History turns the page

In the 11th century, at the court of the palace in Heian-kyō, one could get the impression that the world might be held together with a brush alone: with a document, a rank, a precedent, the “proper” formula, and a calendar in which even politics has its rhythm, like festivals and the rainy season. The kuge aristocracy (公家), which governed Japan before the arrival of the samurai, lived in a thicket of signs—where the shade of paper and the order in which one enters a hall speak of one’s right to exist. Yet beneath that silk, another Japan was being born—so different: the provinces, where what mattered was not what was beautiful, but what could be enforced; not a poem, but a boundary; not favor, but the collection of rice. While the capital debated form, shōen (荘園) were spreading on the periphery—private estates with immunities, enclaves of law in which “statehood” began and ended on paper, while reality tasted of mud and tax.

From that earth—literally from the earth—came the bushi (武士 – warriors). Not as romantic heroes, but as practical people: managers, enforcers, bodyguards of revenue. Their world smelled of horses’ sweat, wet bow-leather, and steel, but it smelled even more of the ledger of dues: how much rice is to flow, who has the right to enter, who has the right to collect, who has the right to judge. The mechanism that built their strength was simple and brilliant: field → donation → office. You clear new land, raise a residence, “give” the land under the umbrella of a temple or shrine, receive shiki—a right/office—and remain on site as the one who truly holds everything in his hands. This was practical power: it did not need to overthrow the court in order to grow; it was enough to learn where the system had its gaps, and how to turn a document into a fact.

And at a certain moment, that practicality entered the salons. Into corridors where only the rustle of silk had sounded before, there came the smell of a long road and the heavy clink of iron; into the language of ceremony came concrete words—words about boundaries, disputes, and enforcement; into an aesthetic that liked to pretend the world was smooth, there drifted the provincial truth that order can be hard and dirty. Today’s text will be about two Japans beneath one 11th-century sky: the old one, which ruled through symbol and form, and the new one, which ruled through land, office, and revenue—and about how they interpenetrated until the warrior ceased to be a tool and became the master of history. If we want to understand where “samurai Japan” truly came from, let us not look for it in legends or in Sengoku battles—we must begin with rice, land, and people who could make sure that things did not only happen “beautifully,” but happened at all.

SCENE

Heian-kyō (today’s Kyoto),

Eishō nengan (11th century)

That morning, Munetada opened his diary at once on a clean page—the beginning of a new era always required clean paper, even if the things that were to happen would be dirty with mud and disputes. In the Fujiwara household, everything had its order: curtains at the proper hour, a brief silence before the messenger entered, the sound of footsteps on the boards so even it was as if it were part of the ceremony. And yet the morning was different. In the city they spoke of a new era, of change, of the fact that with it—as always—some would gain, and others would have to pretend they had lost nothing. On days like these, ink grows heavier, and the written signs more telling.

Fujiwara no Munetada sat at a low table, his paper laid out evenly, the brush held like something that weighed more than a long tachi—for in his world the brush truly weighed more. He opened a new book of notes almost with a sense of duty toward time: the beginning of an epoch, the beginning of a reign, the beginning of his own path toward ranks that would have to be confirmed as soon as the new ruler fully “sat” upon the throne. The diary was not a memoir. It was testimony that a person existed within order, that his life could be arranged into dates, titles, duties—that he was not merely a tangle of accidental days.

As he scratched out the first characters, a guard’s voice rang out in the courtyard: short, too matter-of-fact for the local rhythm. A moment later a man stood at the threshold—someone who could not be “dissolved” into the harmony of the interior. He wore proper attire—no one would dare enter here in rags—yet the fabric seemed harder, less “courtly.” And above all: he smelled of horse and steel. That scent was in him like a truth one cannot shoo away with a fan.

