Japanese feudal system?

Question

the Japanese feudal system is set up around an exchange of privileges and obligations. what did each group ( samurai, shogun, daimyo, and peasants) gain? What were each groups obligations?

Answer 1

"Tokugawa shogunate" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_shogunate

"Edo period" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period

Answer 2

The Heian period was one of the longest periods of uninterrupted peace in early Japan; in fact, we name the period after its capital city, Heian-kyo (now Kyoto), which means "city of peace." In the late Heian period, however, private families began to accrue vast amounts of property (shoen ) and began to support large standing armies, mainly because the Heian government began to rely more on these private armies than on their own weak forces. The result was an exponential growth in the power of the two greatest warrior clans, the Taira (or the Heike) and the Minamoto (or the Genji). The Genji controlled most of eastern Japan; the Heike had power in both eastern and western Japan.





As the powers of these two increased, the clan of the Fujiwara began to control the Emperor closely—a shrewd move since the Taika reform theoretically gave all final power to the emperor. From 856 until 1086, the Fujiwara were, for all practical purposes, the government of Japan. In 1155, however, the succession to the throne fell vacant, and the naming of Go-Shirakawa as Emperor set off a small revolution, called the Hogen Disturbance, which was quelled by the clans of the Taira and the Minamoto. This was a turning point in Japanese history, for the power to determine the affairs of the state had clearly passed to the warrior clans and their massive private armies.

After the accession of Go-Shirakawa and later his successor Nijo, a lesser lord of the Taira, a dissolute, ambitious and shrewd man named Kiyimori, began to slowly accrue massive power to himself in the Emperor's court. Seeing this, it became apparent that the power of the Taira had to be clipped in some way, so the retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa attempted to lay a military trap for Kiyimori with the aid of a minor Genji lord, Yukitsuna. The plot failed and opened an irreparable breach between the Heike and the Retired Emperor and the Genji. In 1179, the head of the Taira, Shigemori, died; his forceful and ruthless leadership had propelled the Taira into the foremost place. He was replaced by his brother Munemori, a coward and poor strategist. Go-Shirakawa, seeing he now had an advantage, began to dismiss Taira in the capital, and Kiyimori fired several court officials and marched on the capital, and forced the new Emperor Takakura off the throne by installing his own one-year old grandson, Antoku, as the Emperor. Takakura enlisted the aid of the Genji and the civil war began.
of the capital came close to a military take-over of the Japanese government. Meanwhile, Minamoto Yoritomo began to build up strength and finally seized control of the whole of eastern Japan. In 1185, he overran the Taira and forced them out of the capital. This war, and its aftermath, deeply affected the course of Japanese history. For Minamoto Taira then set up an alternative government in Kamakura (about thirty miles south of Tokyo); he called his alternative government, bakufu, or "tent government," in contrast to the civil government of the Emperor located in Kyoto. This was a military government; it had two branches, one that administered the warriors or samurai , and the other that judged legal suits. The Kamakura military leader ruled as a shogun, or "supreme general." Ostensibly, the job of the bakufu was simply military administration; in reality, the shoguns and their tent government eventually came to run the country. The Heiji War, then, marks the beginning of feudal Japan, for the relationship of various provincial generals and lords to the shogun was the relationship of vassals to a lord. The individual provinces were more or less independent; their lords, or daimyo, took oaths of allegiance to the shogun.

The Heiji War is also foundational in Japanese culture for it is the subject of the greatest work of Japanese literature, the Heike monogatari (Tales of the Heike). One of the two great classics of medieval Japan—the other being Genji monogatari (Tales of the Genji) by Lady Murasaki—the Heike monogatari captivated the Japanese imagination like no other story or history ever did. Told by professional storytellers, biwa hoshi , whose job it was to establish definitive versions of various tales and commit them to memory, the stories of the epic struggle between the clan of the Hei and the clan of the Gen became so popular that some biwa hoshi became specialists in the story and their profession came to be known as heikyoku ("Tales of the Heike Narration"). By the thirteenth century in Japan, heikyoku became popular among the upper classes and soon constituted the leading contemporary performing art form in fourteenth and fifteenth century Japan, only falling off during the chaos of the Warring States Period (16th century). During this period, the various tales were written down; so the composition of the Heike monogatari can be said to have taken place between 1200 and 1600. Nevertheless, after the outbreak of the Onin War (1467-1477), other types of performance art displaced the heikyoku : Noh theatre, kyogen plays, and the narration of the Taiheiki (Chronicle of the Great Peace); the latter, of course, makes perfect sense in a society being torn apart by civil war.
The defining moment, and the most famous in Japanese history, is the final battle of this great civil war, the battle at Mikusa. The Heike installed themselves in an unbreachable fort near the ocean. The Genji laid siege to the Heike who are holed up in this fort; however, the Genji are unable to advance further, for the fort has three sides that are literally impossible to storm, and its fourth side is a long and steep cliff. The Genji decided to descend the cliff with superhuman bravery on horseback; this cliff was a long steep decline ending in a seventy foot vertical drop, and the army descended this cliff on horseback!. This legendary action spelled the end of the Heike and their power as the Genji warriors destroyed the Heike and forced the survivors to swim to their boats anchored in the harbor, effectively ending Heike dominance forever. This story is perhaps the most famous and best known event in Japanese history. by Minamoto Yoritomo was the single most tranformative event of early Japan. The bakufu , or "tent government" (because soldiers lived in tents), was more or less a military government. It primarily functioned as a separate government concerned primarily with military and police matters. The Emperor's government in Kyoto continued to function as before: the court still appointed civil governors, collected taxes, and exercised complete control in the area surrounding the capital.

