally a category that deals with the lives of the Chonan or the herb commoners he deals with questions about bankruptcy and paying bills and the brilliant innovations of merchants wives and topics of interest to the merchant class and these are invaluable historical materials if one wants to understand the lives of the commoners she Komatsu MoMA's i imam is the great playwright sometimes compared with Shakespeare although no one should be compared with Shakespeare but certainly a brilliant dramatist particularly well known for his depictions of love suicide there was actually quite a rash of love suicides in the 1690s when star-crossed lovers those unable to to marry decide to commit suicide together and be reborn in the western paradise of Amida he often will take a recent incident well known to the people and thinly dramatize it and these are some of his most important works in the visual arts immortal Nobu is the one figure I think needs to be mentioned a pioneer in the production of woodblock prints here you see some samurai who were negotiating the fee for prostitutes in the brothel district all got the coating and his younger brother all gothic ends on represent more the elite culture of the samurai but they're also active during this all-important Gendo ku era in music history Yatsuhashi King Joe was a blind shamisen a banjo performer who learned to play the much more elegant zipper or koto and he retuned it according to the sama the shamisen fashion and made it much more appealing to the masses for the first time women started to perform on the koto and also ensembles involving the shamisen called and third instrument became popular so all these people are active in the late 1600s to important intellectual trends pervade Tokugawa Japan aside from the Buddhism and Confucianism which I've already talked about kaku kaku kaku kaku means national studies and it it owes its beginning to a petition from a Shinto priest around 1700 who asks the court for funds to establish an academy for Japanese learning his argument is we have academies for Chinese learning meaning Confucianism for Indian learning meaning Buddhism but we have neglected our national literature our national religion let's start studying that and this movement took off in the course of the 18th century when moto Adi naughty naga does his work in particular writing commentaries on Japanese classics such as the first history the kojiki written in the eighth century and on the famous tale of genji and looking at that material he makes statements about the nature of the Japanese people visa vie other people and it's very insightful a pleasure to read but often rather inoffensive in terms of his conclusions he says we Japanese do not have a moral code that is expressed in any of our literature the Buddhists have their Eightfold Path the Confucians have their laws that the Christians have their Ten Commandments but we don't have anything like that why because being descended from the gods we are innately good so we don't have a need for morality that may excite some laughter but the way that this cocoa gaku trend evolves it becomes quite political and when from the 1760s Japan which you know is in a state of isolation only maintaining trade ties with Europe through the Dutch and very carefully controlling and monitoring that interaction Japan's waters are increasingly being violated by Western ships as a result of the Industrial Revolution there are more voyages there's more pursuit of trading opportunities around the world on numerous occasions Western vessels pull into Japanese ports and requests to trade and are told no go away this is the national policy Izawa say she Sai is a kind of latter-day representative of kaku kaku or national studies who emphasizes the inferiority of foreigners the superiority of the land of the gods and urges that the country organized to prepare for the military defense against a possible invasion and the way that he depicts foreigners he depicts the Americans in the French and the British all separately but as the hindquarters of humankind and the feet of mankind whereas Japan is of course at the head Dongguk who is perhaps the polar opposite of kaku kaku this is the study of Western things and we can trace this to the 1720s when the Shogun at the time asked his advisor is about calendrical reform and he was told well if we're going to reform the calendar we need access to Western astronomical information because the Europeans are way ahead of the Chinese and so it was agreed that books could be imported from the West most of them in the Dutch language which a very narrow tier of Japanese came to be able to read well enough to translate works painstakingly into Japanese but works on optics and gunnery and karte karte ology cartography and medicine and art enter the country you see here by a Japanese artist an imitation of Western painting and Western notions of perspective the the figure represented here is fancy boat who was at the time the head of the Dutch mission although he was German he was the head of the Dutch mission to Japan in the 1820s shown with his Japanese consort and their baby and a Javanese servant around 1770 this anatomy book was published in Japan a translation of a Western work and this represents a very important moment it shows that the Japanese have come to understand that the Western anatomical science is far in advance of the Chinese and it also resolved an outstanding question which was does the difference in the representation of internal organs in the Chinese texts and in the Dutch texts indicate that the Chinese and ourselves simply look different inside than the Westerners or are we all really the same and this pretty much established that we're all the same Yoshida showing is a kind of mix of cuckoo cuckoo and duck and banku that is very concerned about the possibility of a foreign invasion very much persuaded of Japan's superiority over foreign countries but also keenly interested in Western science he established an academy in western Japan it's still there today as a tourist destination where he recruited students and taught them a mix of cocoa gaku philosophy and also Western science including the Western gunnery and he acquired