A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower by Kenneth Henshall Read Free Book Online Page A

of punishments in morally tolerant Japan relative to those in China. 5 The land allotment system also differed, particularly in that women were allotted land in Japan but not at all in T’ang China.
    Another very important modification of Chinese practices was that of the ‘mandate of heaven’. In China an emperor ruled with the mandate of heaven only while he acted virtuously. He could be removed if he was felt to have strayed from the path of virtue. This was ‘overlooked’ in Japan, where the Yamato rulers preferred to be legitimised by divine descent rather than the judgement of the people.
    The use of the male pronoun above is deliberate, for the Chinese preferred their emperors to be male. This was one thing that was not modified in Japan. Although there were half a dozen reigning empresses in very early Japan, from 770 to the present only two females were to ascend the Japanese throne, both briefly and both in name only. 6
    Life was not, of course, confined to the courts. For all the great advances of the day, there was much suffering and hunger among the common people. A document of 730, for example, lists no fewer than 412 out of 414 households in Awa (in present-day Chiba Prefecture) as existing at what was considered the bare subsistence level. Similar figures, of 996 out of 1,019, are recorded for households in what is now Fukui Prefecture. 7
    Only around 1.8 million acres of land was cleared for paddy, so there was simply not enough land for the allotment system to work properly forvery long. And agricultural technology was inefficient, which meant that land clearance and utilisation left much to be desired. Even much of the cleared land soon became barren. 8
    Peasants suffered too from a heavy tax burden, in no small part thanks to the unusual Buddhist zeal of Emperor Shmu (r.724–49). Shmu commissioned not only the Tdaiji but also a temple in every province, at huge expense. His zeal was partly due to the massive suffering of his people during one of Japan’s worst epidemics, the great smallpox epidemic of 735–7. This virtually exterminated local populations in some areas and reduced Japan’s overall population by around a third. 9 Shmu felt himself in some way responsible for this and a number of famines and other disasters during his reign, and turned – with what seems to have been genuine piety – to Buddhism. 10
    At times there was famine relief, and during particularly serious disasters such as the great smallpox epidemic there was even tax exemption for peasants. In an attempt to increase incentives for land reclamation, a law change in 743 allowed peasants who cleared land to hold it in their families in perpetuity. This revision was part of a trend that saw land increasingly returning to private ownership. 11
    However, in general the tax burden worsened for peasants, who comprised 95 per cent of the population at the time. They were not helped by having to compensate for tax exemptions given increasingly to landowning religious institutions and noble families. Troubled by poor crops and heavy tax demands, many peasants simply walked off their allotted land, seeking instead the security and lesser demands of working land in the private tax-free estates of the temples and nobles. In actual fact, however, life on the tax-free estates was not necessarily better for them. Private landowners could exact their own dues from those working their land, and some were harsher than the government.
    Yamanoue Okura, the socially concerned
Manysh
poet who wrote much of his poetry in the early years of the Nara period, again offers a glimpse of life for the common people. One of his poems, ‘A Dialogue on Poverty’, takes the form of a dialogue between a poor man and an even poorer one. The poorer man’s account is given below. 12
Wide as they call heaven and earth,
For me they have shrunk quite small.
Bright though they call the sun and moon,
They never shine for me.
Is it the same with all men,
Or for