The messenger bowed deeply, but in the movement one felt muscles accustomed to the bow, not to the bowing. He spoke of a matter from the provinces as though he were recounting something measurable: fields, newly cleared land, a residence raised at the border of estates, a “donation to a temple” that suddenly transformed land into shōen—a place of special rights, where other hands should not reach. Yet in that man’s mouth, the words “donation” and “law” sounded like tools. Like a way to keep what one had cut out of the forest with one’s own axe. Munetada listened and saw a mechanism being born: terraced fields, a house, a donation, an office—and the same man remains on site as the administrator, because only he can oversee what has been created.

At one point the messenger used the word “peace”—but he said it the way a warrior speaks of peace: as something maintained because someone is ready to seize someone, escort him, punish him. Munetada thought of it with a slight sting. In Heian-kyō, “peace” was built of poetry, marriages, genealogies, and dignity. Of who owes whom a place in a procession. Of whose daughter will become the mother of a future ruler.

When the visitor left, the smell of horses’ sweat lingered long in the corridor, like a foreign mark in calligraphy. Munetada returned to his brush, but before he wrote the next sentence, he remained motionless for a moment, as if he had heard the step of something greater than himself: not so much the step of a man as the step of an era. And it was then that he understood—though he would likely never have said it aloud—that beneath one sky two orders were growing: one that ruled through form, and another that was learning to rule through land.

What was 11th-century Japan like?

Imagine a state that still speaks the language of old codes, yet is ever more often governed by practice—by precedent, arrangement, private interest. On paper, the idea of ritsuryō (律令) still endures: an imperial bureaucracy modeled on the Chinese Tang system, statutes, offices, “public” order, and ritual as the backbone of the world. In reality, however, what was meant to be a unified and “state” system in the 11th century functions increasingly like a privatized mechanism: key functions pass into the hands of family networks, and alongside statutory offices there arise extra-statutory offices—created ad hoc and then закрепed in custom and in institutional memory. It is precisely this daily practice—and not the code—that begins to produce “administrative truth,” which only later must be justified and ordered.

This process has a hard economic foundation: shōen 荘園 (literally “enclosed estate”). Private landed domains, protected by tax and administrative immunities, grow like a second circulation of blood within the organism of the state—nonpublic, yet ever more efficient.

The owners of shōen (aristocrats of Heian-kyō, court lineages, as well as temples and shrines) build through them financial independence and their own “human backroom”: dependent people, administrators, local executors, guards.

In this sense, the 11th century is not only the “decline of ritsuryō,” but the birth of a world in which real power flows where rice revenue flows—and where there exists the capacity to enforce law. And enforcement—especially in the provinces—ever more often requires armed people: private forces, mercenaries, local “commanders,” whom the court can hire to suppress a rebellion… or to protect its own interests.

Here, three poles of power appear that in later centuries will already be obvious, but in the 11th century are only emerging from the fog: kuge 公家, buke 武家, and jisha 寺社.

Kuge—literally “public/official houses” (公 “public,” 家 “house/lineage”)—are not “aristocrats” in a purely aesthetic sense, but above all an elite that inherits access to statehood: to ceremonial, offices, the calendar, formulas, and to what is recognized as legal.

Buke—“martial/military houses” (武 “arms/war,” 家 “house/lineage”)—are in turn an elite that inherits access to organized violence, to protection, to intervention in the field, to the enforcement of claims (at first only in the name of others).

And jisha—“temples and shrines”—are not religious scenery but real players: they have land, people, immunities, prestige, and sometimes even their own units able to force decisions upon the court (on militant Buddhism in medieval Japan, more here: The Monk with the Naginata: The Martial Face of Buddhism in Kamakura Japan). This triangle of forces results directly from the privatization of power and resources: with the accumulation of shōen and dependent cadres, each of these groups becomes economically independent and can hard-enforce its interests.

The most “visible” summit of the court order in the 11th century is the Fujiwara hegemony and the system of sekkan seiji 摂関政治: rule by regents, in which sesshō 摂政 (regent for a minor emperor) and kanpaku 関白 (regent for an adult) become instruments of the lasting dominance of a single lineage.