Western firearms and he drilled his disciples in Western military formation he also recruited commoners sons of physicians and priests and so on and had them all study drill together why is this important because it's an implicit challenge to that for class society notion it's an implicit challenge to the idea of samurai superiority it is the beginnings of the idea of a national army to be achieved through conscription which actually is implemented by one of his disciples who subsequently becomes the the war minister actually that Yoshida showing was so interested in finding out about the West that he attempted to stow away on one of Matthew Perry's ships in nineteen in 1853 but was apprehended Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a short story about that based on the actual event well in 1852 hastening the end of this period Commodore Perry is dispatched by the US Congress to force Japan to open its doors to outside trade this this indignation at Japan had been building for some time in various Western capitals what business does a modern country have in refusing to participate in international trade that's just irrational plus they sometimes have abused our shipwrecked sailors plus we'd like to enter that country and do some missionary work there were various reasons for wanting to open Japan after this two and a half centuries of isolation it could have been the Russians it could have been the British to open Japan it just happens that Commodore Perry arrived first in these black ships as seen by the Japanese very intimidating Perry himself very intimidated mrs. Edsel Japanese saw him but he was able to deliver a letter from the US president demanding that Japan enter into negotiations for a trade agreement the Japanese buckled and in 1859 a trade agreement was implemented and there were various deleterious impacts of that including a huge gold outflow from the country economic dislocation a period of of terrorist assaults on foreign merchants and bakufu or Shogunate officials thought to be responsible but generally those opposed came around to thinking we cannot defeat the foreigners we cannot kick them out what we need to do is learn from them and those who had learned from them brought down the Shogunate replacing it in 1868 with a new regime of middle-ranking samurai from several different domains who claim to be loyal to the emperor and placing the emperor back in power that's why this event is called the meiji restoration 16 year old boy who's really a puppet but he's supposed to be the the real ruler surrounding the sixteen-year-old boy there are a dozen middle-ranking samurai who then develop policy and among the policies is to abolish the status of the somme what i altogether 7% of the population that has been stipended for hundreds of years is told you were no longer allowed to wear your swords in public you must get rid of those distinctive samurai haircuts we're not going to give you a stipend anymore we urge you to go into trade an industry that is to derogate to the status of the merchants hitherto the lowest class so it was very traumatic for the samurai and resulted in some samurai uprisings in the course of the 1870s which were suppressed but this abolition of samba died class was quite traumatic the person most responsible for the abolition of the samba died class I'll show a photo later Yamagata adi tomo essentially said all japanese our samba die now or all the men are as Japan advances and it very rapidly builds up a modern army as we will see it calls upon the expertise of numerous foreign specialists including our own Massachusetts born Ernest Fenollosa who taught philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University and while there became a deep aficionado of Japanese art at a time when material like the Great Wave by hoax I was being used as wrapping material because this is plebeian art you see Western artists like Toulouse Lautrec and so on found this to be works of genius as we see them today I just thought I would conclude this section with chrysanthemums as depicted by oak aside now the scheduled topic for today was Japanese religious history and in Japan you notice the Ubiquiti of religious symbols you see these Jizo Bodhisattva images that are lovingly taken care of the bibs replaced regularly there are roadside phallic images like this in Japan the phallus tends to depict a loving couple on the surface some or more enough anatomically obvious of works of religion here's a roadside shrine shrines like this or all over the country here's an elaborate shrine at the base of Mount Hiei and that is a Shinto shrine protecting a Buddhist temple complex torii these are God gates that show you that you are entering a shrine compound and you find them all over the place here the Inland Sea here in Kyoto but of course the Buddhist presence is even more important the Buddhist religion intellectually more important in the history of Japan so that's a mix of Shinto and Buddhist but then Confucianism here are the Analects of Confucius of Confucius also play a very important role you can say Confucianism isn't really a religion but it does have a lot to say about the appropriate handling of reverence for the dead and I would say does have some religious aspects Taoism is even present in Japan it's not a very strong force compared to the role it plays in China but in yin yang thought in ideas about Fung Shui lucky directions in medicine Taoism is part of the mix and as I mentioned last time in the 16th century Roman Catholicism is preached for a time before it is thoroughly suppressed in the 1630s now in Japan today it would appear that people are still rather religious at least if you look at the statistics people will identify as Buddhist or a Shinto or both but when you look at the the statistics which asked what do you believe in do you believe in an afterlife do you believe in God or gods the the percentage of irreligious in Japan is about 65 percent so there's a paradox there and in absolute numbers Japan is second only to to China in the number of non-believers and yet every New Year's people go to the local Shinto shrine and they go through the little ritual I do it when I'm there just because I like