Following a war over the imperial suc-cession in 587, the Yamato emperors—initially an empress— became symbolic heads of state and spent most of their time performing state Shinto ritual
Trang 1due to its divine descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu
The Soga uji eventually took over the day-to-day affairs of the
early Japanese state Following a war over the imperial
suc-cession in 587, the Yamato emperors—initially an empress—
became symbolic heads of state and spent most of their time
performing state Shinto rituals, while the uji were assigned
specific tasks in the new imperial administration (including
revenue management, religious rituals, and waging warfare)
by the Soga Prince Shōtoku, who served as the court regent to
the Yamato empress
Prince Shōtoku (r 593–621) promoted the spread of
Bud-dhism in Japan as a superior new form of magic as well as
because of its importance in forming ties to contemporary
China Prince Shōtoku thought that Buddhism played a key
role in the renewal of the Chinese social order that promoted
centralization of political power With Shōtoku’s
encour-agement, clan leaders in Japan competed with one another
to erect lavish local shrines dedicated to the main Buddhist
sects, each an extension of Buddhist sects based in China The
central temples of these Buddhist sects in Japan were located
in the imperial city of Nara The Nara temples served as
cen-ters from which the competing sects spread their influence
among the clans
The Buddhist priests and uji elite accepted their proper
place in the new Yamato political and religious order After
Prince Shōtoku died, the heads of several powerful uji, led by
Fujiwara Kamatari, the head of the Nakatomi clan, planned
and eventually staged a successful revolt in 645 coincident
with the succession of a new emperor to the throne
Subse-quently Kamatari assumed a partnership with the new
em-peror, Tenchi, and as the head of the retitled Fujiwara family
he implemented the new Taika (“great change”) Reforms that
were intended to eliminate what remained of Japan’s old
decen-tralized government Kamatari also established a new capital
at Naniwa (now incorporated within the modern-day city of
Osaka, south of Nara), which was modeled on the urban grid
pattern of the contemporary Chinese Tang capital at
Ch’ang-an The Taihō Code (702), which was implemented in 710 by
Kamatari’s Fujiwara successors, further codified the new
Jap-anese political order, formalizing the Yamato state structure
that had emerged gradually over the previous century
Nara became the new imperial capital in 710 following
the death of Emperor Tenchi, ending the historical tradition
that the Yamato court move each time an emperor died in
or-der to avoid the ritual pollution associated with the deceased
Nara was the site of the realm’s greatest Buddhist temples,
such as the stunning Tōdai-ji (Eastern Great Temple) and
its great statue of the Buddha, known as the Daibutsu The
monks of six Nara-based sects competed for the patronage
of the emperor and his elite but too often took this
competi-tion into the streets of Nara, where subsequent records report that they regularly fought with one another as justification for the government’s fear over the growing importance of Buddhism
An open affair between a Buddhist priest and the em-press Shōtoku in the 750s reinforced public fears that Bud-dhism had become a threat to the civil order When the priest and the empress tried to dislodge the Fujiwara family’s con-trol of the court, the imperial military intervened to physi-cally occupy the Nara temples and to place the Nara priests under a form of house arrest With the death of the empress the new emperor Kammu (r 781–806) and his Fujiwara ad-visers decided in 784 to move the Japanese capital to Heian
(modern-day Kyoto) at the northern end of the Yamato plain.
The move was completed in 794, leaving behind the tarnished reputation of the Nara court and the previously powerful Nara-based Buddhist sects
To eliminate the negative influence of the Buddhist sects
and female members of the imperial family, during the Heian
imperial era (794–1185) only the Tendai and Shingon sects
of Buddhism were officially recognized, and women were no longer allowed to hold the imperial throne as rulers in their own right The imperial authority of the Heian rulers reached its height in the 10th century, when the Fujiwara clan had exclusive management of the affairs of the court on the em-peror’s behalf Under the Fujiwara family, which continued to dominate imperial government until 1160, the court became more and more insulated from the affairs of the countryside, and eventually the rural areas were no longer subject in fact
to the direct authority of the court
After 1185 a series of military strongmen called shoguns wielded ultimate political authority in Japan The shogun re-ceived his authority from the emperor after winning battles against armed opponents In theory, the emperor delegated the responsibility of running the Japanese imperial state to the shogun Under the decentralized system of the Kamakura shogunate (1185–1333), which was based in the city of Ka-makura southeast of modern Tokyo, the regional samurai lords were vassals of the Kamakura shoguns The Kamakura court was administered by hereditary educated samurai Its authority depended on its negotiated alliances with local sam-urai rather than reassignments of loyal Kamakura samsam-urai to military fiefs The emperors in Kyoto and the Kamakura sho-guns competed for the support of local administrators, who
controlled semiautonomous farming estates called shōen that
had developed in the later imperial era
The Kamakura shoguns were successful in repelling two Mongol invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, respectively
The shoguns had considerable help from the kamikaze
(“di-vine winds”), severe typhoons that destroyed the invading empires and dynasties: Asia and the Pacific 367