The key is not the official appointment itself, but marriage politics: control of the right to “provide” official consorts and mothers of future emperors. What sounds like palace intrigue was in practice a technology of power: through marital practices in which the husband “entered” the wife’s lineage space, the young emperor from birth functions within the world of the mother’s residence and kin—and thus within the world of the Fujiwara. Power need not obsess over control; it is enough that it is always nearby, in the same corridor, in the same seal, in the same list of names.

And now something psychologically important: for the Heian aristocracy, politics was not “dirty matter” separated from ritual. In their imagination, ceremonial order is an order of efficacy—an accurately performed gesture and a properly conducted procedure are not ornament, but a guarantee that the world will not fall apart. Hence the obsession with precedent, form, title, the appropriate document. The same mind that celebrates the scent of the season and the choice of paper can with ruthless scrupulousness debate the appointment of a governor—because the governor is the channel through which provincial revenue flows.

In this sense, the 11th century is simultaneously an apogee and a moment of cracking. An apogee—because the development of kana as a prestige script opens a literary explosion (especially in the circle of court women): "Genji monogatari", "Makura no sōshi" (you can read about them, for example, here: A Lesson with Sei Shōnagon: How to Pause Our Gray Everyday Life, Look at It and Enchant It?), memoirs and diaries in which psychic and social life becomes as “serious” a material as politics. A cracking—because the Fujiwara mechanism cannot last forever, the state has ceased to be the sole owner of land, and aristocratic bureaucracy was not prepared for that.

That is why the year 1068 is such a strong signal of change: the accession of Emperor Go-Sanjō (1068–1072), a “rare” anomaly in the system, for he was not born of a Fujiwara mother.

This is not merely a genealogical curiosity—it is a change in the geometry of influence. Go-Sanjō attempts to restore imperial economic agency: in 1069 he issues an edict sharply restricting the acquisition of estates by the great and by temple complexes, and creates an office to adjudicate the legality of holdings (Office of Records / kirokujo)—a bid to apply brakes to the expansion of shōen.

Even if these institutions operate intermittently and amid resistance, they themselves show that the center understands where power is fleeing: into land, into the title to revenue, into independence.

And then comes insei 院政—rule “from the cloister,” that is, a paradoxical maneuver: the emperor abdicates but does not vanish; he shifts to the position of “retired” sovereign who, from a distance, steers the court, as the Fujiwara regents had steered it before.

In the sources, this process is tied precisely to the beginning of the post-1068 era: successive generations of retired emperors build their own backing—shōen, clients, and even military support—because without it one can no longer rule by seal alone.

And this is the moment in which “courtliness” ceases to be the only form of culture, and “warriorship” ceases to be merely a tool hired in the provinces.

It is also worth noting that the terms kuge and buke in the 11th century are still “softer” than they will be later: they signify rather styles of participation in order than airtight castes. Later history will “stiffen” these labels, but already in the 11th century one sees that Japan begins to live beneath one sky in two registers: a register of form (ceremonial, precedent, poetry, chancery) and a register of efficacy in the field (protection, violence, local administration). Between them stands a third pole—jisha—which can speak both the language of the sacred and the language of revenue and force.

Two circulatory systems

Kuge

In the 11th century Japan begins to function like an organism with two circulatory systems. One is visible, elegant, “state”: the logic of the court, where power takes the shape of symbol, precedent, and rhythm. The other is heavier, earthier, less spectacular, yet increasingly decisive: the logic of the provinces, where power takes the shape of land, office, and revenue. And that is precisely why the tension between kuge and the emerging world of bushi does not consist merely of “aesthetics versus brutality,” but of something deeper: two different definitions of what political reality is at all.