the atmosphere it's not a question of heartfelt sentiment but back to the beginning what were the religious beliefs of the Jomon people whom as you know are the first people we know of in Japan a hunting gathering people well they were aware of some intimate connections with the universe this seems to be a sundial from maybe a thousand BCE there are these figurines that seem to be a door to another world there are apparently fertility figurines some more obvious than others Ballack worship is adequately documented here's a deerskin I mean a deer bone image the jawbone believed in an afterlife burying the dead in this fetal position as though they are returning somewhere the architecture of the Joel moan as I mentioned before seems to be the prototype for the Shinto shrine and the shaman among the Jomon probably the ancestor of the Shinto priests so here we have the the the Jomon people as it is thought that they looked the Yayoi who succeed them from about 400 BCE and probably there is mixing between the two and then the last here Japanese as they appeared about the 5th century of the Common Era and that represents a further admixture of Korean blood the Yayoi also had religious beliefs they produced these bells that are covered with images of animals that are thought to be representatives of gods the Yayoi also believed in an afterlife and buried the dead in these huge urns I mentioned before the vast tombs that appear from around 300 ce e so developed religious traditions we just don't know the details as I mentioned last time from Korea in the 6th century during the reign of emperor king may whose emperor from the 5 30s to the 5 60s or so buddhist images and sutras religious texts were introduced and an appeal to the the leader of yamato which is what we will call japan at this time the the yamato leader was encouraged to embrace buddhism the saga were a family responsible for taxation and prac ethical Affairs and they seemed to think that Buddhism would be advantageous to the state and so they were particulars of it and a prince of the imperial family or I should say the family of the great chieftain since we're not really it's not really fair to refer to him as a an emperor this time this is a preliterate unsophisticated society but a member of the family of the yamato chieftain prince shotoku was a particular believer in buddhism and after buddhism had triumphed at court from around 600 he aggressively promotes the religion the turning point was 587 when a great battle between the Pro and anti Buddhist forces engaged in the resolution of a succession dispute fought here on mount siggy song in central Japan and the Buddhist faction won out whereupon so toku had this statue of one of the four warrior deities that protect Buddhist temples constructed and the whole ug temple constructed some of the temples in Japan actually date to the time of Prince Shotoku which is the early 7th century well the indigenous belief system that confronts this new belief system is based fundamentally on the notion of purity and defilement that is the goal to become purified and what one wants to avoid is chaotic or being defiled that means contact with death contact with blood contact with other bodily fluids and regular ritual bathing Japanese are surrounded by water and they have always had the reputation of being a very clean people reverence for nature the divinization of nature animism belief that everything is invigorated by spirit and politi ISM there is a a a system of of Shinto deities with the Sun Goddess at the very head the object of worship is called a commie and that doesn't exactly correlate to God with a small G because a commie can be a mountain or a waterfall or a big stone with an unusual shape all nature is Connie what is the point in Shinto to avoid sameen or taboos it's not really a concept of sin it's just things that if done bring bad fortune there's no metaphysics to speak of no developed cosmology there's a focus on going to sacred spots shrines and praying to the deities but there's not a whole lot of study or rigorous activity involved Buddhism on the other hand and I don't think you can see this very well there's a very philosophical belief system and I will refer you to the chart that I include in the handout for today but it is based upon the idea and this is familiar to many of you that life is suffering and that that is just something that has to be profoundly understood that at every step from birth to death life is suffering primarily and that suffering is caused by craving by desire by grasping and thirdly by giving up that craving one can overcome desire and find spiritual peace the way to do that actually is a rather involved regimen of right belief and right action right speech right meditation and so on well I will simply leave a summary of Buddhism to that necessarily but you can see that it is a huge leap ahead of the earlier religion now Buddhism very much emphasizes the value of compassion and non-violence buddhism prohibits the taking of life and you might think that this would be a very positive development in this society however it has a negative impact on a community that were for centuries referred to as etta or the greatly defiled ones do not use this term in Japan this is a fighting word so it's a this is a bad bad word it means the greatly defiled ones it appears that people who were involved in professions that involved slaughtering animals skinning them butchering them were seen as violating the Buddhist law and so they were segregated and marriage between them and other people was forbidden and the problem of about 2% of the population suffering from discrimination up until the present virtually has to be understood in the context of the arrival of Buddhism now the sama die life is one of taking life how can one reconcile that with embracing Buddhism well there is a good built-in argument within Buddhism that pertains to Karma that things happen to people as a result of their own accumulation of of good and evil deeds and one expression of this is a statement by Oda Nobunaga you might remember that he is the first of the three great unifiers who between roughly 1870 and 1600 reunified the country under central rule as