The real power of the state, however, became more concentrated in the hands of the Kamakura shogun. The term comes from the title that Minamoto Yoritomo demanded when he defeated the Taira: Sei i tai shogun , "barbarian conquering supreme general." The shogun, and the military government beneath him, really did not control much of Japan. For all practical purposes, the provinces of Japan were independent even though local lords (daimyo) swore allegiance to the shogun.

The shogunate, however, did not remain in Minamoto hands for very long. When Yoritomo died in 1199, his widow, from the clan of the Hojo, usurped power from the Minamoto clan. She was a Buddhist nun, so she was known as the "Nun Shogun." She displaced the son who had inherited from his father and installed another son, who was soon assassinated. From that point onwards, the Hojo clan ruled the bakufu while the Minamoto nominally occupied the position of shogun. The relationship between the bakufu and the imperial government had never been very friendly; in 1221, the imperial court led an uprising against the bakufu , but failed. By this point, however, the ideology of loyalty had become fully ingrained in the bakufu structure; the imperial court had little luck persuading people to break that loyalty.

The defining moment for the Kamakura bakufu was the invasion of Japan by the Mongols. In 1258, Kublai Khan conquered the Korean peninsula and in 1266, he declared himself Emperor of China. In that glorious year for the newly formed Yuan dynasty, Kublai set his sights on Japan. In 1266, representatives of the Mongolian court came to Japan and demanded its immediate surrender to Mongolian rule. The imperial court was terrified, but the Hojo decided to stand its ground and sent the representatives home. In 1274, Kublai Khan sent a vast fleet to invade Japan but it was destroyed by a hurricane—the Japanese called this fortunate hurricane kamikaze, or "wind from the gods." Again in 1281, Kublai launched the largest amphibious assault in the history of the ancient and medieval worlds. The Chinese army was a terrifying invasion force. They had the latest technology including gunpowder bombs and "fire-sticks," or guns, and their waves of archers dealt out death and destruction with astonishing efficiency. But the Hojo managed to keep them from landing on the coast, for they had built a vast wall against the invaders. Finally, another hurricane struck, and the bulk of the Chinese army sank with the fleet. soldiers and samurai with gifts of land; this is how the feudal system worked. The samurai gave unswerving loyalty to his daimyo or to the shogun, and in return was rewarded with land. This gift of land, however, would be divided by his sons, and they would in turn divide their portion among their sons. By the end of the thirteenth century, there was, as a result, widespread poverty and dissatisfaction.

Several families resented the monopoly that the Hojo held over the positions in the bakufu , and throughout the thirteenth century, disturbances would break out over this issue. Finally, in 1331, the Emperor decided that he should rule Japan, not the bakufu , and led an uprising against Kamakura. The Kamakura bakufu sent its most heroic and brilliant general, Ashikaga Takauji, to meet the Emperor's forces in battle. Ashikaga, however, switched sides; by doing so, he precipitated a hemmorhage of loyal forces from the Kamakura. In 1336, the Emperor's forces under the leadership of Ashikaga Takauji overthrew the Hojo. The Emperor would not be the sole ruler of Japan, for Takauji set up his own bakufu in the capital city of Kyoto.

Under the Kamakura bakufu , the various regions remained more or less independent. The only rule that was exercised over these regions was by the imperial court and its regional governors. The Ashikaga period, on the other hand, was really a multi-state system whose center was the bakufu in Kyoto. All the offices, of which there were only four—police and military, finances and taxes, records, and a judiciary, were staffed by vassals loyal to the Ashikaga. These vassals were now daimyo, or "lords," that ruled various regions as military governors and owed loyalty to the Ashikaga and the bakufu . All of the daimyo had private armies which oversaw the integrity of their territories (and frequently invaded other daimyo territories).