At court, reality is largely calendrical. Power does not “happen” at any moment—it happens within designated windows of time, in annual cycles, in the rhythm of ceremonies, reports, promotions. Time is a tool of rule, and its most important unit is not the day or the month, but the era (nengō) and “the beginning” as a moment that must be emphasized and domesticated. In court diaries one sees that even religious matters are sometimes recorded primarily as administrative procedures: what matters is who has the right to perform something, how to frame it in documents, what the precedents are, which variant of form one “ought” to repeat in a given year. This is a world in which the symbolic form of administration can obscure the content of prayer, because it is form that maintains order.

From this grows an obsession with precedent. Precedent is not a curiosity for pedants—it is a mechanism of safety. Since politics and administration increasingly rest on relations, custom, and “this is how it was done,” the past becomes an argument stronger than logic. Hence court disputes over details: who stands where, who hands what, who has the right to sign, which color, which object, which formula. Precedents are “charged” with meaning, sometimes even morally: they can be good or bad, auspicious or “undesirable,” and comparisons reach back to earlier reigns and lineage continuities. This is plainly visible in diarists’ reflections, who can assess the weight of an event precisely through the prism of whether it had an analogue in the past and what fate befell those who then repeated a similar pattern.

And here we come to a key kuge instrument: the diary. Contrary to today’s reflex, it is not merely a “record of life.” The diary is the memory of an office, the memory of a lineage, and the memory of the world’s proper functioning. Since the 9th century, the court has “official” diaries—created by specific bureaus (for example, the records of secretaries of the council, palace secretaries, kurōdo 蔵人), because the administration needs a continuous register of matters (see, for example, how this worked in the case of the New Year: New Year like an order and a ritual: how did the samurai celebrate under the Kamakura shogunate?).

But in parallel, the custom of “private” diaries grows—and that word can be misleading: “private” here means rather “not ordered from above,” not “written for the drawer.” This type of writing becomes part of careers and of the hereditary bureaucratic practice of families: you record because thereby you can later prove continuity, reconstruct precedent, win a dispute over procedure, and even build your position in the lineage succession.

Moreover, the very question of “when one begins to keep a diary” tells us something about the psychology of kuge power. Researchers show that officials often begin regular entries when they reach an important career threshold (for example, access to the zone closest to the emperor), or when a generational breakthrough occurs: the death of the lineage head, a change of family leadership, the inauguration of a new emperor. These are moments when one must “bind” one’s own life to a larger axis of time, because on it depends one’s further bureaucratic path and the durability of hereditary offices. The diary then becomes like a second birth: not biological, but political.

Technically, it looks even more telling: many diaries grow out of… a calendar. One writes in officially issued calendars, wherever there is free space; later these notes develop into fuller entries. That means that for the court, time is not background—it is the matrix on which events are laid. Even reports on auspicious days, presented to the emperor, fulfill the role of symbolically “starting” a new kind of rule: a new year, a new era, a new adult ruler—a new cycle. And right afterward: a regular term of rank promotions, preparations, review of reports, chancery work. Power as rhythm.

Buke

But now let us look at the second circulation: the provinces. Here power must be verifiable in another way. Precedent is not enough—one must be able to collect revenue, maintain a boundary, resolve a dispute, ensure that rice truly flows to those who hold title to it. There existed a clear division of basic land control into two major types: shōen 荘園 and kōryō / kokugaryō 公領 / 国衙領.

Shōen are “autonomous” estates (to varying degrees), usually linked to great families of Heian-kyō and to religious institutions (jisha 寺社), managed locally by networks of officials and representatives. Kōryō / kokugaryō are public lands, nominally state lands, subject to provincial administration: the jurisdiction of kokushi 国司 (governors—often absent, residing in the capital) and their apparatus at the administrative seat, the kokuga 国衙.

What in theory sounds like a “simple division” in practice in the 11th–12th centuries becomes a field of constant friction, because shōen grow and undermine the old model of state control. It is important, too, that shōen are not merely a “self-willed expansion of private estates.” In many cases their development has a legal dimension and is sanctioned by state elites: the authority in the capital can—for various reasons—create and confirm these exceptions, because they are politically and financially profitable.