he was consolidating power Oda Nobunaga attacked Mount Hiei the great temple complex to the northwest of Kyoto this is the complex I talked about it last time that was established by sight show in the early 800s it had then the great University of Japanese Buddhism up until 1571 it had also been involved in much carnage its warrior monks had attacked other establishments and resisted central authority so Oda Nobunaga ordered his men to attack Mount Hiei which was dotted with temples and sub temples monastic residences and burn it down and slaughter all the inhabitants and when they said no we can't do that it's a terrible sin he told them I am NOT the destroyer of this monastery the destroyer of the monastery is the monastery itself in other words it will not be your fault if you burn down this mountain you were simply the agents through which fate is unfolding here so what was possible to to come up with some reconciliation between Buddhist beliefs and the martial life now just a hurry through some of the the objects of Buddhist veneration particularly because so many of them are here in the museum the founder of Buddhism Chaka Chaka Moon Almeida is the Buddha of the West who assure is paradise for true believers in him dying Ichi is very different he is the body of the cosmos you might remember last time I showed an image of dainichi the one that's at the the great eastern temple in nada established by sho mu and I mentioned at the time that he is conflated with the sun goddess amaterasu because the name of this buddha who again is the body of the cosmos itself in the sanskrit and in the chinese characters is the light of the sun and so a kind of sun God has worshiped in Japan and conflated with the imperial family hakushi buddha is the medicine Buddha Miroku or Maitreya the Buddha of the future con on whom you often see and who you would with mistake as a female the Bodhisattva of compassion these are Bodhisattvas from this point to be subtly distinguished from Buddha's Manju is the budem of a Buddha of knowledge the Bodhisattva of knowledge geez all of children and Wayfarers forget as the wind you find martial deities in temples dating back to the Nara period warrior deities that defend the temple and although there is no tradition of the nude in traditional Japanese art except in erotic of depictions the musculature of these wooden statues from the NADA and Heian period is quite spectacular these are some of the finest wooden sculptures in the world well the ruling class from seventh or eighth centuries are represented by this Heian courtier here he is not a samurai he's not involved in martial activity here are courtly ladies playing a board game this is an a scene from The Tale of Genji this very elegant kind of romancing but midway through the Heian period in the nine 30s for the first time there was an uprising involving some who died in a rather remote section of the country didn't really make an impact upon the courtiers but from this point on from time to time there would be a clash and a faction of the somme would I the hereditary military class would become strengthened now the reason that these fights are breaking out among the Samet I asked to do with the show end or the landed estates here's a you can't see it but it's one of the earliest maps showing private property and in order to maintain their estates to protect them from rivals absentee landowners who might be courtiers in the capital would hire some would I who would look after their interests and it was perhaps only a matter of time between these sama died a matter of time until these samurai would realize that the court was there as a fruit ripe to pick that they could march into the city and take over something like that happened in 1156 there was a succession dispute in the court and SAAM would I joined in on both sides one faction of them headed by this man tide Akio Modi emerges the national hegemon why is this significant for the first time a man of samurai origins is the real master of the country the emperor is relegated to a symbolic role and all the decisions are made by this member of the military class he doesn't just establish any new institutions and he derives his authority technically through court title but he is representative of changing times in 1185 his family is toppled by its rivals or a faction of its rivals in the Minamoto clan I won't go into detail except to say that from this point on there are very definite samurai institutions from the eleven 90s every province has a military governor alongside the civilian governor appointed by the court so there is the Shogun the Shogun all court located in Kamakura a long way from Kyoto and then there is the long-standing imperial court in kilt though but the real decisions are being made in Kamakura anyway this whole period from 1185 to 1868 we can say kind of crudely was one in which the somme what I were the ruling class and although I've emphasized the way of the sword actually the equestrian skills and skill at bow and arrow were more important than swordsmanship at this time we find the first appearance of warrior monks in the late 900 s and they had their own specific getup and their own specific weapons this is a naginata a kind of curved spear or battle ax and again their exploits are celebrated by the be hua Hoshi or the lute playing monks some of the key figures that need to be mentioned in terms of Buddhism Honan in the late 1100s expounded the doctrine of Amida Buddha again he is a Buddhist separate from the historical Buddha who presides over a fabulous paradise in the West and according to hona Koenen all that one needs to do to be reborn in this paradise is to sincerely believe in the Salva qualities of Amida and to repeat the mantra namu Amida butsu namu Amida butsu namu Amida to acquire merit this is a very simple form of Buddhism which becomes extremely popular among common people but also among some in the elite you might recall last time I talked about Kumagai or the story of uh tzu Modi in the the tale of the hiccup in this great war between the Minamoto and the tiida one of the Minamoto winds up skirmishing with this tide a warrior removes him from his horse and realizes he's just a 16 year old