Book Review

Asia

The Heian period (794–1185) begins with the move to a new capital, Heian-ky (now Kyoto), and ends with a civil war and the abdication of rule over the eastern half of the country. The basic story of this period is rehearsed by the ten essays in this volume: the disintegration of a centralized bureaucratic state, the glittering and refined world of the aristocrats at court, and the rise of the warriors, who ultimately took over government.	1
In the first chapter, the late William H. McCullough recounts the political wrangles that led to the rise of the Fujiwara, who, as regents for child emperors (sessh) and for adult emperors (kampaku) born to Fujiwara women, completely dominated the court from 967 to 1068. McCullough's contribution is an appreciation of the nastier side of marriage politics: the Northern House Fujiwara were particularly adept at eliminating competition by means of staged plots, assignments to distant provinces, and outright humiliation of the emperor when necessary.	2
The story is continued in the ninth chapter by G. Cameron Hurst III. In 1068, the first emperor in 170 years without a Fujiwara mother came to the throne. For a hundred years and more, a series of senior retired emperors competed with the Fujiwara, weakened by fraternal squabbles, by issuing edicts and proclamations from their household offices (in-no-ch), by acquiring private estates, and by using their wealth to subsidize alliances with imperial cadet houses, clans, Fujiwara houses marginalized by Northern House Fujiwara, and warriors serving in the guard. As Hurst makes clear, however, government by the senior retired emperor (insei) only served, among other things, to exacerbate political tensions as senior retired emperor and unior retired emperors struggled to control the succession.	3
During the Heian period, the central government lost control of its financial base, rice land. In the third chapter and fourth chapters, Dana Morris focuses on taxation, while Cornelius Kiley focuses on the provincial administration to trace the developments that made the original system unworkable and forced the central government, in order to secure revenues, to give up direct taxation in exchange for quotas from provincial governors. These two chapters, however dense and difficult, are perhaps the most important in the volume. The development of private estates or shen has been covered in the past; however, I have not yet come across such a comprehensive discussion in English of the exact process by which control over public land was lost and economic and political power shifted to the provinces.	4
The benefits of the privatization of public wealth are reviewed by the late Marian Ury and Helen Craig McCullough in the fourth and fifth chapters, by far the liveliest and most readable in the volume. In Ury's chapter, we can trace the gradual privatization of Chinese learning, first mobilized in the interest of the state (the position of the emperor, the structure of government and its legal codes). Although individual scholars like Sugawara Michizane (845–903) might be recruited by the emperor for political purposes, learning brought no rank and little income. Most aristocrats, as demonstrated by McCullough, amused themselves with music, dance, vernacular poetry, romances, and holiday customs and decorations. Most of these arts, like Chinese learning, became the preserves of certain families and, as a result, suffered the consequences of formalization.	. . .