The most “toxic” and at the same time fascinating element of shōen is their legal nature: they are not only land, but a bundle of rights. The most famous is the ban on interference and the “right of non-entry”—funyū 不入 (and the whole complex of “non-transportation and non-entry” defined as fuyu funyū 不輸不入). This is the language of the boundary: not only geographic, but administrative. Such a right begins as an immunity against kokushi and kokuga, and later will also fight against growing military structures. In other words: shōen teach Japan that sovereignty can be “cut out” in the field like a separate enclave—and this is a mental foundation of the world in which warriors will later so fiercely dispute who has the right to enter, collect, judge.

And here revenue returns like a boomerang. The provinces are not “wild space,” but a vast rice accounting book. Whoever holds title to collection holds power in theory. Whoever can carry out collection and defend it holds power in reality. And since rights layer upon rights—some hold “overlord” title, others executive title, yet others local title—disputes become inevitable. One can already see how local elites learn to operate at the interface: they clear new fields, build residences, make donations, obtain rights to a share of revenue, and remain on site as administrators of what they “offered.” This is the first, silent training of buke: not a romantic duel, but the ability to keep a revenue system running under conditions of competition and unclear boundaries.

As a result, in the 11th century the “two logics of power” begin to diverge like two dialects of the same language. The court says: precedent, rank, calendar, proper form, lineage continuity in writing. The provinces answer: who truly administers here, who has the right to enter, who collects, who will protect, who will resolve a dispute over boundary and revenue. And that is precisely why, when later warriors begin to enter Heian-kyō not only as a “tool” but as a subject, they will meet not an empty decoration, but an entire dense symbolic system that for centuries created law. The court will want buke to speak its language; buke will want the court to recognize the language of land. And Japan—as usual—will not choose one. It will make of it a mixture whose tension will drive history.

The birth of bushi “from the earth”

If we look for the “moment the samurai were born,” it is easy to fall into the trap of later images: a mounted archer in armor, a clan banner, a dramatic duel. Meanwhile, bushi 武士 are born far more modestly—in revenue ledgers, in boundary disputes, in the daily work of ensuring that land truly yields a crop and that someone can defend that crop. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the most important environment for the birth of warriors is local elites managing the real world of estates: both shōen and “state” areas (kōryō / kokugaryō). They stand between the village and the “upper” levels of hierarchy: between hyakushō 百姓 below and the owners of rights (ryōke, honke, religious institutions, the court) above.

In the sources, one sees that this is not one uniform group of “knights.” It is rather a dense layer of people who are simultaneously officials and managers, and often also warriors—whose key feature is the possession of shiki 職, hereditary “posts-rights” connected with administration and revenue. In this zone circulate names of functions that today sound like a catalogue of medieval administration: gesu 下司, kumon 公文, azukaridokoro 預所, hoshi 保司… Some of these roles will later be absorbed or covered over by more familiar posts (such as jitō 地頭), but the logic is the same: someone has concrete, inheritable powers of management and collection, and therefore has a real reason to maintain control—and tools to do so.

And here we come to the essence: bushi are not born as “pure violence,” but as violence embedded in a right to revenue. A local, trusted man “with an iron hand” is needed by the court and landowners precisely because the provinces are a space where a paper title to rice can be worthless. Someone must supervise transport, collect arrears, enforce judgments, resolve boundary disputes, suppress resistance—and sometimes simply deter. Over time these people begin to seize ever greater control over provincial life, because they are “on the spot,” while higher levels of authority can be far away, absent, or operating solely through documents. The source states it plainly: these local intermediaries service a network of estates and offices “in between”—and very often they are warriors.

The most concrete mechanism from which samurai agency grows can be described simply—and it is precisely this chain: “field → donation → office.” In the 11th and 12th centuries, local elites clear new tracts of land, cut forest, drain marshes, establish new rice paddies and fields, and alongside that build their own residences—yashiki 屋敷, zaike 在家, isono 居薗. These are not “houses” in our modern sense, but centers of local power: a storage place, a meeting place, a command point, a marker of status.