boy wants to save his life but is obliged under the circumstances to chop his head off well he becomes one of the one of the disciples of Honan and there's correspondence between them that survives more important than Honan was his disciple shin dong who emphasizing this point that one acquires salvation not by one's works but by faith yes he sounds very much like Martin Luther and that was not lost on the Jesuits in the 16th century who finding out about this doctrine said that infernal doctrine of Luther has even appeared here in Japan but it's really the pure coincidence but shin dong said you don't have to keep repeating namu Amida butsu namu Amida butsu just once with real sincerity is adequate so that's important a second because otherwise it because it becomes a kind of works expecting reward and secondly he said given that you don't acquire any merit from such things as celibacy priest should marry now this is quite revolutionary this is the only school in Japan for hundreds of years that advocated priestly marriage so the movement it's called the true Pure Land movement to differentiated from hone ins movement called the Pure Land Pure Land referring to the Western paradise of Amida this movement becomes a large political movement and under a descendant of shin dong in the fifteenth century named Ben Yeo actually acquires military physical control over a whole province and members of this school of Buddhism become particularly likely to be involved in uprising against local leaders protesting the taxes and and other abuses so here's a depiction of one of these peasant uprisings meanwhile the Mongols recall had invaded in the twelve 70s and twelve 80s we too have been expelled to have failed and this has ramifications because it appears to establish the point that Japan is unique in the world only Japan was able to repulse the Mongols partly because of the valour of the sama die and partly because of the miraculous typhoons for the Hurricanes that swept up and destroyed the Mongol fleet in 1281 well that notion of specialness allows katabatic ichika fusa an important theorist close to one of the retired emperors to develop this notion that japan is the land of the gods and is innately superior to any other country he writes what I consider to be the first kind of theoretical history treatise in Japan in which he looks at the the way that power has shifted from the Emperor's to the nobles to the sama died over time and he emphasizes that only through the proper handling of the succession to the imperial throne will Japan be at peace so he has a number of axes to grind in his text but what I find particularly interesting is the way that he looks at the Mongol invasions as establishing Japanese superiority in the same century a Shinto priest writes a text in which he asserts that up until now we have said that the Shinto kami are manifestations of Buddhist Bodhisattvas but that's wrong that has it wrong actually the comi were first and those that the Chinese and the Koreans worship as Buddhist deities were in fact originally Japanese coming so it's a way of flipping over the traditional way of looking at things and manifesting a proto nationalism during the Muromachi era there's this is the second Shogunate established in 1333 as I mentioned last time the the first Shogunate was toppled largely because of frustration amongst amadai that their actions to repulse the mongols hadn't been adequately remunerated in terms of show n in terms of estate's dissatisfaction leads to the fall of that show Burnet the establishment of a new one and the the dates are wrong up there that should be 1570 to 1333 to 1570 to during this era the Shogun's tended to be weaker and as of the 1460s the country basically falls apart that is to say there is a succession dispute for the position of Shogun and now the Shogunate is headquartered in a on what is now called Kyoto the name has changed over time but the the capital city the imperial capital is torn apart infighting between two factions over about a decade that's the first time that this has happened that the city itself has been virtually destroyed and it is as though in 1476 those who are still fighting in Kyoto realize there's nothing to fight for anymore anymore and meanwhile back in the boondocks they're in their subordinates are taking power so as of the mid 16th century Japan is divided into all these different virtual kingdoms actually when the first Portuguese arrived that's how they comment they say Japan is an empire that is divided into these different kingdoms and here are some of the the most important barons the arrival of the Portuguese as I mentioned last time brings the musket and firearms allow Oda Nobunaga whom I've mentioned before the first of the three unifiers to speed up the reunification of the country among Oda Nobunaga's chief targets the warrior monks of the Shingen School and one of them is depicted here I mentioned the destruction of the temples of Mount Hiei depicted here Oda also attacked the Ishiyama Fortress of Pure Land devotees in what is now all Sokka Nobunaga destroyed it but it was reconstructed by his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi and here it is today in the form of osaka castle which i recommend if you visit Christian missions are also introduced by the Portuguese as I mentioned last time oda nobunaga was prepared to support them because he saw them as allies against the militant Buddhists but Hideyoshi turned upon them and began to persecute them hit aoc also having reunited the country in 1590 having brought peace to the country decided he needed to continue his wars of conquest and invaded neighboring Korea with hundreds of thousands of troops he didn't go himself but dispatched his some of his generals including konishiki yogi Naga whom I mentioned simply because he was a Christian convert who was allowed to maintain his faith at least past the lifetime of Toyotomi Hideyoshi himself but this is the first time any Christians we know of had visited Korea that effort to subordinate Korea fail and after the death of Hideyoshi in 1598 the Japanese troops are withdrawn by his successor Tokugawa EAS forms the third Shogunate of the Tokugawa Shogunate which