The military power, then, lay with individual lords. The only way the government was centralized was through the bonds of loyalty between the daimyo and the bakufu . During the fifteenth century, these bonds grew increasingly frayed until the outbreak of the Onin War (1467-1477) and the descent of Japanese society into unrelenting civil war.
In part as a response to the esotericism of Heian Buddhism, and in part as a response to the collapse of the emperor's court at Kyoto and the subsequent rise of individual, feudal powers in Japan, medieval Japanese Buddhism moved towards more democratic and inclusive forms, of which the most important was Pure Land Buddhism. Pure Land or Amida Buddhism was oriented around the figure of Amida Buddha. Amida, the Buddha of Everlasting Light, was a previous incarnation of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. In the previous incarnation, as a bodhisattva, he refused to accept Buddhahood unless he could grant eternal happiness in the Pure Land to whoever called on him; 1 this compassionate promise was called the "Original Vow." Anyone who calls his name, "Namu Amida Butsu,"2 with sincere faith, trust, and devotion, will be granted by Amida an eternal life of happiness in the Pure Land which has been set aside specifically for those who call on Amida.


Buddhism
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mahayana Buddhism
Amidism was not a Japanese invention; Pure Land develops out of Mahayana Buddhism in India and became wildly popular in China, where the invocation of Amida (in Chinese, A-mi-t'o-fo ) became the most common of all religious practices. But the spread of Pure Land through Japan signals a profound change in Japanese thought; above all else, the shift to Amidism represents a shift from a religion which stresses individual effort aimed at enlightenment to an exclusive reliance on salvation by the Amida; this opened up Buddhism to all classes, including women, who had previously been excluded from the various Buddhist priesthoods. Because of its democratic nature, the priesthood became evangelical rather than retiring; Buddhism began to become, in late Heian Japan and medieval Japan, a religion of the streets. Because of Pure Land, Japanese art also profoundly changed; the art of Heian Japan is placid and rigid; the Amidists began to produce more involved and animated artworks which portrayed such subjects as the tortures of all ten levels of hell, the pleasures of Paradise, and the transcendent and resplendent beauty of the Amida Buddha.
Richard Hooker



Endnotes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



1 This Buddha is, of course, Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha; the scriptural authority comes from a sutra which narrates this story about this Shakyamuni, whose name was Dharmakara. He made forty-eight vows which were instrumental to his attainment of Buddhahood; the "Original Vow" is number eighteen.
2 This invocation is known in Japanese as the nembutsu.

on a single, esoteric idea: all humans have a Buddha nature inside them and to realize this nature all a human being has to do is search his or her inner self. The key to Buddhahood in Zen is simply self-knowledge. The way to gain self-knowledge is through meditation (which is what the word "zen" means). Now, "meditation" is one of the cornerstones of Buddhism, where, under the name dhyana , it forms the final and most important aspect of gaining enlightenment. But Zen (in Chinese, Ch'an ) or Meditation Buddhism granted meditation an exclusive importance not ascribed to it in other Buddhist schools. This is indicated by its very name: all other Buddhist schools either take their names from important Scriptures (such as the Lotus sect, which takes its name from the Lotus sutra) or from a philosophical position (such as the Consciousness-only sect) or an individual philosopher (such as Nichiren), whereas Zen takes its name from the practice of meditation. Meditation, which was a means to an end in other Buddhist schools, became the end in itself in Zen: meditation was Truth realized in action. As a result, Zen readily dispenses with the Buddhist scriptures and philosophical discussion in favor of a more intuitive and individual approach to enlightenment. Meditation, however, is a strict religious discipline: the mind must be made sharp and attentive in order to intuit from itself the Truth of Buddhahood. Part of this discipline involves waking up the mind of the disciple, making it aware of the things around it. There are several ways of doing this: motorcycle maintenance, hard labor, travel, and, in Japan, the koan, which is a question and answer session between disciple and master which involves sudden beatings and illogical answers all in an attempt to wake or stimulate the disciple's mind to make it ready for the discovery of the Truth inside.
Nichiren Buddhism was one of the key sects in medieval Japan. Nichiren (1222-1282) was a Tendai Buddhist monk who left the monastery and invented what was truly a Japanese version of Buddhism; rather than focus on the saving power of the Amida, Nichiren stressed that the Lotus Sutra, upon which Tendai doctrine was based, was the key to all enlightenment and fully embodied the truth of the Buddha Trinity (Vairochana, the Eternal Buddha (in Japanese: Dainichi); Amitabha, the Body of Bliss or Eternal Buddha (which is what the Amidists worshipped); Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha). Nichiren required that all boddhisattvas (those striving to become a Buddha) recite the Lotus sutra rather than the name of Amida; unlike Amidism, Nichiren Buddhism laid emphasis on individual effort rather than salvation through the action of the Buddha.