Then comes a step that, from the perspective of later times, looks like legal magic, and in fact is brilliantly pragmatic: the newly acquired land is often donated to a temple or shrine (or another religious institution), incorporated into its shōen network, and the donor in return obtains shiki—a right/office connected with that land—and, most importantly, remains on site as the administrator. The source describes it without euphemism: local magnates establish new fields, raise residences, then either hold the land independently or “offer” it to religious institutions and incorporate it into their shōen, gaining shiki in return and continuing in the role of local managers of what they themselves created.

Why is this so important? Because in this way a power is born that is simultaneously legal and practical. Legal—because it is anchored in the prestige and immunities of the religious institution (jisha) and in the language of rights and offices. Practical—because real control remains with the man who has people, knows the terrain, and can use force. This is the first form of the samurai “contract with the system”: bushi do not have to destroy order to grow. It is enough that they learn to move within it, exploiting its gaps.

Over time this process has yet another effect: inheritance and division. Newly opened lands often receive individual revenue rights, which sets in motion a continual process of taking over small patches of cleared land; this deepens wealth differences within communities and builds “portfolios” of hereditary holdings—both among local elites and among those who are only becoming warriors. Such lands can be divisible and hereditary, confirmed and reconfirmed by successive authorities in documents guaranteeing possession (andojō 安堵状).

This also changes the psychology of ambition. A local man of power no longer wants to be merely the “arm” of someone from Heian-kyō. He wants a share of prestige and resources, because prestige is a currency that stabilizes revenue. The connection with the court and with temples/shrines thus becomes not decoration but an investment: in legality, in the seal, in the title, in ensuring that a neighbor cannot tomorrow say “it isn’t yours.” At the same time, tension grows in the background: since shiki yields revenue and power, it becomes an object of disputes, fragmentation, rivalry between lineage branches—exactly as later samurai will dispute halves and quarters of offices or rights.

And one more thing: what we call “peasants” is often not a single, simple category in the sources. Even the term hyakushō 百姓 (literally “common people,” “the populace”) can be treacherous—researchers (for example, Amino Yoshihiko—one of the most important historians of Japan’s Middle Ages) remind us that we should not automatically equate it with farmers in the modern sense, because village life and work were more diverse, and social dependencies more multi-layered. This is important because bushi grow in a world where power consists not only in “owning land,” but in the ability to manage people of different status, skills, and obligations.

Thus—step by step—bushi become something more than local executors. First they are people of order and collection. Then they become holders of hereditary rights (shiki), and their residences and “private” surroundings (shitaku 私宅 and adjacent lands) form lasting centers of local control. And when in subsequent centuries new political structures overlay this (Kamakura, jitō, shugo), warriors will not appear from nowhere—rather, their old “earthbound” agency will be recognized, formalized, and strengthened.

Other worlds

In the world of the kuge aristocracy, power did not begin with the sword, but with form. And not in the sense of “nice customs,” but literally: whether you can play the game of signs so that others recognize you as having the right to belong. The court was like a great machine for producing reality through ritual: a bow was not a bow, but a confirmation of hierarchy; the choice of words was not style, but a test of belonging; and “proper” behavior at a specific moment in the calendar worked like a seal of legality. It is enough to look into descriptions of ceremonies and of the daily acts of court officials: arranging themselves in strictly defined sequences according to rank and function, care for precedent, postponing actions because a day is “inauspicious”—all of this says that social order was literally directed in time and in the body.

In such a world, aesthetics becomes politics, because aesthetics is the only language the center can speak at all. An excellent shorthand for this mentality is the reflection on miyabi (雅): “courtliness” as an ideal of life and art, where what matters is “good sensibility,” “proper language and responses,” “taste,” and the active avoidance of what is low and ugly—as if ugliness were not only an aesthetic misstep, but a crack in the structure of the world.