again is from 1603 to 1868 he clinched his victory by defeating his foes at a great battle in central Japan the Battle of Sekigahara in which there were over 200,000 troops involved and in the aftermath of this battle because so many of the daimyo or the Baron's involved had been destroyed there were over half a million men transformed suddenly into masterless Sam would I still having the somme would I status but no income so a very dangerous stratum of society for some time the next major episode of violence takes place in 1614 15 when the son of Hideyoshi again the second of the three unifiers his son comes to into a conflicted relationship with Tokugawa Ieyasu there's nothing that the boy did it's not his fault it's just he's the wrong person in the wrong place attracting dissident samurai who want to fight on his behalf against Tokugawa Ieyasu so it was necessary to attack the castle and to destroy the remnants of the Toyotomi family one further instance of violence at the beginning of the Tokugawa period and then that's it in 1837 1838 there was a large-scale Christian uprising it's a combination actually of a peasant uprising based upon harsh taxation and Christians rising up against the persecution inflicted on them at great cost to the Shogunate this rebellion was extinguished and that was about the last that one heard of Christianity for quite a while here is the legendary leader a 16 year old boy Amaka Shashi doll and you see there in the background the cross being born into battle a key to the Tokugawa Order was the castle town samurai were all told you must leave peasant villages where you have historically lived and he must take up residence near your Lords castle and as I mentioned last time the rule was only one castle per domain all the other castles had to be leveled so what this means is that in short order actually between about 1580 and 1620 there is a massive wave of urbanization in Japan that results in Japan being the most urbanized country in the world with the possible exception of the much smaller holland edo by 1700 has over a million people killed though and all Sokka both have about half a million people these are extraordinarily large populations for the time here's a castle overlooking a castle town and so here is where the Somme would I were confined now to return to the for class system this is associated with the neo-confucianism of a juicer in China I've listed the the classes before a reminder that the art of the period is largely bourgeois even depicting oops humble professions like barrel making I mentioned both ordinary Naga and the of Coca gaku I referred to Yoshida showing here's Yamagata audio Domo his disciple who did in fact establish after the Meiji Restoration the first modern conscript army the cult of the warrior remained vigorous even after the abolition of the samurai class Yasukuni Shrine is in the news from time to time this was established in 1868 as a place to pray for the war dead in the war that accompanied the restoration at the same time following the Meiji Restoration not sure how to link this with the foregoing but it's something that needs to be integrated there was an attack on Buddhism by the new leaders who were promoting state Shinto with the particular attention on the emperor to be revered as the descendant of the Sun Goddess but they were not interested in promoting Buddhism and indeed some were very concerned that Buddhism was a negative life denying philosophy and so thousands of Buddhist temples were closed down between 1868 and 1874 thousands of nuns and monks forcibly defrocked but cooler heads prevailed and the Buddhist community was able to successfully protest well in short order Japan goes to war with a professional modern army with China and then again with with Russia in 1904 1905 and you notice in these depictions the importance of the sword which remains an emblem of the lot of the warrior and the the cult of the samurai doesn't quite die out here for example is a World War Two poster following the establishment of the alliance with Nazi Germany Japan is depicted as a samurai warrior I've seen some posters in which you have a Roman soldier representing fascist Italy and then a kind of Viking looking character representing the Germans and then a Japanese somewhat I all standing together in solidarity as another just a random example of how the Somme would I tradition still resonates of the book of five rings which is a fascinating kind of samurai treatise by a famous swordsman has been translated a number of times into English and in this case you see how it's it's advertised the classic text of principles craft skill and samurais strategy that changed the American way of doing business I've also seen versions of the book in which it's recommended to CEOs in order to understand the mind of the competition in order to master the Japanese mind so there's still mass production of sawn wood i treatises of the early Tokugawa period that brings me to the end of my two presentations I know this is a whole lot of information but maybe I can clarify during some questions [Applause] so that was that was a very speedy trip we went through for two sessions does anybody need some clarification thank you it sounded like Buddhism came by way of Korea and I'd always understood it came by way of China could you talk about that a little bit yeah I think it's unfortunate that there is that perception there's a lot of contributions of Korea to Japan that are not widely acknowledged even among Japanese but know the route was from the kingdom of pic jet initially most of the missionary monks were Korean it took about a hundred years before the the greater number were coming from China but that has to do with both the fact that missionary impulse is integral to Buddhism so Koreans being so near Japan it's to be expected that they would see that as their duty to take the gospel to take the good news of Buddhism next door also there is an important political relationship between the the picture court and the yamato court in japan and after the picture regime is overthrown with chinese assistance to the neighboring country of Shilla the the ruling elite apicture flee on masse to Japan so that that enhances