Four Centuries When Japan Turned Inward and Invented Its Own Culture

The Decision to Stop Copying The embassies to Tang China had been the conduit for Japanese state-building for two centuries. Their discontinuation, advised by Sugawara no Michizane in the late ninth century, was partly practical — Tang was in decline and the voyages were lethally dangerous — and partly a judgement that Japan had taken what it needed.

What followed was not isolation exactly, but a period in which imported forms were digested and reworked into something local. The clearest case is writing. Chinese characters had been adapted to write Japanese, awkwardly; during the Heian period the kana syllabaries developed, and for the first time it was possible to write the Japanese language fluently in a script suited to it.

Why the Great Writers Were Women Here the history takes a turn that still surprises people. Chinese characters and Chinese-language composition were the prestigious male sphere; kana was regarded as the women's script and treated as lesser.

So the women of the court wrote in kana — in Japanese, about their own lives — and produced the literature that survives. Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century, is a long psychological novel about a prince, his relationships and his decline, and is widely described as the world's first novel. Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book, from the same court, is a book of lists, observations and sharp opinions that reads with startling immediacy a thousand years later.

The men were writing formal Chinese verse, which is read today mainly by specialists. The dismissal of the vernacular is the reason the vernacular literature exists.

How the Court Actually Worked Heian aristocratic life was tiny, intense and highly codified. A few thousand people at most, in and around one city, for whom the correct incense, the correct layering of coloured robes, the correct paper for a letter and the quality of one's calligraphy were matters of real consequence.

Courtship was conducted largely through poetry, exchanged in a thirty-one syllable form, with the handwriting and the paper carrying as much weight as the words. Political power ran through marriage: the Fujiwara clan dominated for centuries by marrying daughters to emperors and governing as regents for their grandsons.

The aesthetic that came out of this is mono no aware — the awareness that things are moving and ending, and that beauty is bound up with that. It is the sensibility behind cherry blossom, behind the melancholy in Genji, and behind a great deal of what still feels distinctively Japanese about Japanese art.

The Fear Underneath The refinement had a shadow. This was a city with no understanding of epidemic disease, periodic famine, and fires that destroyed whole districts, and its explanatory framework for misfortune was the anger of wronged spirits. Onmyōdō, the court's divination and geomancy service, advised on directions, dates and the placement of buildings, and vengeful ghosts were a matter of state concern rather than folklore.

Michizane himself, the man who ended the embassies, became the most famous of those ghosts after his exile and death — and the shrine built to placate him is one of the most visited in Kyoto today.

Where It Survives Byōdō-in at Uji is the single best surviving expression of the period's imagination: the Phoenix Hall, built by a Fujiwara regent as a representation of Amida's western paradise, reflected in its pond. It is on the ten-yen coin, which means most visitors have handled an image of it hundreds of times before seeing it.

The Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds and Kiyomizu-dera carry the period differently, and Uji doubles as the setting of the final chapters of Genji and as one of the great tea regions. Reading a few pages of the Pillow Book before going does more for a Kyoto trip than any amount of temple history.