Importantly, this is not innocent elegance. Michele Marra, an Italian Japanologist and professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, wrote it superbly in "The Aesthetics of Discontent": “To be the unquestioned political center meant the ability to create an ‘aesthetic version of politics,’ in which taste and refinement can conceal the painful reality of the socio-political environment.” This sentence is like a key to the entire Heian era: Heian-kyō (Kyoto) does not so much ignore the provinces as it produces around itself a cocoon of form, within which even rising tensions can be “translated” into style and ceremonial.

That is why kuge live in the shadow of ranks and signs as though they were laws of nature. This also explains why the art of the word and sensitivity to language develop so strongly at court: not because they “like poetry,” but because in this culture language is an instrument of status, and status is currency. In the materials one sees how the notions of suki (数寄) and miyabi intertwine with the court ethos: a sukimono is someone who, with passion and discipline, practices an art (especially poetry), and at the same time remains embedded in the prestige system—even when later he flees into “aesthetic resignation” and makes a virtue of it.

The court can thus produce a paradox: artistic “delicacy” can simultaneously be a shield and a political weapon.

But in parallel another style of life grows—what we will later call buke. And in its germ there is nothing of a “romantic code.” There is, instead, an ethos of efficacy: one must calculate risk, secure revenue, win a dispute, defend a right, sometimes deliver a preemptive first strike before someone undermines one’s claim. This is a culture in which land and office (shiki 職) are inherited like an extension of the body, and any error in documents may mean that your children wake up homeless in someone else’s world. And therefore pragmatism is not a “lack of taste,” but a style of existence: what matters is what can be maintained.

This pragmatism quickly turns into a habit of fighting for rights—often fragmented, overlapping, disputed. In warriors’ documents one already sees an entire universe: inheritances, bequests, confirmations, lawsuits, even fears of forgery and the need to possess “proper proofs” (honmonsho). This is a world where law becomes a battlefield as real as the road at night.

Moreover, when posts such as jitō-shiki (地頭職) appear, they immediately become for local warriors both a symbol of status and a source of productive revenue (a tax “nipped” from the local flow). This is buke in a capsule: prestige matters, but prestige makes sense only when it can be converted into control and rice.

And now the most important thing: these two logics are not simply “pretty versus ugly.” They are two ways of processing uncertainty. Kuge domesticate the world by enclosing it in form—in the calendar, precedent, language, ceremonial. Buke domesticate the world by relying on a point of ownership and proof—document, office, right to collect, right of entry. Kuge are obsessed with the “proper gesture,” because the gesture maintains hierarchy. Buke are obsessed with the “proper title,” because the title maintains revenue—and without revenue you will maintain neither people, nor horses, nor security.

And in the background of all this stands the provinces as the “dirt of the real world”: boundary disputes, violence in night raids, taxes, resistance, unclear rights. The court can long veil this with the silk of form, but that silk begins to tear. And in precisely this moment the tension is born that will drive the following centuries: when aesthetics ceases to suffice as the sole language of power, and pragmatism does not yet have full legitimation—there begins an era of interpenetration, negotiation, and quiet struggle over who has the right to call order “normal.”

The end of the dispute

Toward the end of the Heian period, this “cocoon of form” that the court had been weaving around itself for centuries begins to crack at the most inconvenient place: in the capital itself. This is no longer a story in which something dirty and distant happens in the provinces, while in Heian-kyō the rhythm of ranks, festivals, and calligraphy endures. Suddenly, the warrior is not only someone “for enforcement” in the field. He becomes someone who stands in the palace corridor, has a patron among the highest, and whose presence ceases to be an incident—it becomes a principle. This is what later Japanese school history textbooks will call: “the rise of the warrior element in the capital of peace”: samurai as clients of great houses, “hired swords” from policing and protection, who from generation to generation begin to grow in importance—and in ambition.