the connection between the Peninsula and Japan but also the Confucian Analects were received via Korea the potter's wheel okay um you talked about this cult of the warrior and the samurai business strategy which I see as pretty in Western could you talk a little bit more about how the cult of the warrior is being seen in Japan today in Japan not societies how was the cult of the well let's see in Japan as in the u.s. there are the aficionados of kind of samurai pop culture I find it a little bit annoying that sometimes I'm going online looking at information about some period of of Samba die history or looking for an image to use in a presentation like this and I find all this game oriented material you know nice elaborate maps with all the daimyo names on them and then I realized there's all these chips and cards and other material there's just not suitable so but but there are those who are deeply interested in Samba culture if you go to any bookstore massive quantities of material on Japanese history the Japanese are much more interested in their history than we are in ours the offerings on NHK national television a huge amount of what they call GD geeky or period dramas almost all this Samba die but what does the average person think I I think rather like Norwegian Americans like me look at the Vikings no it's cool to have that in our background but I don't think most people give it a whole lot much more thought than that well of course if you come from Samba dye background and you have the swords of your ancestors there on display you might think about these things more than others two questions first one is sort of like that one I've always been puzzled by why the samurais seemed to me like corporate lawyers lackeys to the elite and powerful and get this so romanticizing both there in the West and I like your take on well that's a cheap well the the the emphasis upon loyalty is mistaken the Jesuits in the 16th century are careful observers of Japanese society and of the sama dye they say they're extremely good at what they do they're extremely good warriors they're cruel but they have certain negative aspects one they all commit the site the crime against nature and secondly they have no loyalty to their masters that they keep stabbing them in the back but that was during this period of civil war in which it was very common for the subordinate of the Lord to take advantage of an unguarded moment and kill him and take over I think that culture of loyalty is really inculcated during the peace centuries of the Tokugawa and that has a lot to do with neo-confucianism emphasizing feudal loyalty as analogous to filial piety okay now one last quick question is that 25 words or less what is your take on the chrysanthemum sword my take on it is that it's a useful exposure to Japanese culture recognizing that it was written in a time and place but I think it's it's well worth reading and I do encourage students going to Japan to to read it for some insight but I haven't gone back and read it for quite some time and my choice of the the title for the first lecture wasn't based upon the reading of that book so much as appreciating the utility of the the phrase okay for those of you who didn't hear it was about the book we talked about last time the chrysanthemum and the sword spiritual practices of the people on a daily basis did they go to temples did they carry out worship in their homes or how did they carry out their religions um that's a good question first of all this is a very complicated environment if you're just looking at the the Tokugawa period there are real differences in religious practice between Buddhist schools or some people refer to them as sects I call them schools and there were peasants who didn't observe Buddhist rituals at all but I don't think in terms of a specific daily prayer or procedure that's national if one has the ashes of dead relatives then at certain intervals one would burn incense if one could afford it and place flowers maybe but as I mentioned Shintoism is very local oriented so the visit to the shrine to pray would be something that is not necessarily every couple weeks or so but to ask on certain times for certain things that would be the procedure but also the observance of regular matzo tea or festivals with a religious component but there's wide differences locally and when those happen and what they're about but I would say that among the peasants Shinto rituals probably more important and prevalent than the Buddhists in most places so another question trying to pull all this together in the rise of militarism in the first half of the 20th century in Japan what was the relative importance of Zen Buddhism for the old samurais tradition Shintoism and loyalty to the Emperor neo-confucianism and you know the importance of this state how does that all come together well the the school system and also the press which is quite tightly controlled demand that the entire population recognized and did not question cocoa Thai cocoa ties hard to translate into English it literally means the body of the nation or the state national polity is how it was translated officially but it really Rafi refers to this bond between heaven Amati rasa the progenitor of the imperial family the imperial family which is exists through history and the Japanese people over whom the emperor governs and to whom he is somehow related such that people were not discouraged from thinking that the yamato race was divine and superior to other races it's quite complicated because simultaneously academics are embracing Spencer's social Darwinism and academics are saying well there is a hierarchy of peoples and the white people are higher and there are even Shinto oriented nationalists who are prepared to accept that so yes we know that they're superior but because they eat meat and if we eat meat we alter our lifestyles and we can be like them anyway we do have this connection to the gods through the emperor and then under our feet is the land of Japan which is created out of the limbs of izanagi and Izanami the primordial pair so the land itself is sacred but anyway this notion of coca tie which essentially in a political sense means you do not challenge the legitimacy of the imperial line that you go to jail for that if you propose democracy even because that means sovereignty to the people as opposed to the to the emperor that's not permitted and a famous 1925 law banned any questioning of the coca tie or this is significant the system of private property so that kind of intense and nationalism gets conflated with communism and the principal targets for this are the Communists and the socialism but I hadn't meant to get into the twentieth century particularly thank you for that wonderful presentation it was very rich so every time I tried to take notes I was about five slides behind my question is a little specific you mentioned that the samurai had to leave the villages and go and live near the castle in the castle towns and it reminded me of the movie the Seven Samurai where the villagers villagers had to get actually some samurai into the villages to be protected so the question I have is how did the the leaving of the samurai affect life in the villages well it improved it at least short-term you didn't have somewhat I breathing down your back telling you what to do we're trying to recruit sturdy youth as their own vassals you don't have some but I who are provoking the peasants by levying taxes against them that lead to peasant rebellions which destabilize the whole social order so from the point of view of the regime this was a positive thing from the point of view of the village what it means is that they become self-governing that the village council gets together and makes decisions about planting and the assigning of responsibilities so certainly there's an improvement but the tax is typically around 50% of the total crop and so long as the rice production is increasing and it's soars in the course of the seventeenth century as does population and you're paying half the crop then you're doing okay but when the lords step in and impose additional taxes or say well this year we're going to raise it to 70% that occasions popular resistance and that mounts over time the tendency is for there to be more and more peasant rebellions for more and more reasons about 3,000 in the course of the Tokugawa period which is less than 300 years also what you find in the peasant village is a stratification of the peasantry so that you wind up having a handful of families who are making that we're producing enough rice to divert some of it to sake to rice wine production and they make fortunes off of that and branch out into pawnbroking and so on and then you have other people who are unable to pay the land tax who borrow money from their neighbors wind up mortgaging their land losing it and then their virtual day laborers and towards the end of the period peasant rebellions are as likely to be pointed against local elites even within the same village as opposed to feudal authority the Mongols of course are step people they don't build ships but they conquered Korea and the Koreans are very good shipbuilders and the Chinese are good shipbuilders but what we found out from marine archaeology is that a lot of these ships that were sent and that were sunk were not intended for high seas use they were for the Yangtze and yellow rivers and so this is one reason that they capsized as easily as they did I guess there's one more question over there thank you as well for your extraordinary lecture my question is more of a cultural one can you explain the what I see as a deck ha to me between the samurais love for show eNOS and glitzy played art and so forth and the austerity of the tea ceremony you find a contradiction between their the the gaudy inist of some of their yeah yeah how to how to explain the wabi-sabi appeal a that's its first of all where does it come from it's very much influenced by Zen which of course is separate from Samba and Japanese Zen is influenced by Chinese Chung and Chung in China has less of a martial connection than Zen does in Japan although there is the Shaolin Temple and all of that which is a chon institution but I would say the aesthetics of the tea ceremony are best understood not in terms of the the feelings of the samurai class but in terms of the aesthetics of Zen then the question is why is there a special relationship between the samurai and Zen I would say first of all the connection is overstated sometimes it said the Amidah sits the Pureland people that was the religion of the peasants and Tendai and Shingen those are the the religions of the aristocracy but Zen because it's so simple and it involves meditation that gets your mind sharp so that you can kill better that these are somehow you know they resonate with one another but most Samba die were pure land they were not Zen and I think the important thing is that Zen becomes prevalent at the time of the formation of the Kamakura Shogunate and the Kamakura Shogunate like the administration's that have preceded them wants to have its own special relationship with a new recent import of Chinese Buddhism so that explains the high level connection between zen and the Somme what I but I don't know how many samurai became interested in the tea ceremony it initially was more popular among merchants in ports like Sakai Sen no DQ I didn't have time to about is one of the many things I didn't have time to talk about I've been trying to keep it down but sin no DQ is the the figure who kind of codifies the tea ceremony and he was close to hit a Yoshi the Great War Lord Hideyoshi didn't understand tea ceremony and we know that because he threw this massive tea ceremony bash in Kyoto with thousands of people involved that is so non wabi-sabi so you know there's the question of to what extent did the the psalm what I understand or really appreciate this or just maybe participate in order to show that they they had some sophistication is a good question I talked about sophistication I feel like we have had a very sophisticated afternoon here and thank you all for coming thank you Gary [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 5,939

Rating: 4.6638656 out of 5

Keywords: art, art history, museum, lecture, course, japanese art, fine art

Id: 1iSd6CkEoAU

Length: 80min 43sec (4843 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2020