The mechanism of this change is paradoxical and brilliant at once: insei 院政, the rule of retired emperors, which was meant to be a way to regain imperial agency after decades of Fujiwara regent dominance. It is insei that teaches the capital that power can no longer be sustained by seal and precedent alone; one must have one’s own estates (shōen), one’s own clients, one’s own executors—also military. In other words: the imperial house begins to build the same “private infrastructure” of force that the Fujiwara had earlier built with such mastery. And since politics now contains more private centers of power, there also appear more opportunities for the warrior to become more than a tool.

And then something happens that for kuge must have sounded like profanation: political violence ceases to be an anomaly and becomes an argument. Two explosions in the capital—the Hōgen rebellion (1156) and the Heiji rebellion (1159)—are in this sense like loud blows against a wall that until then had only been meant to tremble with music, not with impacts. After them, the Taira—thanks to clientele around the retired emperors—push the Minamoto out of the center of military influence. And under the rule of Taira no Kiyomori something unprecedented happens: a warrior enters what until then had been almost sacral and reserved—into the circle of the highest nobles (kugyō).

Of course the court immediately responds with its defensive reflex: it tries to absorb that energy into form, to name it, order it, make it “part of the world” (as they even did with spirits from the beyond—see here: Administration by Dread: Official Appeals of Vengeful Spirits (onryō) in Heian Japan ). But Kiyomori goes further—in a certain moment he even begins to defy his own patron, and when his grandson, the infant Antoku, becomes emperor, Kiyomori attempts to rule like the old Fujiwara regents. And here the delicate balance breaks: kuge can endure much, but it is hard to endure a situation in which someone takes over their technology of power without belonging to their moral-aesthetic world. Disagreement grows—discontent both among the highest and among the lower strata of the court—and the symbolic capital begins to resemble a place where form must compete with force.

The Genpei War (1180–1185) closes this process like a bracket. Importantly: it is not a pure war of “clans” in a romantic sense. Conflicts could be chaotic, and loyalties within the same houses diverged according to interests, sibling rivalries, local calculations—as if the very structure of warriors’ lives (inheritance of revenue rights, disputes, divisions) had moved up to the level of high politics. The ultimate victory of Minamoto no Yoritomo and the defeat of the Taira at Dan-no-ura in 1185 do not end only a war—they end an era in which “political initiative” by definition lived in the capital.

After everything, however, kuge do not disappear completely; they lose their monopoly on power. Yoritomo builds in Kamakura a second center of power, parallel, not “substitute”: the new warrior center in Kantō does not immediately annihilate the old center in Heian-kyō, but “attaches” itself to the existing hierarchy as an additional, ever heavier layer. The court will continue to be the throne of symbolic legitimation, and in the first decades after Kamakura’s founding it can even retain real authority—especially in western Japan and in the sphere of law. Yet the warrior network of clientele gradually takes over what is most important for the state: land allocation, taxes, new offices and their distribution.

In this sense, the “disappearance of kuge” is rather a long process of shifting the center of gravity than a single act. Kuge remain—as guardians of ritual, language, symbolic continuity, and sometimes as partners in the legal game. But buke build a mechanism that has an advantage not because it is more “brutal,” but because it is more operational: it can manage disputes over rights to land, it can place people in the field, it can enforce, it can reward service, it can punish betrayal. Over time there arises a militaro-administrative network at the level of the state, the province, and the locality, which endures (in various forms) until the beginning of modernity.

The greatest events in Japan’s history are born at the junction, not in pure, separated worlds. Kuge gave Japan a language of order: a form capable of turning politics into ritual, and ritual into the right to rule. Buke gave Japan an order of enforcement: the ability to organize people, land, and violence so that what “is owed on paper” begins to be owed in the field. And when these two logics met in Heian-kyō like two air currents—there arose a storm, from which a new Japan emerged: still beneath one sky, still with palaces, poetry, and ceremonies, but with the weight of power already shifted onto the shoulders of people who knew not only how to write, but also how to ensure that what was written became reality.

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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